In the mornings, I do exactly what my physiotherapist tells me to do. Warm up. Do some leg raises. Or are they hip hiker flexions? Can’t remember my muscular anatomy. Doesn’t matter either. It’s hard. It’s very hard to get things moving in the morning, any morning. And don’t under any circumstances ask why. Why is it so hard? Why am I doing it? Why does it matter? Does anything matter? 

What is matter?

That was the question, the only question, on the minds of my first employers. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. I had had some part-time jobs. But it took me 11 years to progress from shooting victim to a full-time job. And fortunately, when I got into a full-time job, I had a good one. I was a science writer. I had the task, daunting at first, but increasingly fulfilling…of interviewing learned people and learning myself. The laboratory was a big, is a big, center for nuclear physics, i.e., low energy physics, and all manner of applied energy research. Including, these days, environmental research.

I know a lot about building envelopes. No, I don’t really know a lot, but I know the importance. It was a heady time. The Carter Administration had thrown lots of money into energy conservation after the oil embargo in the early 1970s. And when I began employment at the laboratory, 1979, the researchers were steaming along. Window reflectivity. The albedo effect. Spin one, spin two, and all other sorts of states of energy and mind and being that derive from quantum mechanics.

And speaking of mechanics…. In those years I drove a 1968 Plymouth Valiant, a wonderful car with an engine that had only two or three moving parts. And it seemed destined to roll forever. But forever is relative, as the physicists at LBL were teaching me. And the car simply had to have certain things done. Like rebuilding the transmission. Like a real tuneup every now and then. So now that I was making money as a science writer, I could afford a mechanic. And things were humming, including my Valiant.

Meanwhile, there were all sorts of people still alive at the laboratory that had their feet in the past and the present, as it were. Glenn Seaborg, for one, I interviewed him once. Kind of disappointing. Marvin Cohen, just the opposite. A wonderful guy who always wore a three-piece suit when he lectured down the hill on the Berkeley campus. His field was solid-state physics. And his specialty was electron mapping. Do electrons need a map, really? Well, he thought so. And I didn’t care. It was this guy who, along with colleagues at Stanford and a couple of other places, created what was for a while called solid-state electronics. Transistors. Basic stuff like that. And he had endless time to explain stuff. He liked explaining stuff. He was a teacher.

But why am I digressing into this 40+ year-old history? I think it’s partly because old folks like me dwell a lot in the past. But actually it’s more complicated. I find myself not so much dwelling as exhuming and, for the first time, understanding. A lot has passed through my cortex without adequate attention. What was I doing? What was I thinking? Why did things unfold as they did? And, again, why does any of this matter?

Which brings us to Beauty and the Beast, Jean Cocteau‘s film, that is. Brought to musical life by Composer Philip Glass…and assisted by Opera Parallèlle and the San Francisco Jazz Center. Jane and I saw it yesterday. In the course of my life, artsy words like “surreal” and “multimedia” have faded in and out of popularity. But they do add up to something, the gradual evolution of performance art, for one. And all I can say is that all of these elements were very much in evidence at the Jazz Center’s Miner Theater yesterday.

I had never seen Jean Cocteau’s film. But it is a vibrant retelling of the classic tale, with all the lighting and cinematography one would expect of a visual artist. But this production, while accompanying the film in the way of Philip Glass, went way beyond. One never knew where one was, as it were, and if you will. And even if you won’t, well, imagine being there, Cocteau’s film on one screen, and sometimes drifting onto the wall. While additional film footage of the live performers who echoed what we were seeing on screen, that is, Cocteau’s screen…and were at times involved in a triple image. The original movie. Live actors/singers. Video of the same live performers. And while the story moved briskly on stage and on screen and in the orchestra pit, one never quite knew who was going to pick up the narrative ball. No one dropped it. That is the point.

And so now I’m an old guy, but still enjoy modern stuff. And I was glad my mind was expanding into the realm of physics and energy conservation and chemical biodynamics, whatever the latter is or was. And what’s next? The Msuni bus #35. Lunch in Noe Valley. Onward.