Michelle Legrand, Film Composer, 1932-2019

It didn't get a lot of press in the U.S., but famed French film composer Michel Legrand died last week, with President Emmanuel Macron hailing him as an "indefatigable genius."   Legrand had three  Academy Awards.  At 86, an obit remarks, "Legrand last performed on stage just last month, and was still composing and practicing piano an hour a day."  See LA Times here.  NYT here.  NPR here.

His most famous works include the theme to Summer of '42 and "Windmills of Your Mind," from the film The Thomas Crown Affair.   From Youtube clips, Summer here, Windmills here.

Personal favorites of mine are the haunting theme and variations from "The Go-Between" and the whole soundtrack of the not-well-known "Young Girls of Rochefort."

Memories

When I was in the Stanford MD-PhD program, around 1984 I was working late in the lab and the classical FM station was on.  The theme of "The Go-Between" was played, and I either wrote down the name or may have even called the station to find out what it was.   Theme and variations here.

When we lived in Chicago 1997-2002, there was a screening of the semi-forgotten film "Young Girls of Rochefort," which got a stellar review from the free weekly, Chicago Weekly, in November 1998, here.  I saw it, dragged my wife to it the next night, and got a DVD a few years later when they became available.  The songs in Young Girls are diverse but try one or two; the song of Maxence, here; the art store here.

Footnote

See the opening minutes and closing minutes of Summer of 42, here and here.  (Unrelated to music, the Summer of 42 pharmacy scene here, with priceless character actor Lou Frizzel, see also here.)

BOOK LIST CY2018

Highlights from 2018 reading. 

For my business strategy blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, click here.

For earlier book lists, see 2015 here, 2016 here, 2017 here.  This year, for the first time, I include a few unusual and outstanding movies or miniseries as well.

Discussed are:

Society and Politics

Dreamland. (opioids in America).
Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller.  (German pastor, 1930s).
Hitler's American Friends.  (Pro-German politics in the US, 1930s).
The 2020 Commission.   (Look back on the nuclear war of 2020).
God's Bankers.  (Vatican finance, 1700s to 2000s).

Business, Medicine, Strategy

The Alchemy of Air.   (Discovery of nitrogen fixation; impact on war and agriculture)
The Tangled Field.  (Scientific sociology centered around geneticist Barbara McClintock).
Never Split the Difference.  (Negotiation from an FBI hostage expert).

Memoir and Fiction

Nothing to Be Afraid Of.  (Memoir, Julian Barnes).
Dear Los Angeles.  (Diaries and Letters about LA, 1700s-2010).
Living With Monks.   (Young business entrepreneur goes off the grid for a month)
Dear Committee Members.   (Parody of academics).

Brief Mention
   Farsighted (science author Steven Johnson). 
   The Judge Hunter (light novelist Christopher Buckley).
   Avoid Boring People (James Watson).
   The Square and the Tower.  (Vertical vs flat organization and management in business and society).
   Bad Blood (Theranos scandal).

Books are discussed in more detail below, after I touch on cinema and streaming.

Cinema

Instead of repeating descriptions of the big top ten films that are likely familiar (A Star Is Born, etc), I'll touch on a few that were memorable but off the beaten trail.

I really liked Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly in "Stan and Ollie," about Laurel and Hardy in the last phase of their career. 

There were three wonderful documentaries about people in their 80's and 90's:

• Rose Marie, who had an amazing life story and was still around in her 90s when the documentary "Wait For Your Laugh"  was made.   (I often walk by her star on the Hollywood Blvd Walk of Fame).   
• Wim Wenders, a German director I met briefly in college around 1980, made a film about Pope Francis, "A Man of His Word."   
• And best known, the documentary "RBG" about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  

Television/Streaming

I enjoyed HBO's "The Young Pope," a somewhat fantastical miniseries starring Jude Law.   YouTube clip here and here.  HBO also gets two Honorable Mentions:  Brexit (docudrama with Benedict Cumberbatch) and King in the Wilderness, MLK 1964-1968.

I lived in Oregon around 1985, in the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh period, and enjoyed Netflix' six-part documentary "Wild Wild Country."   

In fiction, I loved the 1920s-era German TV series, on Netflix, "Babylon Berlin" (16 episodes).  I wrote a detailed "fan blog" about it here.   It's hard to watch a 12-hour series with subtitles when it's available dubbed in English, but I recommend trying 15 minutes in German with subtitles, because the original actors' voices are so perfect.  Trailer here.

I also went head over heels for the Coen brothers movie "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs."  Also Netflix.  I wrote a detailed "fan blog" of Easter eggs and surprises in it, here.   Youtube clips here followed by here (pair).

Deeper Dive:

Society and Politics 

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opioid Epidemic. Sam Quinones.  Sometime in the year I saw a really gut-wrenching documentary about opioid epidemics in downtrodden parts of the US.  This book takes you through it, from the Mexican border to the hardest-hit parts of Ohio and West Virginia.

Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis.  Matthew D. Hockenos.  Martin Niemöller was a German pastor from a conservative, nationalist family, who said little about the Nazis early on.  By the late 1930s, he couldn't stay quiet - and ended up in a series of prison camps, finally Dachau, which he survived.  Niemöller wrote the famous poem, "They came for the communists - I was silent...They came for the Jews...I was silent...They came for me..and no one was left."  (Here).   I had no idea - that was ACTUALLY his life.    The book is also notable for the social history of Germany from 1880 through the 1920s, which provides a setting for what follows.  (For an online article about Niemöller, here.)

Hitler's American Friends.  The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States.  Bradley W. Hart.  See also a sister book to Hitler's American Friends, which is set in the U.S., see also "Travelers in the Third Reich," Julia Boyd, what Americans and others made of the 1930s.

I have a collection of old books about the 1930s (many $5 on Amazon).  There were a lot of people who hated Roosevelt.   There were a lot of people who liked Fascism, especially given the global chaos of the Depression and the revolution in Russia.   I have two vintage 1930s books that give the con and the pro perspectives from the contemporary pages.  "Nazi Means War" by Leland Stowe, 1934, told about the jaw-dropping social changes in Germany.   "The Wave of the Future," by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1940, talks about how Fascism in Spain and Germany has some drawbacks, but we'd best fly with it.   For the 2017 book, "Hitler's American Model" - US law and Nazi race law - by Yale professor James Whitman - see my 2017 book list.  For another angle on the 1930s in Berlin, how Germany viewed itself in the 1930s, from the perspective of German authors today, see here.  I mention all these because the highly polarized 1930s provide some map for a highly polarized US and Europe today.

Which leads us to:

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States.  Jeffrey Lewis.   Written in the form of a Warren Commission-type government report on how we stumbled ass-backwards into nuclear war in 2020.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power in the Vatican.  Gerald Posner.  This is a continuous history, but it's almost like two books, one from 1700s to 1950s, and another, half the book, focused on a complex scandal in the 1970s into the 1980s (including quite a few murders or very suspect suicides).   I particularly liked the fast moving first 100 pages about the older history.

Business, Medicine, Strategy

The Alchemy of Air. A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler.  Thomas Hager.  A few years ago I really enjoyed "The Leviathan and the Air Pump," by Shapin and Schaffer, about the discovery of the vacuum and the development of the early modern approach to science.  And "The Invention of Air," about the discovery of oxygen, by Steven Johnson.   Here, we have the discovery of nitrogen fixation, which revolutionized both agriculture and bomb-making.  Without nitrogen fixation, we would have starved in the early 1900s; without it, WW-I would have been a fraction as destructive.

The Tangled Field.  Barbara McClintock's Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control.  Nathaniel Comfort.  Back in early med school, I read "A Feeling for the Organism," about little-known and remarkable Cold Spring Harbor geneticist Barbara McClintock (1984).  Here, Comfort, a Hopkins professor of history of science, takes a deep dive approach to McClintock's complex science, and the response to her ideas.   There's a fair amount of the person and the biography, but it's not the main point. Tangled Field reminds us that at any time, there may be far more going on in biology (or biomedicine) that we want to suspect.

Never Split the Difference.  Chris Voss.  There are bookshelves of books on negotiating; this one is a new spin (from a hostage negotiator turned longtime business consultant) - nice airplane read.

Memoir and Fiction

Nothing to Be Afraid Of.  Julian Barnes. One of my favorite books ever, from the mid-80s, the British author's Flaubert's Parrot.  Here, Barnes gives us a memoir of his parents' lives, his lives, aging, death, and what to make of it, or try.   There's a tie-in to the Stan and Ollie movie, which similarly asks, what do we do with our lives, when the end is no longer far out of sight.

Dear Los Angeles.  The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542-2018.  David Kipen.  Several centuries of diary extracts, letters, and other sources from the unknown and the famous decorate the long life of my adopted hometown, Los Angeles, which have lived in the middle of since 2003.

Living With Monks. What Turning Off My Phone Taught Me About Happiness, Gratitude, and Focus.  Jesse Itzler.  Young successful business entrepreneur goes off the grid for a month.  One of my early possible career choices was joining a Benedictine monastery (or alternately, joining the Jesuits and being a college professor).  I stayed four times at the now-gone Blue Cloud Abbey in South Dakota, and I've stayed several times at St. Andrew's Abbey north of Los Angeles.  Many good memories of these visits and I'm sure they'll be some more overnights at places like this.  (A picture of the Blue Cloud abbey on the prairie has been my iPhone screen saver for several years).

Dear Committee Members.  Julie Schumacher.   Parody of academia in the form of windy recommendation letters from a perpetually disgruntled professor.  See also the 1980s comic novel Small World by Brit author David Lodge.

Brief Mentions

Farsighted (science author Steven Johnson).   One of my favorite books ever is the author's "How We Got to Now," which also became a wonderful PBS series.   This book on decision-making science is good, but on my second tier.

The Judge Hunter (light novelist Christopher Buckley).  I really loved his, "Relic Master" a year or two ago.  This is another comic novel, now set in the 1700s not 1500s.  A nice book on the second tier.

Avoid Boring People (James Watson).  Watson must be on many people's bottom-ten lists (along with, say, Attilla the Hun and Louis CK)  for his senile comments on race and genetics.  This 2007 book was enjoyable and readable for me, covering his life including flyovers of matters he treated elsewhere (e.g. 1953 and the double helix).  I wrote a short blog about this book, where I also discuss the absolutely wonderful movie with Jeff Goldblum about The Double Helix, which sadly is too hard to find.  I read Avoid Boring People because a PBS documentary about Watson's life just aired in January 2019.

The Square and the Tower.  Niall Ferguson.  Vertical vs flat organization and management in business and society, from a viewpoint that spans several centuries.  Nice reading; second tier.

Bad Blood.  The story of the Theranos scandal by investigation journalist John Carreyou of the WSJ.

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Extra Notes

Bill Gates' December 2018 book list is here.

Also good airplane reading on political polarization, Amy Chua's "Political Tribes."   (Especially remarkable is the chapter on Chinese in Vietnam.)  Sam Rosenfeld, a historian at Colgate, assesses how we shifted from overlapping parties in the 40's 50's 60's to the extreme polarization of today (The Polarizers).  Sen. Ben Sasse, a PhD historian, gave us "Them" about fragmentation of social groups.

Another take on what can be learned from monasteries today: "Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks" by August Turak.

When do I read/watch this stuff?  120,000 actual flight miles / 500 mph = 240 in-air hours or 6 x 40 hour weeks...

James Watson's Third Memoir: Avoid Boring People (2007)

James Watson's Third Memoir: Avoid Boring People (2007)

For a number of years, Nobel Laureate James Watson, now in his 90s, has been on most Least Popular lists because of his views on race and intelligence.

That understood, I ran across his third volume of memoirs, Avoid Boring People (2007) and read it recently.   Famously, Watson wrote his first memoir, The Double Helix, in 1968, and his memoir of the later 50s and 1960s, Genes Girls Gamow in 2001.    His 2007 book covers his whole life again, from childhood until sometime after he stepped down from Harvard to lead Cold Spring Harbor full time in 1976 (having served at Harvard 1955-1976).   He was pushed into full retirement from CSH in 2007 due to racial remarks.

PBS has just run the new documentary American Masters / Decoding Watson, in January 2019.

My favorite movie about science and one of my favorites in the overall biopic and documentary category is Race for the Double Helix (also released as Life Story), a 1987 BBC film starring Jeff Goldblum as Watson.   It's not available as a conventional DVD or commercial streaming.  IT's not even available as a used VHS on Amazon.  A fuzzy DVD is available at the "ioffer" website (here).  At least in 2018, the movie streamed fuzzily in two parts here and here.  I make the effort to list all this since - it's one of my favorite movies, period.

Back to Watson.  In his third memoir, Avoid Boring People, he simply goes quickly (a few pages) over some of the years he devoted much more text to in Double Helix and Genes Girls Gamow.  Discovering DNA in 1953 gets around 5-10 pages in Avoid Boring People.

Most Amazing Thing

I found the book entertaining, bogging down mostly in a few later sections where he detailed minor steps in the career of a postdoc I'd never heard of.   The most amazing thing was the people I had heard of - many of whom he met very early in his career, before they or he were famous (or nearly as famous).   Many of these characters are in Horace Freeland Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation, a history of molecular biology from the 1940s to the 1960s and early 1970s, which came out in 1978, when I was early in a college biology major.  I still have the hardcover I bought then.   These names include Gunther Stent, Seymour Benzer, Salvador Luria, Sydney Brenner, Leo Szilard, most or all of whom he knew before discovering DNA in 1953 at age 25.  

Snippets

Watson's acerbic wit (or worldview) is in evidence throughout the book.  I've jotted down a few by page - (259) Edward Tatum, head of CSH before Watson, was a "plodder" kept aloft by coauthors or students; (255) The Stanford Biochemistry Depart is "Arthur Kornberg's ever self-congratulatory biochemistry department," (234) He kept records of lawyer's bills preceding The Double Helix ($5.75 for postage), a nice picture of his office on p. 219; (207) Trying to lure Hubel & Weisel, the vision pioneers, from HMS to Harvard University; (196) Still annoyed about not getting a raise in the early 1960s; (266) How he married a much younger wife (he was about 40, she 19); (276) He buys Syntex stock on the recomendation of Carl Djerassi, the inventor of the OCP; (277) Graduate students could avoid the Vietnam draft only if they switched from biochemistry to cancer research; (309) His resignation letter from Harvard to pursue CSH full time; (303) He shows up at a party with Truman Capote; (316) Some sharp remarks on chased-out Harvard president Larry Summers (nothing distinguished his time in office like the leaving of it...a nod to Macbeth).  Additionally, Watson was a cousin to Orson Welles.

Watson ends each chapter with five or six "rules for living," some grand, some quotidian.  Fitting the pun, he uses "Avoid Boring People" as a rule twice, the first time to avoid conversation, the second time to avoid yourself being dull to others.

An open access article on the path to DNA, Nature, here.

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Personal notes.

I saw Watson once, when he was a visiting professor at Stanford Med School in the 1980s.  I saw Crick at least once or twice and probably heard him lecture on his theory of dreams in the 1980s.

I heard a lecture from Gunter Stent (mentioned several times in Watson's book here) one evening in college.  I loved Stent's book Paradoxes of Progress (1981) and still have an original copy.   Later, I got a copy of Stent's little-known autobiography Nazis Women and Molecular Biology, much of which is about his wartime experiences in Berlin in the 1940s and just after.   My copy is signed to "Bea and Gunther", likely Gunter Steinberg, a schoolmate of Stent's in Berlin who also ended up living in California, like Stent.  Stent lived 1924-2008.

I was wandering Harvard Square around 2007 and saw a poster that recently ejected president Larry Summers was giving a talk on campus; jotted down the building and room; spent an hour listening to him talk about his Harvard presidency and the leaving of it in an audience of about 15.

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Watson mentions a number of books.  One he has mentioned before is Schrodinger's What Is Life.   He was influenced by Unresting Cells by his U. Chicago physiology professor R.W. Gerard.  He also mentions "Christ stopped at Eboli," by Italian concentration camp survivor Carlo Levi (no relation, or very distant, to Primo Levi).

Unresting Cells was published in 1941 and reprinted without updates in 1949; Gerard mentions research during the war years was limited.  It was also reprinted in 1961, without changes.   The genetics chapter, as young Watson read it in college, is in the cloud here.

Joy and Perseverance: Two Interesting Youtube Channels

I ran across two remarkable personalities in 2018 based on their Youtube channels.  Both bring an enthusiasm and joy to their pursuits which I find inspiring.

Dana Newman / Wanted Adventure

In the first example, Dana Newman is a young woman from Florida, who finished college and immediately moved to Prague in search of adventure abroad (2008).  She had to renew a visa in Munich, which she happened to meet a young man who soon became her husband.  Her channel, Wanted Adventure, has over 200,000 subscribers and over 400 videos; 53M total views.  Nearly all the vlogs are in English, and she describes the miracles, puzzles, and curiosities of living in Germany.  (Water heaters in apartments are so weird!  The post offices are unlike any other country!).   There are a few videos where she speaks German the whole time, and others where she marvels at the puzzles of the German language.  (Mark Twain wrote a wonderful article about the bizarreness of German). 

Here's my choice for a first video.  I shared it with my offspring, who took to high school language class about the way a cat takes to a bath.   In this video, Dana marvels with cheer and wit about her frustrations with some German word pairs that are hard to figure out and remember.   It's hard to recall anybody who's as enthusiastic and charming about anything.  Watch at least the first minute or two!

HERE.

Besides her channel, she's also written a book just published in German about her experiences (You go me on the cookie!, in German, here).  (It's actually her second book after a 2012 novel in English).

Martin Molin   / Wintergadan

Martin is a young Swedish musician whose channel started in 2012 and has 175M total views, with over 1M subscribers. Here.

The showpiece video is Marble Machine, a music instrument built of thousands of parts and playing one melody by using 2000 marbles on a xylophone and other instruments.   The earworm melody has been played over 90M times.   The machine was years in the making (the first one was retired and he's making a second one) - the channel holds dozens and dozens of nerdy, enthusiastic, carefully made videos about the design and construction.   (After watching several of them, I think it would have been easier to make a House of Cards twenty feet high...)

Find this viral music video
  HERE.

Interview with Martin here, Wikipedia here, music website here.

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Check out both channels for T-shirts available as branded merchandise.

Named link as

https://tinyurl.com/joyandperseverance