Of Dunning-Kruger and Beer and Pizza at Papa-Del's

My sister and I were discussing our blogging last night. She is much more current and active than I, although she has fallen off the pace that she has set for herself over the last several years. I have nearly completely dropped off the map, not posting since last October (although that was a darn good post, if I do say so myself). After careful consideration, we both discovered the problem - perceived lack of content!

Actually, the inclusion of the word "perceived" is the critical element. I think we both have plenty of content, but neither of us actually believe it in our gut. We are probably far harder on ourselves than we need to be. Chalk it up to a corollary of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, recently called to my attention by Nathaniel. He stumbled upon it on StumbleUpon (check it out on the Internet if you're not aware of it). According to Wikipedia, it is a "cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes." The converse is that people who have some skills/abilities tend to underrate them, causing an illusory sense of incompetence.

I've known for a long time that I beat myself up too much on stuff, and probably worthiness of my blog content is one of those areas. Actually, I believe I suffer from a curious mixture of wild over-confidence in my abilities in some respects and severe self-doubt in others. My old college roommate, Kevin, had a wonderful turn of phrase for the former, used most devilishly on our trumpet and music colleagues whom we thought had an exaggerated view of their own musical abilities - he often said they were "suffering from delusions of adequacy."

Which leads me to my next thought in this rambling entry - I reconnected with dear old college chums Kevin and Caroline Flanigan at University of Illinois last weekend. We calculated it had been 15+ years since we'd seen each other. We vowed it would never happen again, because seeing each other was fantastic. There are some people you just connect with, and it doesn't matter how long it's been - it seems like just yesterday since we'd seen each other. Plus there were other bonuses for the weekend, like my meeting two of their three wonderful children, Abby and Liam. We are looking forward to them meeting Nathaniel (again) and me meeting Maggie (again), who are about the same age. And there was the added bonus of reconnecting with mutual friend Scott Bush. Scott was Caroline's high school friend, and Kevin had to "pass muster" with Scott when Kevin and Caroline started dating; I too remember meeting Caroline ("this great girl I met in chemistry lab") - I don't think I applied as "scientific inquiry" on Caroline as Scott did on Kevin (who likened it to presenting his c.v. to Scott), although if I had, she would have passed with an A+ from the moment Kevin introduced us.

We had some good times back in the day, and I'm looking forward to more years of good times to come. Kevin, I think we need to dig up your short film ("The Dip") and have a screening! Written produced and directed by Kevin, starring Caroline and me (the only people available to start shooting at 11:45 p.m. the night before the project was due).

All Politics is Local - Unfortunately, Sometimes

Barack Obama's remark to Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press yesterday, in response to a question about Caroline Kennedy's expression of interest in HRC's vacant Senate seat, takes on new meaning today, huh? Something like he likes Caroline, but he doesn't need to weigh in on New York politics because he's got enough on his plate with Illinois politics. Rod Blagojevich indeed has hit a new low in Illinois state politics, and that is saying something.

I remember encountering the comment some years ago, in law school I think, in the context of federal vs. state power, and the notion that a part of the beauty of the federal system is that we've got 50 states to experiment with different levels of regulation, different regulatory approaches and the like, and that, where we can, we should leave matters to the states to regulate because they are "closer to the people." That is, viewing the state legislatures as so-called "laboratories of democracy" as the Reagan "New Federalism" was still relatively fresh--moving power from the federal governments to state/local governments. And an effective counter to that argument (or at least it seemed so to me at the time) was that if you wanted to see how powerful lobbyists could get, unleash them on the state regulators. They could be rolled with ease, and that, even though there were 50 state governments, if you really wanted to see an industry (e.g., take the tobacco industry) control their own governmental regulatory regime, turn it over from the feds to the states.

I think events in Illinois today prove that that surely would be a probable result.

The Scene: One Year Anniversary

Ok, it's not been quite one year since I started writing this blog, but nearly so. But just this week my good friend Kevin Flanigan emailed a link he stumbled on that he shared with his brothers Tommy and Sean [Kevin, Sean and Tom--my own personal Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard] and me: http://www.naturestable.net/. It is not a fancy website, but that's Nature's Table for you. It was a "real" place--real music and real food (although not the "real America" Ms. Palin spoke of--in fact, just the opposite!). I frankly cannot imagine my four years at Illinois without that place. I guess I didn't realize that it had only opened in 1979. To me, it seemed like a place that must have been part of the U of I music scene since the '50s or '60s (not that I thought that much about it at the time). And I'm a firm believer that the school is much poorer for not having it there still (sadly, it closed in 1991, a victim of university expansion).

But it was a scene. I never played there. My jazz chops were just not good enough at the time. But I was an devoted fan. The memory of that session with Ray's Condition Blue, featuring pianist Mike Kocour ("he's a math major? You've gotta be kidding me!") and the great Jeff Stitely on drums remains vivid (see my post of on Kocour from November 2007). I've copied some pictures from the website that include those guys, just as I remember them. (Hey, I didn't recall the flannel so much, but I guess it was "in, man, very in.") The list of daily gigs at the Table that is at the website is fascinating. I can still go down that list and tell you, with a fair amount of certainty, which gigs I was at (I mean, is it weird or what that I remember going to a Friday happy hour of hot music featuring Tom Birkner on cornet and vocals?)

In a strange three degrees of separation, Stitely was a neighbor and friend to Matt Farmer. Matt went to high school with my friend Neal Connors. Not only did I meet Matt by playing gigs with him and Neal up in Chicago but we've become very good friends. And where did I meet first meet Neal? While playing in Jeff Stitely's big band at U of I, naturally!

Little things can fundamentally alter the course of one's life, can't they? One big one was my introduction to this wonderful U of I jazz scene in the summer of 1981, between my junior and senior years of high school, going to the two week Illinois Summer Youth Music program (ISYM). I also went to Indiana that year and did a band and orchestra camp. Because of that, I elected to go to the jazz program at Illinois. There I met Tom Birkner, heard and played in a big band with the even-then-amazing Kevin Kizer (a kid my age, already playing in the #1 jazz band at Illinois), experienced John Garvey (Garv), encountered Tom Wirtel (then Shabda Nur), heard the likes of Brad Wheeler, Ron Dewar, Joel Spencer and others I can't remember right now, and of course, met the Kev-ster himself. Two young trumpet playing kids--one from just south of Chicago and the other from smack dab in the middle of nowhere-- but who had a lot in common. One of the most important of which was a love of music and playing which I think has shaped the people we became, even if we were not the next Dave Bilger or Wynton Marsalis.

What a scene.