December 2, 2005 – 12:22 am
It is easy for us to bustle though our busy lives without pausing to reflect that so much of our familiar and comfortable world was not created by us, but bequeathed to us by those who lived and died long before we took our cue to strut briefly upon the stage. Here in Gotham one tends to take the city itself for granted, as if it were given feature of the natural world, but if one stops to consider that every last brick, every nail, every floorboard, every window, every doorknob, every layer of paint in every one of the city’s innumerable structures, from the meanest toolshed to the loftiest tower, was carefully put in its place by some human hand, the scale of one’s indebtedness to those who went before us is almost ungraspable in its immensity. To these multitudes, almost all of them nameless and forgotten, we owe nearly everything – our cities, our nations, our languages, our religions, our music, our literature, our science, our mathematics, our art, our culture, and even the very bodies that we inhabit. I think it is worthwhile to dwell on this astonishing fact every so often.
From my remarkable friend George Beke, who might best be described as a cultural archeologist, a tireless scholar of the symbolic and esoteric artifacts of bygone times, comes an extraordinary insight into one of the most familiar features of our common cultural framework – the days of the week.
December 1, 2005 – 12:46 am
Today, November 30, was Winston Churchill’s birthday. He would have been 131.
Like many, I regard Winston Churchill as perhaps the greatest man of the twentieth century. He alone sounded the tocsin as Germany rearmed. His measureless optimism and indomitable spirit gave the British the sinew to stand alone against the Nazis after his warnings went unheeded. His ringing oratory sustained the fighting spirit of a battered nation. His literary output, and his incomparable command of his beloved language, would make him a towering figure even had he confined himself solely to writing. His six-volume history, The Second World War, is unique in all of literature – a spellbinding account of one of mankind’s greatest struggles, written not just by a gifted historian, but by the leader of a dauntless nation, and the architect of civilization’s ultimate victory.
December 1, 2005 – 12:04 am
Looking over the science section of the New York Times yesterday I found the following response to an article about hypnosis (sixth letter down):
To the Editor:
Re “This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis”: The first thing that came to mind when I read that some people are susceptible to suggestion is the trance some religious fundamentalists get into. The article goes on to say that suggestion changes what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.
That would explain the apparent contradiction in our most recent presidential election, where logic seemed to be turned on its head.
Was that 10 to 15 percent who could have been in a hypnotic trance enough to turn around an election and in essence undermine (undermind) the democratic process?
Mark Gretch
Raleigh, N.C.
What idiotic, insulting, execrable drivel.
Re “This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis”: The first thing that came to mind when I read that some people are susceptible to suggestion is the trance some religious fundamentalists get into. The article goes on to say that suggestion changes what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.
That would explain the apparent contradiction in our most recent presidential election, where logic seemed to be turned on its head.
Was that 10 to 15 percent who could have been in a hypnotic trance enough to turn around an election and in essence undermine (undermind) the democratic process?
Mark Gretch
Raleigh, N.C.
What idiotic, insulting, execrable drivel.
November 30, 2005 – 1:45 am
Visitors to this site (they already number in the tens, in just a few short months) may have noticed the “Martial Arts” link category over in the sidebar. As of this writing there are four links, of which three-quarters seem to be about something called “Hung Ga”, or “Hung Gar”.
So what’s the deal? I shall explain.
November 27, 2005 – 10:38 pm
I have a new toy:
My parents, who are, shall we say, “getting on”, and who are less capable physically than they once were, have moved to smaller quarters, and needed to get rid of some of their stuff. Some was sold, some thrown out, and some redistributed to friends and family. My father, not needing it anymore, entrusted to me his microscope.
Now this isn’t just any old microscope. It’s a Wild M20, made in Switzerland, and considered by many to be the finest optical microscope ever made. My father bought it in London, his hometown, in the 1950s, when he was just beginning his career as a medical researcher. Though it is not particularly large, it is surprisingly heavy, and its dense metal body is finished in deep, lustrous black. Its interlocking parts, even after fifty years, move with exquisite precision, and without the slightest play. The optics are incomparable. Though it is a purely functional object, I find it almost hypnotically beautiful.
I know little about the practical techniques of microscopy, but I intend to learn. What a gift! I think of the legions of the curious throughout the ages who would have given their eyeteeth for such an instrument, and feel that I owe it to them to learn to use this fantastic tool, and to use it reverently and well.
You can read about the Wild M20 here, and here.
Thanks, Dad.
November 27, 2005 – 9:49 pm
Here’s an uplifting headline:
Man from 1,500 years ago had violent death
It’s the story of an aboriginal Australian who “was repeatedly speared and then axed,” according to the scientists who found him.
“He sure trod on someone’s toes,” said Allen Madden, cultural and heritage officer for the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.
You can read the story here.
November 21, 2005 – 11:59 pm
I’m fond of metaphors. In fact – with apologies to Will Rogers – I never metaphor I didn’t like. Here’s one that seems rather apt to me lately:
Life is a Pachinko machine.
November 20, 2005 – 11:59 pm
Are there abstract objects? Do numbers, for example, have an existence that is independent of our minds? This is one of the Big Questions, and has been a recent topic of debate over at Maverick Philosopher, where I have been outnumbered as usual. It’s a pretty tough room for materialists, that place.
What, exactly, have we been wrangling over? Consider the following proposition:
The statement “3 is prime” was true even before there were any minds to conceive it.
Is this true? Bill Vallicella and company say it is (and seemed a bit shocked that I might think otherwise), but I think the question is more subtle that they realize, and doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer. Here’s the view I am proposing:
November 18, 2005 – 5:17 pm
Here’s Charles Krauthammer, in today’s Washington Post, getting off a shot at “Intelligent Design”:
“How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.”
Read the full article here.
November 18, 2005 – 1:52 pm
I’ve just spent a few days at PubSub’s Granite State Research Kitchen up in Nashua, NH. It’s in an enormous brick building that used to be a textile mill back in New Hampshire’s industrial heyday. A lot of these old piles, which are all over the place up there, have now been converted into high-tech office complexes, pottery studios, and cutesy-poo shopping malls.
The first thing you see when you enter the building is a larger-than-life wooden cigar-store Indian. He looks pretty much like the prefab one in this picture (I found this image here – hope its owners don’t mind):
Shading his eyes, the brawny warrior gazes past you into the distance as you come through the front door. Is he scanning the blue horizon for smoke signals? Following the flight of a soaring eagle? I doubt it. My feeling is that he is probably too embarrassed to make eye contact, not only because his descending career arc has brought him from hunting bison on the majestic plains of the West all the way down to hawking handfuls of Presidentes, but also because he has apparently been coerced into wearing, as a token of his subjugation, a fetching, knee-length, American-flag skirt.
I find it interesting that you can get away with that up in New Hampshire. Here in Gotham you’d have picketers outside your place in about twenty minutes.
November 11, 2005 – 2:04 pm
Here’s an interesting item:
A Miami-based film director is spending $100,000 on a piece of property. He plans to turn the location into a big-game hunting resort. What makes the venture somewhat unusual is that what will be hunted is “dinosaur-like monsters”, and that the property is located inside the online game Project Entropia.
They say the real-estate bubble may have burst. So who needs “real”?
November 9, 2005 – 1:23 am
I’ve been spending a lot of time around philosophers lately, and I’ve noticed something.
Before I begin, let me say, for purposes of full disclosure, that although I have had a lifelong interest in philosophy, I was raised by two scientists. My mother is a physical anthropologist, and my father, an immunologist, did the research that led to the eradication of rH hemolytic disease. He was in fact recently considered for the Nobel Prize.
So, despite my deep and genuine admiration (envy, even, on occasion) for the purity and discipline of the trained philosophical mind, sometimes I can feel a bit, shall we say, conflicted. And although what we now call science (a relatively recent arrival) was, in its infancy, known as “natural philosophy”, science and philosophy are two different things entirely.
November 8, 2005 – 1:30 am
I’ve just read, on my wife Nina’s recommendation, the book A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. Here is the first paragraph:
I wake to the drone of an airplane engine and the feeling of something warm dripping down my chin. I lift my hand to feel my face. My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut. I open them and I look around and I’m in the back of a plane and there’s no one near me. I look at my clothes and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.
The book is the story of Frey’s six weeks, at age 23, at an elite detoxification clinic in Minneapolis. It is a horrifying tale. I have known an awful lot of drug addicts and alcoholics in my day, and have peered over the edge of that abyss at times myself, but Mr. Frey, I have to say, raises the bar. He has, by the beginning of this story, been a dedicated alcoholic for ten years, and an obsessive crackhead for three. He has spent every day for years pumping booze and drugs into himself until he blacks out. He has destroyed every relationship he has ever had with anyone, is wanted in three states for various antisocial acts, and has brought himself to the uttermost brink of death.
November 6, 2005 – 2:45 am
I’ve been spending a lot of time over at Bill Vallicella’s place lately, as anyone who reads these posts is bound to have noticed. We’ve been arguing dualism vs. phsyicalism, and the fur has been flying. Here’s a recap. I apologize if this post is of rather unseemly length.
November 5, 2005 – 5:01 pm
As I walked along William Street in Lower Manhattan yesterday morning on my way to the PubSub command center, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a dazzling light twenty feet or so off the ground. Looking up at it I couldn’t make out what it was for a moment, then realized that it was only a metal fixture attached to a building. It wasn’t really any sort of lamp at all, but was catching a thin shaft of sunlight (the streets are narrow, and the buildings tall, in the Financial District) and bouncing it my way. This was an interesting perceptive shift; at first I had thought I was seeing a primary light source, then realized that its illuminative virtue was not intrinsic but contextual.
I was immediately struck by what an apt metaphor this was for the topic of derived vs. intrinsic intentionality.
November 1, 2005 – 1:31 pm
Today, the new Moon, is the day of Diwali. From Wikipedia:
DiwÄlÄ« or DÄ«pÄvali (also transliterated Deepavali; Sanskrit: row of lights) is the Hindu Festival of Lights. For Jains it is one of the most important festivals, and beginning of the Jain year. It is also a significant festival for the Sikh faith.
October 28, 2005 – 11:11 am
My good friend Jess Kaplan, who practices law in Sacramento, has just sent me an interesting item (written before Harriet Meiers withdrew herself from consideration) about confirmations of judicial appointments. One might assume that qualifications like a high-level clerkship, outstanding academic credentials from prestigious institutions, experience on the bench, an extensive body of written work, and so forth, would grease the wheels, but it appears that exactly the opposite is the case. In the author’s words, “The less sterling a candidate’s record, the more likely Congress is to confirm.”
Readers can find the article here.
October 27, 2005 – 11:35 pm
For many years I have been curious about consciousness. It is something that most people never think much about, but when you begin to wonder about it it is hard to let the subject go. Consciousness is at the same time the most familiar phenomenon there is, and the oddest of all. We give it up every night and regain it each morning, without wondering how such a change might be possible. We know that consciousness is bound, somehow, to our bodies (and, we assume, not to the ordinary objects of the world), but we cannot begin to imagine how such a binding might be arranged. Consciousness can be aware of itself, but unconsciousness cannot, and so we do not see the “edges” of our consciousness, as we can demonstrate by trying to observe ourselves in the act of falling asleep. Our experiences of our lives in the fleeting present, and of the memories that are all we have of the past, are dependent for their very existence upon our our consciousness.
As reader of these pages will know, I follow quite closely the conversation at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website. Lately Bill has treated his visitors to a good hard look at the philosophical treatment of several aspects of consciousness, such as qualia, dualism-vs.-physicalism, and intentionality. I highly recommend his site to any readers who are curious about the various views that animate this discussion; Bill’s blog is a rara avis in philosophical discourse: simultaneously scholarly, engaging, and accessible. He also attracts a respectable ensemble of readers and commenters.
October 20, 2005 – 6:03 pm
It is 4:58 p.m. on Thursday, October 20th, 2005. I am sitting In John F. Kennedy International Airport, in the gleaming new Jet Blue terminal, waiting for a flight to Long Beach, California. I’m flying there for the weekend to help my parents move. They are no longer young, and their health is not what it was, so they are leaving the house they have lived in since the early ’90s for a residential facility that will be a good deal less demanding.
I’ll be back In New York City on Sunday evening.
I am sitting in a surprisingly pleasant bar/restaurant, having arrived almost two hours before my flight is to depart. Looking around me I see twenty-two high-definition television screens, one of which is almost the size of a single bed. One of the screens is displaying moment-by-moment coverage of Hurricane Wilma, which satellite observations have determined to be the most intense storm ever to have been noticed in the Atlantic Basin. The satellite image is superimposed on a computer-generated map of the southeastern corner of North America, and is colored a lurid orange at the center of the storm. This is where Doppler radar observations show the highest wind velocities. Wilma is cruising through the Yucatan Channel on its way to visit a familiar type of destruction on southern Florida.
October 20, 2005 – 10:23 am
This story, one of the enormous body of Mulla Nasrudin folk-stories, is taken from The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by the late Sufi writer and teacher Idries Shah.
The philosophers, logicians and doctors of law were drawn up at court to examine Nasrudin. This was a serious case, because he had admitted going from village to village saying: ‘The so-called wise men are ignorant, irresolute and confused.’ He was charged with undermining the security of the state.
‘You may speak first,’ said the king.
‘Have paper and pens brought,’ said the Mulla.
Paper and pens were brought.
‘Give them to each of the first seven savants.’
They were distributed.
‘Have them separately write an answer to this question: “What is bread?” ‘
This was done.
The papers were handed to the king who read them out:
The first said: ‘Bread is a food.’
The second ‘It is flour and water.’
The third: ‘ A gift of God.’
The fourth: ‘Baked dough.’
The fifth: ‘Changeable, according to how you mean “bread”.’
The sixth: ‘A nutritious substance.’
The seventh: ‘Nobody really knows.’
‘When they decide what bread is,’ said Nasrudin, ‘it will be possible for them to decide other things. For example, whether I am right or wrong. Can you entrust matters of assessment and judgement to people like this? Is it or is it not strange that they cannot agree about something which they eat each day, yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?’
October 18, 2005 – 10:58 am
Some years ago anthropologist Donald E. Brown published a book called Human Universals. Its argument is that there are cultural traits that can be found in every human society – universal characteristics that, because they are manifest in all cultures throughout history and in all environmental settings, clearly must represent innate features of human nature. Such an idea, of course, flies in the face of the “progressive” intellectual fashions of the past century, fashions that persist to this day, as discussed in a previous post.
Dr. Brown has compiled a list of these ubiquitous human traits; you can read it here.
October 17, 2005 – 11:46 pm
Alright, I’ve had it.
Once again today I heard someone say “it’s a chicken-and-egg thing”. This refers, of course, to that stale old chestnut “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” This trite saying is supposed to be an example of an impenetrable mystery, but it is nothing of the sort. The least understanding of biology, given a moment’s thought, easily resolves the question.
How does speciation occur? Is it by some creature starting its life as one species and ending up as another? Obviously not. New forms of life arise through mutation, through the imperfect transfer of genetic information from parent to child. So in this example something that was not-quite-a-chicken laid an egg containing the world’s first chicken.
Which came first? The egg. Move on.
October 17, 2005 – 4:07 pm
We can stop arguing about the existence of qualia, thanks to Sony.
Somebody should send Daniel Dennett one of these.
October 17, 2005 – 12:40 am
This weekend I was up in Wellfleet, MA, for the annual OysterFest. Lots of small towns the world over have shindigs like this to celebrate a local product, but this isn’t just any local product. These are Wellfleet Oysters, and they are magnificent.
Wellfleet is a lovely old fishing village on the slender outermost stretch of Cape Cod, and since its founding hundreds of years ago it has been renowned for this matchless mollusc. For two days each October the town’s picturesque main thoroughfare is closed to traffic, and epicures come from far and wide to sample the bodacious bivalve in every conceivable form – baked, grilled, fried, stewed, and, best of all, just as Nature made it: succulent and beckoning on its nacreous and razor-edged half-shell.
Wellfleet Harbor’s clean, cold, salty waters and 12-foot tides provide the ideal environment for raising these incomparable invertebrates, and as good as Wellfleet oysters are when ordered at Manhattan’s fancier tables, to savor them in their eponymous hometown, only hours or even minutes after they have been roused from their briny slumber, is enough to make one wonder whether there mightn’t actually be a divine Plan after all.
October 16, 2005 – 11:52 pm
Bill Keezer, who maintains several interesting blogs, has graciously added waka waka waka to the blogroll of his site Bill’s Comments. Bill is an open-minded, well-educated, intelligent, questioning Christian, and is just the sort of person that people like me, who are agnostic but intensely curious about what the spiritual truth of the world might turn out to be, need to have around. He also, as a trained scientist, provides a valuable perspective on how thinking people can reconcile science and religion, a project that is not going well in this country, to say the least.
In the post in which he lists recent additions to his blogroll, Bill refers to this site as “a serious blog by a philosopher”. I’m flattered; although I am curious and have read and brooded a lot, I have no formal training in Western philosophy, and am very aware of my amateur status in comparison to the real pros like Bill Vallicella, who have devoted their adult lives to the effort while I was off making records. But who am I to argue?
“A serious blog by a philosopher.”
I like the sound of that, and I shall try to live up to it.
October 13, 2005 – 12:55 am
I have already posted about Steven Pinker’s excellent book The Blank Slate, a salvo against the modern denial of innate human nature. In today’s Wall Street Journal Charles Murray, who as one of the co-authors, in 1996, of The Bell Curve was pilloried by the Left for suggesting that there might be inherent statistical differences among human genetic groups, has returned to the battle with an essay arguing that subsequent study has buttressed his position.
He has kept a low profile since his ruthless persecution by the Thought Police nearly a decade ago, but the recent tar-and-feathering of Lawrence Summers for suggesting that innate sex differences might have something to do with the low numbers of women at elite levels in science and mathematics was more than he could bear in silence. It is brave of him to speak up again, because he is sure to get little but contumely and derision for his efforts. I encourage all to read this essay, and to try to do so with an open mind.
October 9, 2005 – 12:31 am
Here is a remarkable image. It is the blazing surface of our Sun.
Each of the small granular regions in the picture is roughly the size of Texas. The Earth would fit comfortably within the large sunspot in the center.
Although they appear black in this image, sunspots are dazzlingly bright, as bright as lightning. It is only by contrast to the surrounding photosphere that they seem dark.
It is easy to look at such an image and marvel at it as an unusual and strangely beautiful visual phenomenon without making a deeper effort to establish a mental connection between our local context and what is being depicted here. Dwell for a moment on the scale of the scene in this photograph, both in relation to our Earth and to the Sun itself.
It is interesting that the picture can be taken in as somehow representing an object of comprehensible size.
“As above, so below.”
October 7, 2005 – 12:43 am
According to the news media, Gotham is once again in the “crosshairs of terror”. The problem this time, apparently, is a 19-martyr posse of fanatical suicide bombers with Metrocards. Al Qaeda the F-train ridah.
This news has little effect around here other than to give those who tend to become anxious something to become anxious about. My own parents lived through the Blitz in London, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let something like this bother me. I’ve been riding these subways, at all hours of the day and night, for 30 years. I’m used to staring death in the face.
They’re going to intimidate New York City?
October 7, 2005 – 12:18 am
Well, that’s about it – I’ve reposted everything I could find from the old site.
To recap, here’s what happened: this domain was previously hosted by a cheap-o hosting company called 1GBHosting.net. It had gotten good customer reviews, was a great deal ($5.95 a month) and gave me everything I needed.
At first the proprietors were engaged and helpful. Once I was up and running, though, they became somewhat aloof, especially when things started breaking.
First I noticed that I couldn’t send emails to some domains (aol.com, for example). This turned out to be because reverse DNS lookup was failing. I wrote the support staff about it, and got a response weeks later that said something like “um… yeah, we’re working on that…”
Next the cPanel application that provided a user interface for managing the site went dead – an expired license file. I wrote to the hosts again, but by now they were radio silent.
I started thinking about how I might get my content backed up and out of there, but before I could do anything the whole website vaporized.
So BACK UP YOUR CONTENT, ye bloggers.
October 5, 2005 – 9:45 pm
Well, it appears that the new location is becoming visible to the Web. As the smoke clears I am beginning to put things back together. Many thanks to my friends over at Maverick Philosopher for all the help and moral support.
I have copies, kindly cached by Google, of a lot of the old content (thanks, Sam, for the tip), but it is going to take a little while to get it all reassembled.
October 4, 2005 – 4:59 pm
We can rebuild it. We have the technology.
We’ll be back very soon.
September 21, 2005 – 12:44 am
A lively discussion has been going on over at Bill Vallicella’s website. I seem to be spending so much time over there, in such engaging company, that I am getting very little done in here!
One of the topics we’ve been grappling with is the physicalist view of the mind. As you might have guessed from previous posts, I hold the view that our minds are entirely grounded in the physical world: that all of our thoughts, memories, fears,imaginings, etc. – in short, our inner lives – are the result of the activity of our physical bodies, in particular our nervous systems. We are a long way from completing the scientific program that will exhaustively map subjective experience onto objectively measurable physical states and transactions, but I do believe, along with most scientists studying the problem, that the idea is sound, and the goal attainable, in principle at least. But this view, all but hegemonic among research scientists, has met considerable resistance in the philosophical community. A recent posting at Dr. Vallicella’s site sums it up:
Marvelously complex as it is, the brain is just another chunk of the physical world. Study it till doomsday with the most sophisticated instruments, map every cubic millimeter of it, establish detailed correlations between brain regions and types of conscious phenomena — and what do you accomplish? You learn more and more about a highly complex piece of meat.
September 8, 2005 – 1:05 am
I have been preoccupied by discussions with Bill Vallicella in this space, and should give him a moment’s peace.
In a letter to the New York Times (fifth letter down), one Linnda Caporael shows us once again how deeply entrenched the perverse cultural doctrine that Steven Pinker calls “The Blank Slateâ€still is. MS Caporael writes (italics mine):
David Brooks is right to see that the “bursting point†has come (column, Sept. 4), but it does not include “the elemental violence of human nature.â€
There is no such thing as human nature without culture and its institutions. The message of Katrina was not from Hobbes; it was from a neoconservative leadership: “Starve the beast,†feed the rich, abandon the poor, disgrace the nation. That’s not a natural disaster; it’s an American tragedy.
September 6, 2005 – 11:24 pm
Yesterday I left a comment on a post by Bill Vallicella (who maintains one of the most interesting sites anywhere in the blogosphere) about Richard Dawkins’ antipathy toward the “theory†of Intelligent Design. Dr. Vallicella has responded here, and I’ll take this opportunity to respond to his response.
September 1, 2005 – 11:56 pm
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has commented here on my previous “Logic and Faith†post, with his usual thoughtfulness and insight. He has also expatiated further on the general question of faith and intuition.
I feel the need to add a few more thoughts of my own.
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, comments here on Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I haven’t read the book, so I must be careful about what I say here, but from the excerpts quoted, and the interview given by Harris at Amazon, he (Harris) appears to be staking out a position that, with unintended irony, is the product of his own faith. The most telling example of this is something he said in this interview:
‘Faith’ is a false belief in unjustified convictions.
There has been quite a ruction lately about the Topeka, Kansas school board’s wish to accommodate literalist Christians by introducing new teaching standards for biology. The proposed guidelines would suggest to the impressionable student that the Darwinian idea, in which modern organisms (including humans) arose through a lengthy process of evolution by natural selection, is mere scientific dogma, and that an alternative account of the phenomena — “intelligent design†– should be given serious consideration.
April 22, 2005 – 11:24 pm
Yesterday’s Times carried a sad notice: renowned bassist Niels-Henning Oersted Pedersen has died at age 58 in Denmark. I in no way intend this space to be devoted strictly to remembrances of deceased bass players, but Niels deserves a mention. He was one of the great ones, and played, in his long career, with the best of the best.
April 18, 2005 – 11:17 am
On Thursday, the 24th of March, New York City’s musical family assembled at the Church of the Tranfiguration on East 29th Street to say goodbye to the gifted bassist Wayne Pedzwater, who had died the previous week after a long and grueling struggle with gastric cancer. To know Wayne was to love him, and since pretty much every professional musician in New York knew him, the gathering was not small.
Wayne was a remarkable figure; he seemed to glow from within. He was tall, athletic, and strikingly handsome, with the sort of physical presence that one might imagine could only be the result of a carefully managed eugenics program. He had a dazzling smile, a nimble, curious and capacious mind, and a splendidly pungent sense of humor. Above all, though, were his extraordinary musicianship and his dedication to excellence.
