Flying out of San Francisco, I imagined that all of my worries would simply disappear when I took off for the “mystical” land of Peru. I had recently been through a few travails, including an emotional business divorce and looked forward to some relief. But instead, I became aware that they traveled with me, like close friends who would not say goodbye. With this distressing realization, coupled with the frustration of having my plane ticket canceled for the flight out of Lima, I finally arrived in Cusco, irritated and exhausted.Read the rest of this entry »
It’s the second set of the night. The Les Paul strung over your shoulders pours out hard and soulful sounds through the Mesa Boogie Mark IV (78 pound, 85 tube watt) combo amp. As you reach for that perfect note, bent over in trance, you feel a twinge in your lower back, then a sharp stab deep in your spine, and the life is suddenly sucked out of that singing lead. Coming down from the clouds, mind and body are re-connected, your body telling your mind to stop doing what it is doing. And you think about loading the amp into the car after the gig.Read the rest of this entry »
I remember my first bass rig. 1975. A sunburst Fender Precision copy and a small no-name transistor combo amp. Light weight, compact. I just threw it all into my Delta 88 Royale and drove. Easy. No muss, no fuss. But as the years went by, and the bands got better, and I started to make a little money, my speaker cabinets got bigger and the amplifiers heavier, until I was finally hauling around an Aguilar DB750 head and a couple of “4 by 10” Eden cabinets.* (Did I forget to mention the compressor and rack?) The sound was awesome! I could turn the master and gain knobs to 2 or 3 and push my band with clean tone and endless volume. Yes, I was the “King of Bottom”. But my lower back started talking to me, and it was not with kindness. Rolling the cabinets to my car with a hand truck, I felt the pain as I anticipated the angled, awkward lift into the back seat. And then there was the head—750 watts and 43 pounds of compact tube power. I felt like one of those Olympic athletes doing the hammer throw just to get that thing into the car. As part of a middle age rock band, something had to give. It was a stark, clear choice–my back or my equipment.
Thirty Five Thousand years ago, the ice age caves of Southern France were covered in beautiful images of wild animals and abstract symbols. Since that time, the ancestors of these painters have produced the Mona Lisa, Sufi poetry, and Rock and Roll. The story of Homo Sapien has been, in large measure, a story of art—of the language needed to express it and the technology necessary to make it move.Read the rest of this entry »
I have been in chiropractic practice for almost twenty five years. From the beginning, I have taken an integrative approach, working with a team of complementary practitioners—medical doctors, acupuncturists, physical, movement, and massage therapists, nurses, and osteopaths—all under one roof in my clinic, Chiromedica. There were not many practices like this back in the 1980’s. But in recent years there has been a proliferation of integrative health centers, many of them run by medical doctors. Major medical centers like California Pacific, UCSF, and Kaiser Permanente have set up “complementary and alternative medicine” clinics, yet chiropractic care is excluded in house, relegated (at best) to off site referral. Given chiropractic’s central role in the history and development of alternative and integrative healing, it is worth exploring why this might be the case.Read the rest of this entry »
Two years ago, while visiting New York City, I was strolling through an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled “Venice and the Islamic World: 828-1797”. The exhibition contained magnificent pottery, silver work, weaponry, and textiles, all laid out in glass cases. As I passed by one of these displays, I noticed a very large book opened somewhere in the middle. It was Avicenna’s “Canon of Medicine”, the most authoritative medical text in the Islamic world at the time. And on the opened page was a picture of a man lying face down on a table and another man standing above him with his hands placed on his back, performing what appeared to be a spinal manipulation. I looked at the descriptive caption on the case. It read, “Doctor performing a spinal manipulation on a patient”. Yes, a spinal manipulation, documented and illustrated, in Persia, approximately 1000 AD. Read the rest of this entry »
The small Pugeot, gears grinding, wound its way into the high desert mountains. Leaving Shiraz, the City of Poets, of Sadi and Hafez, we were headed to Yasuj, the half way mark to Isfahan. The scenery had changed dramatically, from dry rolling hills to snow capped peaks and as Ali, my new guide and driver, sped along the narrow roads, sheer vertical drops only inches away, I looked across the landscape and imagined the armies of Alexander and Genghis Khan passing through these narrow valleys, camped along the powerful rivers below, then perched above, on the high ridges, waiting in ambush. I sensed the ancient footsteps of a million men and women.Read the rest of this entry »