Under Siege

I don’t eat meat, but I have my own trick for making my Thanksgiving meal savory: a book about hunger. Nothing depressing. No emaciated Ethiopians, concentration camps, or sepia photos of dour-faced Oklahomans creeping in their rusty lorries through dusty fields. Instead, I sought solace and well-being in Daniel Bentioff’s, “City of Thieves,” a work of fiction that pretends to be semi-nonfiction but ultimately gets dragged down by the unbearable weight of its sappy artifice.

The book is a quick and engaging read, which helps explain its longstanding perch on bestseller lists and conspicuous ubiquity at bookstores nationwide. The story is set in Leningrad in the waning days of World War II, when the city is under siege and its residents are starving. The narrative is carried by the fictional author’s grandpa, a former solider who had settled in America in the decades after the told escapades. We thus know, right off the bat, that the hero, Lev, will make it -- a no small matter given the number of bullets flying toward him over those 200-plus pages.

The grandson narrator freely acknowledges that, as a writer, he has taken some liberties with Lev’s story. But by the time the story ends, it becomes clear that this is a colossal understatement. The plot is delightfully absurd. Lev gets caught looting a corpse and faces imprisonment or worse. As he is detained, he meets another man in a similar predicament, a muscular, sex-crazed, salty-tongued companion named Kolya. The odd couple has an unusual assignment -- find a dozen eggs and deliver them to a Soviet colonel, who needs the eggs for a wedding cake for his daughter. So far so good. But what begins as a bleak but brisk-paced tale full of dark-humored naturalism gets bogged down in fake pathos and over-the-top action. The comically absurd becomes the painfully absurd as Bentioff, scraps emotional honesty in favor of fake pathos and over-the-top action scenes that would be better placed in Tarantino movie than in a book of historical fiction. The pages turn quickly but the book disappointedly devolves into action-packed melodrama -- a “Water for Elephants” with testicles.

 Sure, there are plenty of smiles and tears to complement the bullets and grenades, but the laughs are generally triggered dirty jokes and the tears are those of melodrama. But the lingering feeling after the final page is one of frustration and disappointment at the wasted opportunity. Bentioff is a Hollywood screenwriter, not a historian, which explains why “City of Thieves” is the way it is. He is a gifted and engaging storyteller, which helps explain the book’s success and which makes it a fine airplane companion. Unfortunately, a reader hungry for a meatier, weightier war story, with emotional honesty and  fare should scour elsewhere.

Read this tomorrow

Oh deadline, where the hell art thou? Without you, a procrastinator like myself feels lost at sea -- a useless slug in a world of dirty dishes, brisk novels and lofty thoughts doomed to never get anywhere. And that's the problem with having a blog -- no deadlines, no stick, no motivation and no posts for a month. The horror. The horror!

But I'm out of my writing coma now and I have Dr. Perry to thank. That's John Perry, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He wrote a useful guide for people like me -- a pithy, read-in-one-sitting gem called "The Art of Procrastination" that I reviewed for the Weekly and that ran this week. The fact that it's an "art" makes me feel better. The fact that it brought me back here after an inexcusable delay fills me with hope. Here it is (also found at http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=18049):

In praise of tomorrow

John Perry's quest to make life easier for the procrastinator

"The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing," by John Perry, Workman Publishing Company, 112 pp., $12.95

It's a real shame that most of the people John Perry targets in his new book, "The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing," will never get around to reading it because they're too busy scrubbing clean pots, finishing last Sunday's crossword puzzle or sweeping crumbs and pennies from beneath their couch cushions.

It's a shame not just because Perry's book offers plenty of simple and practical tips to the chronic delayer. The witty, breezy volume also serves as a support group of sorts, a warm hug and a pat on the back to those of us all too skilled at tuning out that annoying sound of time's winged chariot hurrying near. He calls his book of musings "a sort of philosophical self-help program for depressed procrastinators" and he doesn't disappoint.

The scope of the book is mercifully limited. A veteran procrastinator himself, he knows his readership well and he points out in the conclusion that most self-help books for procrastinators look down on the habit. Perry's doesn't try to plumb the deeper mysteries of the procrastinator's psyche or engage in the type of neuroscience jargon that characterizes much of today's pop science. As the title makes clear, procrastination to Perry is an art, not a science — a fact that offers little comfort to those of us looking for a quick fix. No magic pill can cure us of our affliction (if one existed, we'd pop it first thing tomorrow). No surgery can fix us up (even if it could, we'd spend a year weighing its pros and cons). We can't even pin the blame on some obscure virus whose Latin name would at least lend our paralyzing condition a shred of dignity and legitimacy. No, when it comes to chronic procrastination, the enemy is within and defeating him typically involves an intricate chain of self-deception, self-flagellation and a rack of dishes that sparkle mischievously after repeated washings while a story lies unwritten or the manuscript lies unedited or the homework lies uncompleted while the clock ticks away.

Perry, a Stanford University philosophy professor, is here to guide us through the endless cycle of deception, disappointment and deadlines. The key, Perry claims, is to become a "structured procrastinator," which he defines as "a person who gets a lot done by not doing other things."

"Oddly enough, once we realize that we are structured procrastinators, not only do we feel better about ourselves but we also actually improve somewhat in our ability to get things done, because, once the miasma of guilt and despair clears, we have a better understanding of what keeps us from doing those things," Perry writes.

To cope with the problem, Perry prescribes a series of simple solutions with complicated names. Chief among these is "task triage," the art of sorting your list of tasks according to urgency and determining which of these tasks demand perfection and which can be relegated to the just-good-enough pile. The exercise is offered as a treatment for a symptom (or possibly the cause) of procrastination — the self-defeating drive toward perfection that keeps one from getting anything done. The task triage, Perry explains, gives the tortured procrastinator the permission to do an imperfect job right at the outset of the activity. By consciously deciding which tasks can be accomplished without perfection, the paralyzed perfectionist effectively turns down the pressure and frees himself up to proceed with no (or at least little) delay.

While task triage is Perry's solution to prioritizing projects, he relies on a more traditional tool for planning daily activities — the to-do list. To him, however, these lists are palliatives as much as directives. The Stanford philosopher understands the giddy comfort that comes with checking a box on a list, regardless of the activity being checked off ("It helps us to think of ourselves as doers, accomplishers, and not just lazy slugs. It gives us psychological momentum," Perry writes of checking boxes). His own to-do lists, which he says he tries to make before he goes to bed, are far from imposing. The first seven items on the list — turn off the alarm, don't hit the snooze button, get out of bed, go to the bathroom, don't get back in bed, go downstairs, make coffee — get accomplished by the time he sits down with his first coffee cup, as he points out.

The detailed to-do list is a particularly useful tool because it allows the procrastinator to break down large, daunting tasks into small, conquerable increments and to pat himself on the back at every increment. He finds similar guidance in Kaizen, the "Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement through small, implementable steps." He encourages his disciples to lean on these ancient teachings from the East.

"If you say you are adopting the Kaizen Way, rather than simply that you're trying to procrastinate less, you will sound like you have adopted a martial arts regimen," Perry writes. "That's kind of cool."

A cousin of the to-do list is the "not-to-do" list — Perry's preemptive strike against foreseeable distractions. His examples, which likely sound familiar to procrastinators and regular people alike, include "do not check email" and "do not start surfing the web." The latter habit, as the perpetual delayer knows too well, is particularly vexing, and Perry helpfully devotes an entire chapter to the love-hate relationship between the procrastinator and the computer. His solution? Surf only when you know you'll be interrupted.

"I log on when I'm already hungry or I'm sure my wife is going to pop in with some urgent task before too long or I am already feeling the first signs of a full bladder," Perry writes. "If you use a laptop, another ploy is to unplug it before you start your email; the spell will be broken when the battery dies — although as batteries improve, this technique becomes less useful."

Perry's prescriptions, whether for finishing projects or getting through the day, tend to target symptoms rather than the disease, which in his mind isn't such a bad one to have. It's good, for example, to play lively music in the morning (even if it's bad music) to get out of bed and inject some momentum into your day. It's also useful to collaborate on projects with non-procrastinators, who as Perry points out "will likely have already started on many tasks by the time you are ready to plunge in." His solutions are clear, easy to implement and demonstrate a deep, nuanced understanding of the procrastinator's inner dilemmas. He doesn't chide or slap wrists. You are who you are, gentle procrastinator, Perry seems to say. Live with it and let me help you.

At certain points in the book, Perry comes close to but stops just short of glorifying procrastinators. He acknowledges that procrastination is a "flaw, not a well-hidden virtue," but then spends much of his treatise praising this flaw with faint damning. The goal, he writes, "isn't to find a philosophy of life that makes procrastinators into heroes (although it might be fun to try to work out the principles). I simply want to note that it's not the worst flaw in the world; you can be a procrastinator and still get a lot of work done. Plus, with good self-deception skills and the little bit of willpower that allows you to manipulate yourself, you can become less of a procrastinator."

The problem he diagnoses is all too real and, for some of us, far too familiar. The solutions sound plausible and comforting. But desperate cases and those looking for more substantive changes (perhaps making that astronomical leap from "structured procrastinator" to "actual achiever") might need heavier medication. Reading "The Art of Procrastination" made me want to get crazy with checkmarks, compose a not-to-do list, flip my alarm-clock radio to a station that plays something jollier than static, close my browser and meet a few more go-getters. These things will get done. First thing tomorrow.

Chinese bullet

Liu Zhijun, also known as Great Leap Liu, had a sweeping vision -- to construct a high-speed-rail system and to rescue China from an embarrassing legacy of crammed, crawling trains. As Evan Osnos showed in his New Yorker article, "Boss Rail," Liu succeeded much too well. Liu blasted through China's bureaucratic rates, a climb to the top propelled by kickbacks and rewarded by paramours (his 18 mistresses are as much as testament his stamina as his public-works achievements). Liu succeeded in building the 7,500-mile train system in record time, though his ambition ultimately landed him in jail for corruption. His name, Osnos notes, has been generally purged from China's celebratory news releases. The July 23, 2011 crash of bullet train D301, which killed 40 people, took some gleam off this proud accomplishment.

The incident, and Osnos' wonderful article as a whole, made me think about my home state of California, which is preparing to lay the tracks for its own rail system -- a project I've been covering since January 2009, when rail officials hosted their first scoping meeting on the mammoth project. To be sure. California can't compete with China for the scale of corruption, cost overruns and mismanagement. But when it comes to high-speed rail, that's surely not for the lack of effort. The project received a literate vote of confidence from Californians in November 2008 (the vote  approved a $9.95 billion bond for the $33.6 billion-at-the-time project). Its progress since then has been a series of missteps, management errors, conflicts of interest, scathing audits, lawsuits, managerial mishaps and souring public opinion. Gov. Jerry Brown sees the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles high-speed-rail system as his transformational "legacy" project (will future generations call him "Great Leap" Brown?). But in recent months, he's had some troubles convincing even his fellow Democrats to share his vision. Despite his party's dominance of the Senate, the bill authorizing roughly $ billion in funding for high-speed rail and other train improvements passed the state Senate by a single vote in July.

The Democrats who were most familiar with the project through committee assignments -- Joe Simitian, Alan Lowenthal and Mark Desaulnier, all voted against the rail bill. Each argued that high-speed rail is a great concept but that the current plan is badly flawed and should be reconsidered. They cited financial uncertainty and second-guessed the plan's key tenets -- including the decision to launch construction in the Central Valley. Simitian, who is concluding his final Senate term, gave an impassioned speech in explaining his "No" vote and rejected the supporters' assumption that the plan should be approved because it will generate jobs. The vote is not on a "vision" but on a specific plan that will cost the state billions of dollars during a fiscally turbulent time. "This is a question of whether or not we generate good jobs with the right plan or the wrong plan," he said.


Supporters, led by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, didn't bother with the details. They virtually ignored the plan in front of them and talked about Abraham Lincoln building the Transcontinental Railroad, California's can-do spirit and construction of Golden Gate Bridge. If any of them had actually read the transformational bill they were about to vote on, they did a great job hiding the fact.

"In this era of term limits, how many chances do we have to vote for something this important and long-lasting?" Steinberg asked in a question that could just as easily refer to the world's biggest coal factory or a space station pegged for Saturn.

China's rail system is one of many invoked by California's rail officials to promote the state's own push. We are behind and we need to catch up, the argument goes. The California High-Speer Rail Authority's former CEO Roelof van Ark often stressed the agency's desire to learn from foreign partners and had traveled to China to solicit investments for the Golden State's fledgling efforts. So the Senate vote in July, and California's project as a whole, rarely strayed from my mind while I was reading Osnos' description of Great Leap Liu's "important and long-lasting" legacy project:

"China's most famous public-works project was an ecosystem almost perfectly hospitable to corruption -- opaque, unsupervised, and overflowing with cash, especially after the government announced a stimulus to mitigate the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. It boosted funding for railway projects to more than a hundred billion dollars in 2010. In some cases, the bidding period was truncated from five days to 13 hours. In others, the bids were mere theatre, because construction had already begun. Cash was known to vanish, in one instance, seventy-eight million dollars that had been set aside to compensate people whose homes had been demolished to make way for railroad tracks disappeared. Middlemen expected cuts of between one and six per cent."

The problems with California's rail project are different from those in China, but the difference is mostly in degree. The parallels, meanwhile are jarring. The oversight in California is virtually nonexistent with a few dozen state staffers managing a team of more than a thousand consultants, who manage teams of subcontractors, who manage their own subcontractors. This problem has been flagged repeatedly by State Auditor Elaine Howle, who has repeatedly raised red flags about the project's weak oversight, including a slew improprieties carried out by the main project manager, the firm Parsons Brinckerhoff.

Howle flagged several suspicious rail expenditures, including $46,000 spent on furniture for a program manager. The payment was "based on an oral agreement, despite the fact that its written contract expressly states that oral agreements not incorporated in the written contract are not binding," her audit stated (the written contract required the manager "provide its own furniture, equipment and systems." The audit also noted a case in which the rail authority paid a regional contractor more than $194,000 to subcontract for tasks that were not included in the work plan -- one of many such transactions. Hardly the stuff that inspires confidence.
 
Howle is far from the only impartial official to blast the project. The Legislative Analyst's Office called the rail authority's decision to launch the line in Central Valley a "big gamble" based on "faulty assumptions" and concluded that the governance structure for the project "is too weak to ensure that this mega-project is coordinated and managed effectively." The office recommended not approving the bond money until these problems are corrected. The majority in the Legislature ignored this recommendation because, as the hard-to-refute argument goes, Lincoln built the Transcontinental Railroad.

Eric Thronson, who wrote the LAO report, also noted that the rail authority has "considerable autonomy" and that this "does not ensure that the board keeps the overall best interests of the state in mind as it makes critical decisions about the project."

"This relative lack of accountability to either the executive or legislative branches creates a risk that the board will pursue its primary mission — construction of the statewide high-speed rail system — without sufficient regard to other state considerations, such as state fiscal concerns," he wrote.

Howle voiced a similar sentiment when she wrote in her audit:

"The Authority's current organizational structure places the largest portion of the program's planning, construction, and most importantly, oversight in the hands of contractors who may not have the best interests of the State as their primary motivation," the report states. "As a result, the Authority lacks assurance that the program is implemented in a way that best serves the public."

The rail authority responded in May with a face-palm of a hiring decision, when it hired one of its main contractor to manage the entire project as the agency's CEO. The decision to name name Jeff Morales, a vice president at PB, as its new CEO earlier this year did little to comfort the project's growing swell of critics. For a project in which contractors have been in charge since Day One, the state's decision to give its main contractor the power to officially call all the shots can either be seen as a step toward greater transparency or toward giving California's most glaring conflict on interest the state's official seal of approval.

It's possible that things will turn around and that the badly botched $60 billion project (up from the original estimate of $33 billion in 2008) will become the envy of the rest of America. It's also possible that Central Valley will have a shiny new set of tracks for its moderate-speed trains, footed by the rest of the state at a time when teachers are getting canned and state parks are shuttering. It's possible that the $50 billion dollars that the state still needs for the project will magically materialize. And it's also possible that it won't, that the largest infrastructure project in California's history will die a low-speed death and that Legislators will start quoting Abraham Lincoln as they advocate for Brown's next legacy project. Water tunnels anyone?

"Born with a gift of a golden voice"

As a young man, he hobnobbed with Joni Michell, Lou Reed and Nico; jammed to his biggest hit with Jimi Hendrix; received a blowjob from Janis Joplin at New York City's Chelsea Hotel (and wrote a song about it); wrote poems and novels and climbed up the literary ladder of his hometown, Montreal. He was enchanted by a woman named Suzanne and fell in love with a woman named Marianne. He would immortalize them later. He lived in Greece, Montreal and New York.

As an older man, he tasted failure, suffered through depression ("I have no talent left/ I can't write a poem anymore/ You can call me Len or Lennie now/ Like you always wanted"), experimented with styles, producers, fasts and LSD, strummed his guitar before modestly attended shows, gradually conquered Canada, England and most of Europe ("First we take Manhattan/ Then we take Berlin" -- but in reverse order) and wrote songs for the top folk singers of his day.

As an even older man, with his fame catching up to him and America waking up to his talent, he retreated to a monastery to become an ordained Buddhist monk. His style changed -- he had synthesizers now and backup singers cooing as if in a choir. His voice matured into a rich baritone -- haunting, deep, crystal clear, almost hypnotic. His lyrics were sparse. Simple words with profound resonance. Religion. Mortality. Sex. Love (If you want a father for your child/ Or simply want to walk with me a while/ Across the sand/ I'm your man). He retreated to a monastery. Tribute albums and Best Of compilations arrived in droves. One of his hits was covered by Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Bono, Rufus Wainwright, Justin Timberlake, k.d. lang and (most memorably) Jeff Buckley. As a more pertinent sign of its prominence in the new millennium, Simon Cowell declared it one of his personal favorites. Another cover of this same song climbed to number one on the UK singles chart but was later pushed to number two by another cover of the same song ("Baby I have been here before/ I know this room, I've walked this floor/ I used to live alone before I knew you./ I've seen your flag on the marble arch/ Love is not a victory march/ It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah."). He stopped smoking and threw away his antidepressants. He said he wanted to fall with his eyes open.

He got engaged to Rebecca de Mornay in the early 1990s, but it didn't last. He cut an album with Rick Ruben. He lost his entire fortune in 2004, when a business associate to whom he entrusted his finances betrayed him. Now in his mid-70s, he was forced to go on a world tour. His sublime, three-hour performances are now the stuff of legend. He's a wit, a charmer, a fountain of wisdom and the ultimate gentleman. And he's still going strong, having just released a new album in January.

Leonard Cohen's voice was rolling through my head almost the whole time I was reading Sylvie Simmons' phenomenal new biography, "I'm your man: The Life of Leonard Cohen." That, in itself, is a great reason to read the book, but there are many others. Her research is astonishing, her writing is beautiful and she intersperses her tales of Cohen's fascinating life with interview snippets. She covers her subject with affection but doesn't shy away from chronicling his depression, anxieties and sexual liaisons. She talks to everyone and, more importantly, everyone seems to talk to her.

Consider Simmons' account of Leonard battling depression in the Mount Baldy Zen Center, a spartan Buddhist retreat close to Los Angeles where Cohen became "Jikan," a monk among monks subject to a rigorous daily routine. In describing the experience, Cohen compares the monk's life to "pebbles in a bag; one is always working shoulder to shoulder, so it has the same quality as life anywhere, the same sensations of love, hate, jealousy, rejection, admiration. It's ordinary life under a microscope."

His first stop after leaving Mount Baldy, Simmons notes, was McDonald's, to buy a Filet-O-Fish. "He would wash it down later with a glass of good French wine." He went home for a few days, watched some "Jerry Springer," realized what life outside the monastery is like, and went back to the mountain. The details sparkle.

Simmons also does a masterful job tracing Cohen's evolution as a musician, from a guitar-stroking folkster singing about tea and oranges to a fedora-wearing crooner predicting Apocalypse in front of a booming synthesizer. The difference is striking. The voice I hear when I listen to early versions of "Suzanne" and "Bird on a Wire" is indistinguishable from the one belonging to the "kid with a crazy dream," the Jewish monk in a fedora who enchanted the Paramount Theater crowd in Oakland in December 2010 (one of the most memorable concerts I've ever attended). The beautiful vocals of the Webb sisters and the soft notes coming from his band provided the perfect backdrop for Cohen's baritone ("I was born like this/ I had no choice/ I was born with a gift of a golden voice").

Cohen's wisdom is as soothing as his voice. When he loses his life savings, he doesn't panic or despair (though his history shows he was perfectly capable of both reactions). He tells his friends, "It's enough to put a dent in one's mood" and then rises up to even greater height. Crowds pack to see him. Women swoon and so do critics. Now 78, he remains on top of his game -- still, steady and free. A bird on a wire.

My favorite Cohen performance of "Hallelujah." Live in London, 2009:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q

American Gulags

The history of civil rights in America bears plenty of scars -- from slavery to interment of Japanese residents to Rodney King. But one blemish that has been unusually well disguised is the network of gulag-style work camps that opened in the days before World War II as part of the federal government Civilian Public Service program. This national network -- which included desolate camps in California, Michigan and Minnesota -- brought together academics, activists and draft resisters of all peaceful stripes and subjected them to mind-numbing, soul-sapping chores with minimal sustenance and under extreme conditions. The nearby townies -- who often had sons fighting abroad -- made things even more miserable for the Yankee Solzhenitsins by serving up threats, insults and the occasional beating. Things were particularly rough for those campers who didn't have a simplistic explanation (the most common of which is generally, "My God told me not to!") to explain their reluctance to go to war. Their government didn't get them so it punished them instead.


While I'm not a pacifist, I was fascinated to learn about this grossly under-reported chapter in American history in Michael Doyle's new biography of Roy Kepler, "Radical Chapters." The highly engaging book, which I reviewed last month for the Weekly and in the Almanac, goes far beyond the facts of Kepler's life and does a masterful job weaving his actions into context, from the early 1920's all the way to the present day. But it's the American gulags that continued to percolate in my memory weeks after I finished the book. Kepler served in several such camps. So had his older brother, Earl, who received a 30-month prison sentence for resisting the draft but then was transferred to a labor camp after getting paroled 10 months into his term. Earl worked in a forest in Glendora for about a month. He died in a fire that was accidentally started by his cabin-mate -- a fire that left 95 percent of his body covered in second- and third-degree burns. I wondered as I was reading whether Earl was still a pacifist while on his deathbed. Or, for that matter, if he was still an atheist.


Roy, who was at his brother's side in the hospital, continued to shuttle between camps, including on called Germfask that was known as the "Alcatraz of CPS." I won't cover all the grizzly details of these camps, but I'm really glad that Doyle had. The camps, which shuttered in 1946, clearly had a lasting impact on people like Roy Kepler and his future book-store patrons -- the peaceniks, the beatniks, the flower children, the militant rebels, the pothead philosophers, the acid-sucking bohemians and the whimsical skeptics who two decades later would rise up against Vietnam, write their own radical chapters and become, in their own right,  revolutionaries.

Michael Doyle, who is incidentally a former Palo Alto Weekly writer, will be reading from "Radical Chapters" on Oct. 16, from 7 to 9 p.m., at (where else?) Kepler's in Menlo Park.


Book review: Roy Kepler's war on war
Radical pacifism and the making of an institution

"Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution," by Michael Doyle, Syracuse University Press, 416 pp., $29.95.

By Gennady Sheyner

Roy Kepler's life was a tale of two revolutions: one that gave rise to war protests, draft resisters and the bohemian, anti-establishment sensibilities of the late 1960s, and another one that brought paperback books to the masses and, in the process, redefined the bookstore as we know it.

But he didn't look like a typical revolutionary, or, for that matter, a typical bohemian. He did not sport a Che beret, hurl Molotov cocktails, shroud himself in beatnik black, or wear flowers in his hair. While his associates favored group hugs, painted buses andspiraled-down, mind-bending acid trips, Roy Kepler saved his trips for places like Livermore, where he was arrested in 1960 for protesting the recently built nuclear lab; and Oakland, where he was arrested in 1968 after leading a peaceful demonstration in front of the Oakland Induction Center, a transfer point for soldiers about to go to war.

As Michael Doyle illustrates in his excellent new biography, "Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution," Mr. Kepler was a sharp, unsentimental businessman, known less for his own personality than for those of wild, world-changing bohemians who populated his popular Menlo Park bookstore, a landmark institution that plans to reopen its own next chapter later this month. But while he often wasn't the loudest or the wildest man in the room, he was, above all, a leader, a man who parlayed his own lifelong pacifism into a broad anti-war movement and, in the process, created a institution that continues to change and inspire bookworms in Menlo Park and beyond.

Roy Kepler is brought back to life in this new biography by Mr. Doyle, a journalist with the McClatchy newspaper chain and a former Palo Alto Weekly reporter. Mr. Doyle's deeply sympathetic and intimate look at Mr. Kepler's life and times follows its subject from his humble upbringing in Denver, to his war-resistance efforts during World War II and the Vietnam War, to his radical experiences with new institutions such as the Free University and the Institute for Nonviolent Studies, to his wild success in transforming his stuffy but eclectic bookshop into the Bay Area's leading melting pot for revolutionary thinkers.

Roy Kepler was born in Denver in 1920 and first became a "radical pacifist" at the onset of World War II, a period when being a conscientious objector didn't endear one to the general population, particularly when the stance had no religious basis. His brother, Earl, also a pacifist, received a 30-month sentence for resisting the war and avoiding the draft. Though he was paroled after 10 months, Earl would never see happy days. He joined the Civilian Public Service and was assigned to work in a forest north of Glendora, the same camp where Roy was based. Within a month, a fire that was accidentally started by his cabin-mate destroyed his cabin and left 95 percent of Earl's body covered in second- and third-degree burns. He died in the hospital.

Roy Kepler would spend his early 20s shuttling through various work camps, including Germfask, a CPS camp in northern Michigan known as the "Alcatraz of CPS." With morale plummeting because of tedious labor, scarce supplies and aggression from residents of nearby towns, Germfask men fought back with pranks, shattering a 3-gallon mustard jar in the kitchen, clogging latrines, covering the floor in a layer of white flour topped with obscenities written in coffee grounds, calling in sick in alphabetical order.

The camp was ultimately shut down and Roy went to another camp in Minersville, in northern Sacramento Valley, where conditions were nearly as dismal. Before long, the war was over, the camps were dismantled and the civilian program was shut down. In March of 1946, Roy Kepler became a 

free man.

His freedom and the end of World War II did little to diminish his opposition to war and conscription. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he took part in antiwar protests and joined a series of pacifist organizations, including the prominent and relatively conservative War Resisters League and the smaller but more radical activist group called the Peacemakers.

As a member of WRL, he did his best to encourage nonviolent confrontation and, in 1947, he and his supporters spearheaded a resolution stating that the League would promote "political, economic and social revolution by non-violent means." He advocated tax resistance and took part in protests opposing the 1948 draft, which lawmakers instituted to counter the looming threat from the Soviet Union. By September of that year, he climbed to the top of the League's administration, becoming its executive secretary.

He fell into the book business almost by accident. In the early 1950s, he enrolled in college, traveled to France on a Fulbright scholarship, held a brief stint at the radio station KPFA, got married, had a daughter, and took a job for Eastern News Service, a distributor of books and magazines. The gig involved extensive traveling and gave him a critical exposure to the publishing business.

By the spring of 1955, he began contemplating his own venture — a bookstore that would specialize in paperbacks, a new book type that was largely viewed as vulgar by Stanford Bookstore and other booksellers in the Palo Alto area. In May of that year, Kepler's Books & Magazines opened shop at its first location, 939 El Camino Real in Menlo Park.

Kepler's was one of three independent bookstores that were just starting out in the early 1950s. Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood in 1953. Three years later, Pat and Fred Cody opened the first Cody's books in Berkeley — a store that attracted a strong following from the city's anti-war crowd. Each sought to create something greater than a place that sells books — a community where browsing is encouraged and where connections form.

It is this quality that helped sustain Kepler's through the era of chain bookstores and Amazon — forces that put many independent booksellers out of business (Cody's, for instance, closed down in 2006). Kepler's itself went through a series of close calls and was rescued on more than one occasion by investors from the high-tech field who used to patronize the venerable bookstore.

In 2005, with its finances in shambles, the store was shut down and was saved only by a community outcry and an injection of funds from a team of investors. Earlier this year, Roy's son and longtime store proprietor Clark Kepler retired from the family business, and Kepler's welcomed a new transition team led by former Kepler's enthusiast Praveen Madan. The new Kepler's is scheduled to reopen in late September.

Mr. Doyle's book, like Kepler's bookstore, is loaded with cameos from legendary bohemians and storied pacifists, from the civil-rights pioneer Bayard Rustin and troubled beatnik Allen Ginsberg to the shaggy-haired rocker Jerry Garcia and the charismatic Paly graduate Joan Baez, a prominent figure in Roy Kepler's life.

It was at Kepler's that Jerry Garcia, a store regular, met his future Grateful Dead collaborators, the lyricist Robert Hunter and bassist Phil Lesh. Ken Kesey stopped by the store in 1964 in search of a driver for his bus, which would become immortalized in Tom Wolfe's classic "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." It was here that a curious young nerd named Steve Wozniak pored through computer books and absorbed the knowledge he would later use to help launch another revolution in Silicon Valley. And it was also here that Ira Sandperl, an eloquent pacifist and Ms. Baez's intellectual guru, worked his bard-like magic as a bookstore clerk.

Mr. Doyle devotes plenty of text to the tight teacher-student bond between Mr. Sandperl and Ms. Baez. This includes their establishment in 1965 of the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence at Ms. Baez's Carmel Valley ranch. The venture, which Mr. Kepler helped finance and which ebbed and flowed through several locations before fizzling out in the mid-1970s, was one of many alternative-education projects he would experiment with during the Vietnam War era.

In 1965, he helped start the "Free U," a school that by 1969 claimed to serve 1,275 students and that included among its eclectic offerings nonviolence seminars, improvisational drama classes, and courses on capitalism and neocolonialism. Among his more quixotic efforts was a series of Peace Games, intense role-playing exercises that would split participants into attackers and defenders and included linked arms, mock executions and real tears.

Throughout the era of protests, experiments and change, Roy Kepler remained a constant force — the adult in the room, a man whose pacifist ideals remained fixed and yet tempered by realistic expectations. Ms. Baez described him in a 1994 interview with the Palo Alto Weekly as a "steady, solid, nonviolent rock," according to the book. His wife, Patricia, even likened him to a statue once, "a steadfastly unemotional man more easily admired than embraced," Mr. Doyle writes.

Even when vandals hurled cherry bombs at his stores and threatened to target his house in the late 1960s, Mr. Kepler remained unflappable. While others in his circles saw mayhem and violence as plausible tools in resisting the status quo, he remained tethered to his pacifist convictions up until his death on New Year's Day in 1994 at the age of 73.

Mr. Doyle doesn't try to veil his own admiration for his subject. His portrayal of Roy Kepler and his inner circle is intimate and deeply sympathetic. He consistently refers to Mr. Kepler, Mr. Sandperl and Ms. Baez by their first names and he doesn't dig too deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of Mr. Kepler's and Mr. Sandperl's pacifist convictions. Nor does he raise any questions or present any challenges to Mr. Kepler's and Mr. Sandperl's fixed commitment to nonviolence — there are no discussions of "just wars" in this book.

But the author does a masterly job in weaving Roy Kepler's life into the colorful, rapidly shifting context of the Bay Area in the second half of the 20th century and in explaining how this principled visionary both shaped and was shaped by the zeitgeist around him.

Facing the music

My latest book review for the Weekly concerns a once-blooming industry that is now in decline because of changing habits, fickle tastes and unsustainable financial models. For once, it's not newspapers, though I'm far from smiling.

The book, which explains why so many American symphonies are now on life support, is a bittersweet read. Robert Flanagan's thorough scholarship and clear writing (as one would expect from a Stanford University business professor) give his sobering conclusions great credibility. The book is impeccably organized and, at around 200 pages, surprisingly concise given how much information he packs in. But the mood is definitely more Sibelius than Bradenburg, particularly for the dwindling masses who get pleasure from live classical music. There are no magical solutions here, but at least we can now understand the exact nature of the ship's mechanical problems as we watch it sink.


An Unfinished Symphony

Stanford scholar Robert Flanagan digs into the financial troubles of American orchestras

 "The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras," by Robert J. Flanagan, Yale University Press, 240 pp., $50
 

When the Philadelphia Orchestra announced in April 2011 its plan to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the news thundered through the arts community in the City of Brotherly Love like a gong in the middle of a Chopin sonata.

Since its founding in 1900, the beloved institution has risen to prominence as one of the nation's Big Five, along with the New York, Boston, Chicago and Cleveland orchestras. But with expenses hovering far above revenues and labor concessions out of reach, the orchestra's trustees decided that bankruptcy was the only way to close a gaping deficit. It became the largest orchestra in the nation's history to file for Chapter 11.

To those who have been tracking trends in the symphonic scene, the move probably didn't seem so jarring. Orchestras have never been cash cows. Even in the best of times, ticket sales have consistently failed to cover performance costs, forcing musicians to rely on patrons, endowments and government grants for sustenance. These revenue sources become particularly critical during economic downturns, just as they become scarcer.

Still, bankruptcies have been limited largely to smaller organizations: the Louisville Orchestra in 2011, the Honolulu Orchestra in 2009 and the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra in 2003. Philadelphia's was remarkable because of the prominence of the institution.

The financial crisis for orchestras has many sources, including unsustainable labor costs, a diminishing audience, a sluggish economy and dwindling government support.

So what's an orchestra to do? That's the question at the heart of "The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras: Artistic Triumphs and Economic Challenges," a new book by Stanford professor Robert Flanagan. By collecting and analyzing data from dozens of American orchestras large and small, Flanagan offers a sober-minded and, as the title implies, sobering look at today's symphony scene.

With an accountant's precision, he tracks the orchestras' historic trends, pores through their financial books, and carefully tracks current and historic levels of private contributions, endowments, musician salaries and government support. He compares the business models of America's orchestras to their counterparts abroad, analyzes the labor trends in the symphony scene and segregates the short-term impacts of economic recessions from the longer-term effect of the "cost disease" inherent in their business models. What emerges is a portrait of an industry filled with interrelated problems and few good solutions.

Not all of these problems are unique to orchestras. The most basic pitfall — expenditures that rise faster than revenues — is familiar to the auto industry, to name one of many possible examples. But orchestras have one distinct disadvantage. A carmaker may lay off workers or seek cheaper parts abroad; an orchestra can't outsource its woodwind section to China during a performance of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." A carmaker can adopt technology to boost efficiency and improve the company's productivity — the only sure-fire way to keep up with rising labor costs. But a concerto will take just as long to play during the good times and the bad.

This "cost disease" has become more irksome over time, as labor unions have begun to flex their collective-bargaining muscles, prompting labor costs to climb. Becoming a symphony musician is an arduous, highly competitive ordeal, with the supply of trained musicians far exceeding the demand. But, as Flanagan shows, those who make it tend to do well. In fact, as his analysis indicates, over the past two decades musicians' compensation has been climbing at a faster rate than that of other professions. He found that since 1987, the salary increases for orchestra musicians in his sample of American symphonies averaged 4.2 percent per year, compared to the 3.6 percent in salary increases received by other union and nonunion employees in the United States, on average.

"Pay increases for orchestra musicians also exceeded the pay gains of university teachers and health workers, who also work in sectors that have low productivity gains but face much stronger demand," Flanagan writes. "In short, the pay of orchestra musicians not only kept up with pay increases elsewhere in the economy, as suggested by the cost disease argument; their pay also increased more rapidly than the pay of most other groups of workers in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Century."

To make matters worse, Flanagan found that the wage increases musicians receive weren't correlated with the orchestra's financial performance. Instead, they were generally linked to how much the orchestra has received in private donations — hardly a formula for long-term stability.

Unsustainable labor costs aren't the only problem. Audiences have been decreasing steadily but consistently, despite growth in the general population. According to a National Endowment for the Arts survey that Flanagan cites, 13 percent of polled adults reported in 1982 that they had attended at least one classical-music concert in the past year. By 2008, that number dropped to 9.3 percent. Performance revenues made up 48 percent of orchestras' total revenues in 1982, then fell to 37 percent in 2005.

Communities such as Philadelphia and Detroit, which have seen significant population declines, have been hit particularly hard. Interestingly enough, Flanagan found that a community's population plays a much greater role in orchestra attendance than factors such as per capita income or unemployment. Unfortunately for orchestras, that is one factor that they have absolutely no control over.

Flanagan's book offers plenty of advice for easing the financial pain through prudent financial management. A board of directors should diversify its orchestra's investment portfolios and institute conflict-of-interest policies to promote prudence (shockingly, only 60 percent currently have such policies). An orchestra manager should create more differentiation in ticket prices (that is, charge more for the most preferred seats and less for the least preferred ones) to get the most per ticket. Musicians should be aware of the orchestra's financial picture when making compensation demands during negotiations.

But he also emphasizes that there is no "silver bullet" and cautions of "the futility of a single solution." Raising performance revenues, for example, may narrow the gap but it would take much more to eliminate it. "Even filling the concert hall — an ambitious goal for an industry usually selling 70 percent of its capacity — would not eliminate deficits at most orchestras," Flanagan writes.

The same can be said about nonperformance income such as donations and government subsidies. Flanagan concludes that nonperformance income growth alone is "unlikely to cover future structural budget deficits, unless supplemented with actions to narrow the deficit itself by both raising the growth of performance revenues and slowing the growth of expenses."

Flanagan's book is unlikely to cheer up a fan of classical music. It offers a rare and unsparing look inside a troubled industry where backstage problems often get obscured by front-stage polish. Some sections may sound a bit wonky for a general reader unconcerned about the methodologies trustees use in investing endowment proceeds, but anyone interested in getting the story behind the recent rash of orchestra bankruptcies will find plenty to like here.

But as "perilous" as the lives of symphony orchestras may be, Philadelphia's experience also offers a glimmer of hope. On July 30, after more than 15 months of negotiations, the orchestra officially came out of bankruptcy with a plan that includes labor concessions; reduced rent from the Kimmel Center, the concert hall where the orchestra performs; and greater oversight over investments by the philanthropy group Annenberg Foundation.

Some issues remain unresolved. There are contested claims from creditors and concerns about the departure of some musicians unhappy about the new labor conditions. But orchestra administrators were happy to announce that the deal "addressed more than $100 million in claims, debts, and liabilities with a settlement of $5.49 million" and that the music is resuming this month, when the orchestra launches its new season.

For all the gloom and doom, a requiem for American symphony orchestras would be premature.

Titled

Rebecca says something like:

"Every time one of these Disney family movies comes out, it's always advertised as a 'fun-filled romp for the whole family.'"

I respond with something like:

"Or a rollicking adventure. Or a lively romp."

"Well, I guess you wouldn't want a stodgy romp," she says.

"Or a somber romp."

Except, maybe sometimes you do. Maybe there's something intensely appealing about playing seriously. Isn't that what a writer does? There are moments when craft dissolves under subtle epiphanies and deep emotions and the art of arranging words becomes for the writer a matter of life and death (or, more typically, fuzzy ecstasies and debilitating inconveniences). It's still a game, though no one is laughing. It's a somber romp.