Weird July
Here's a snapshot of twelve days in July 2015, with my birthday right in the middle of this span. It was weird.
I'd been working on various SETI projects at UC Berkeley, largely SETI@home, for almost 20 years. This entire time funding was scarce - outside of occasional generous gifts from corporations and foundations we squeaked by due to a slow, steady stream of small donations from the public.
So when I caught wind in June there was interest from a new foundation to give us significant support I felt relief, but it was odd that - even as a core staff member - I wasn't given any details. Soon I learned that there was an unnamed billionaire sponsor involved, hence the secretive need-to-know nature of this whole process. By the time July rolled around I got enough hints that funding was pretty much secured, but I had no idea from exactly whom, how much, and what the grant would exactly be for.
Meanwhile Secret Chiefs 3 had a week-long residency at the Stone in Manhattan which required much preparation. Around July 12th I flew to the east coast for a string of SC3-related shows, sometimes two per night. Trey had been burying me with scores of fun, dense, new music to learn for these performances - about 80 pages all told. Besides learning a gazillion notes I had to program/manage up to six keyboard controllers and their sounds for myself and other band members. Every afternoon were crazed rehearsals in various desperately hot rooms. The New York summer heat was in full force. Much to our relief the Stone had a working air conditioner.
My sister Lisa resided in Williamsburg at the time, just at the base of the bridge. She had a convenient crash pad in a fun neighborhood. And the Stone was right on the other end of the span in the Lower East Side - I could easily walk to/from the venue and her apartment, which was a particularly pleasant and meditative journey late at night when the air was a bit cooler and the long walkways were surprisingly devoid of other pedestrians. Just me, the bridge, the moon, the breeze over the river, and the overflowing cans of garbage.
In cracks of time between practicing and performing I got into the groove of my NYC experience. I drank my first manhattan in Manhattan. I went to an Upright Citizens Brigade show. I enjoyed several halal cart fixes. I felt great relief being around pedestrians who know how to efficiently locomote on city sidewalks (unlike the Bay Area). There were a couple big thunderstorms. I marveled at how many newer restaurants had names of the form "Word & Another Word". But mostly it was a real treat hanging out and collaborating with awesome musicians and who happen to also be awesome people: Trey, Toby, Ches, Kenny, Timba, Gyan, Shanir, Jason, Eyvind, Jessika, Ryan, and the whole Cleric gang.
Anyway... my birthday arrived with little fanfare. The show that night was particularly stressful, if only because we were premiering new material from John Zorn's Masada Book Three live. As well, John himself was going to be in attendance to observe our progress while working the door. No pressure.
Lisa and I had celebratory dinner together before the set. Upon returning to the Stone she got stuck at the end of the line. I secured her a guest spot because it's a small room and, as expected, the show sold out well before Lisa entered. John told her sorry the venue was full, but she said she was on the list. He checked and exclaimed, "oh you're Matt's sister!" and then gave her the royal treatment, holding up the whole production by digging out an extra chair and setting her up in some extra space off to the side by the stairs. I watched this whole scene unfold trying not to laugh - especially since Lisa seemed to have no idea who John was. The look on her face read, "what a very nice gentleman!"
Later that night I went to sleep, unaware the principal investigator of this mystery SETI initiative had e-mailed me. He wrote about a big press conference on Monday announcing the new grant - and this info was embargoed so hush hush for now. I woke the next morning to this exciting news. Still no specifics, though. My only clue about anything was the grant, due to its size and scope, required a press conference. I figured I'd just find out the deets on Monday like the rest of the planet!
Sunday night was the last of the Stone shows. As a sort of an inside joke with myself I wore a Green Bank Telescope t-shirt, knowing full well there's going to be some big media splash about this giant radio observatory, perhaps others, the following morning.
And sure enough, there was a press conference featuring a panel which included the likes of Stephen Hawking, Frank Drake, Sir Martin Rees, and Ann Druyan. I watched quietly on my laptop in Lisa's apartment while she was still asleep. The head of the Breakthrough foundation, billionaire Yuri Milner, announced the beginning of Breakthrough Listen - a new SETI project to be managed by the team at UC Berkeley.
He laid out the basic roadmap for this ambitious undertaking. We - as in me and a handful of colleagues - were going to look a million stars, manage several hours of dedicated telescope time every day at three observatories around the planet (Green Bank, Parkes, Lick), build digital back-ends that can record up to 10GHz at a time, and make all the data available to the public. The scope of this endeavor was far larger than I (and most of us) expected. Gulp. Yuri mentioned the amount of the grant was $100 million dollars, spread out over 10 years. Um... WwwwwooOOOOoowwww!
This was both amazing and very scary. Finally the Berkeley SETI Research Center has gotten the funding (and rightful attention) it has deserved for decades, but was our scrappy little team up for this challenge? E-mails started going around amongst the SETI@home gang, each of which could be summarized as: "holy crap."
But I couldn't really celebrate with the team, or start figuring out what the next steps were, as I was still in NYC for a couple more days. My flight back was on Wednesday because SC3 had vague plans to do recording after the Stone shows. I hung out at Marc's studio as Kenny, Ches, and Shanir nailed basics for the new Masada album. My presence wasn't really required outside of cheerleading, but there was some important logistical discussion about our upcoming Rock in Opposition festival gig in France, along with the usual scheduling of potential tours and recording sessions.
Also, I knew Lisa wasn't going to be in Williamsburg forever, and this was my last chance for this kind of hipster hang in Brooklyn. So I enjoyed the remaining 48 hours in town doing specific New York-y things (mostly eating and walking between places to eat). The final dinner was at a new, popular restaurant in Greenpoint that served California style pizza (though nobody in NYC would call it that). The owner would circulate and chat it up with us patrons. I mentioned to him I was from Oakland, and he said he considered opening a place out in my neighborhood but feared the competition.
On the flight home the dude at the window slept the whole time and kept the shade closed. In a way this was fitting - experiencing incredible forward momentum while unable to get visual clues from the outside world to determine my true path or velocity. Being a projectile with no sense of exact direction or destination was a perfect metaphor for how I was feeling about this upcoming, uncharted phase of my life.