Recently, I attended an event that is held four times a year in Los Angeles’ version of the French Riviera, Malibu. It is called ‘Tales by the Sea’. It is put on by Ann Buxie, who is a local philanthropist,who gives back to a community that really doesn’t want for much. However, there is something rather endearing about a bunch of people gathering simply to enjoy the lost art of telling a good story.

As to be expected, some stories are more interesting and some people are better at telling them, but when you get a bunch of very talented, creative people, which includes screenwriters, actors, authors and musicians all turned raconteurs, for an afternoon in front of an assemblage of 150 like minded souls, who came to revel in this, the most basic and fundamental performance art, it is just plain fun.

My Sunday began as it often does with me turning on the television to enjoy the CBS Sunday Morning show. This magazine style program invariably has a feature or two that I truly enjoy. These folks know how to tell a good story.  I watch as I pace around the living room at 6:30 am trying to get my body to wake up. It does this in sections these days. I do this while making coffee as nothing else is going to happen without it. I then am reminded of a thought I often have which is, the biggest obstacle to making a pot of coffee is that I haven’t had my coffee yet.

On this Sunday morning one of the program’s segments celebrated the tenth anniversary of the highly anticipated roll out of the first iPhone by Apple. Technology doesn’t excite me the way that it does some people. I kind of just roll with these things, accept them as part of the price of doing business these days and then obsess about it.

I am always wondering what price we are paying for the convenience that technology presents to us. How is humanity being degraded by the seductive lure of something new and exciting? What kind of culture shames its citizens into using a particular product by telling them if they don’t, they will be left behind? Is there a correlation between having every conceivable piece of information at our fingertips and at the touch of a button and the dumbing down of our society? What are the immutable laws of unintended consequences at play with the iPhone.

This segment of the program showed an old newspaper advertisement for Radio Shack which displayed a dozen or more items for sale at their various retail stores. These items are all now contained in what one journalist called, ‘our universal appendage,’ the iPhone. These included of course the telephone, a personal computer, a camera, tape recorder and calculator among other things. Swipe screen technology and the fact that the device doesn’t have an external keypad of any kind were areas of discussion during this segment. The mere fact that newspapers and Radio Shack have all but vanished could have been mentioned at this point, but wasn’t.

Then social critics and historians weighed in on how this device ranks in terms of revolutionary inventions and innovations which have shaped humanity through the ages. This is when the discovery of fire and the printing press were mentioned by way of comparison to the iPhone.

I also learned that my new universal appendage is an even newer technology, and my Android is even more advanced then Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s revolutionary product. It was suggested that Apple, in the wake of Jobs' passing, has fallen behind and is now irrelevant. To that one pundit asked, “How many life altering revolutions do you want in a decade?”

I couldn’t stop thinking about this bit of technology. While techies in Northern California were preparing to launch this latest product offering, a student at Harvard named Mark Zuckerberg was getting ready to launch a social network which would be as equally life altering for many. Both his Facebook and Jobs’ iPhone would merge to become as addictive to many as crack cocaine. Our global community and how we interact with one another would never be the same.

The gathering of folks to engage in the art of storytelling seemed particularly quaint and, dare I say, old fashioned given this context. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to get there, but wait I would, as trying to get to the beach, well another beach anyway, on the hottest day of the year that coincided with a Sunday afternoon was rather tedious to say the least. It seemed as if every Angelino was headed to Malibu.

What was particuly helpful was that I was traveling with two of this afternoon’s story tellers and two of the three musicians whose performance would kick off the festivities. They were blues man Al Blake and an incredibly accomplished musician who is also a jazz historian, educator and author among other things. His name is Washington Rucker. For me the story telling began long before we arrived at the venue. These two musicians would be joined by pianist Fred Kaplan to round out the trio.

That’s right, this upscale community of privilege, wealth and fame would be treated to some real down home, straight ahead natural blues before getting down to the business of flexing their chops as story tellers.

Ann Buxie took to the stage and then said words that I am always thrilled to hear.  “If you would all take a moment to turn off your phones we can get started.” She then introduced each story teller by reading a quote provided to her by that particular “teller.”

She introduced the band by way of reading a quote from Albert Murray provided by Al Blake. “We invented the blues. Europeans invented psychoanalysis. You invent what you need.”

Then it was a little music before the story telling. While listening to the band’s opening instrumental number, their interpretation of Little Walter’s Juke, one of the most famous blues instrumentals ever recorded, I wondered how many in the audience had ever heard this tune before. I wondered how many appreciated that an instrumental can be like a good story, but it is more like a great conversation. Kaplan’s piano interacted with Blake’s harmonica as if they have been having this conversation for decades, which in fact, they have. This pair of world class musicians first started playing and recording together in the mid 1970’s.

The conversation took place in a room that was filled with warmth by the brush drumming of Washington Rucker, a true master of the form. Their all too brief, two song set concluded with an Al Blake original, Fly Like an Eagle, which he wrote as a tribute to his mother. Then all three musicians told their own personal stories as to how they found this elusive music which they would make their life’s passion.

After this enjoyable afternoon came to an end, we began our long journey back down the coast. We crawled in bumper to bumper traffic while police and emergency vehicles raced by on the shoulder of the road and in the opposite direction to attend to multiple accidents in front of and behind us on the Pacific Coast Highway. As I gazed out of the passenger window of the large van that carried two musicians, this writer and a drum kit, I could peer down into the driver’s seat of the cars also creeping along. Driver after driver had their heads down and had their gaze affixed in their lap as they couldn’t take their eyes or their hands off of their smart phones. Many of the cars had other passengers and they were all doing the same thing.

The late afternoon light that was dancing off the crashing waves of the blue Pacific to the right or the soaring Santa Monica Mountains to the left were no match for their addiction. This couldn’t even compete with a good conversation let alone a good story. For many of these ‘millennials,’ this digitized, computerized landscape will be the only world they know.

I then wondered how many accidents and lives lost in the highway carnage that was taking place all around us were a result of drivers who were being distracted by their new ‘universal appendages’. I feel lucky to be born when I was and can give the digitally distracted world some perspective as it chips away at our humanity with increasing force and rapidity.

These thoughts gave this afternoon’s story telling event the kind of gravitas it deserved. In this day and age people walking up to a microphone and simply telling a story is a big deal. Thanks and kudos to Ann Buxie and all the story tellers for providing an oasis of civility for a couple of hours last Sunday in a world that desperately needs a good story to tell.

-  David Mac



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