Born in 1939 during what would be the last years of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, my father, Choung Tai Chee, also called Charles or Chuck or Charlie, came to the United States in 1960. He was flashy, cocky, unafraid, it seemed, of anything. Wherever we were in the world, he seemed at home, right up until near the end of his life, when he was hospitalized after a car accident that left him in a coma. Only in that hospital bed, his head shaved for surgery, did he look out of place to me.
I once discovered aliens! I was really excited for about two days.
Turned out my “aliens” were actually a subtle glitch in the camera and telescope we were using that took a while to hunt down. I was privately embarrassed, but fortunately I hadn’t told anyone outside my team about it until we had figured it all out. That caution came about because as a SETI (or search for extraterrestrial intelligence) scientist, I’m a professional skeptic. I always treat my results—especially my “huge if true” results—with the most skepticism I can muster.
“Let’s go surfin’ now, everybody’s learnin’ how,” sang the Beach Boys on their breakthrough hit, “Surfin’ Safari,” in 1962, and countless youths began dreaming of the Southern California good life — a Shangri-La of mile-high waves and tanned surfer dudes lugging their boards across the sand. The Beach Boys and their inspiration, the duo Jan and Dean, had inaugurated a school of rock ’n’ roll that had little to do with greaser rebellion. Their music had a breeze blowing through it; it swung with an easy gait.
Joel Selvin, the former pop music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, has explored rock’s history in a string of fun books, including “Monterey Pop” (written with Jim Marshall) and “Summer of Love.” In his new one, “Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise,” he tells the story, set between 1957 and 1967, of a network of young Angelenos who “captured a California of the mind” — one of “cars, sun, sex and surf; ‘Gidget’ set to a rock ’n’ roll beat.”
We humans have been evolving for millions of years and — as any good biologist will tell you — in response to pressures in our environment, we are evolving still.
So how come our bodies are so flawed? Why does sharp vision so often elude us, for instance? Why do our backs hurt so frequently?