Ken Phillips
September 20, 2000
New York City was basking in one of its best sunny September days. I took a taxi from Lincoln Center across Central Park, where joggers and strollers outnumbered cars, and headed over to East 84th Street. That's where Rachel Epstein lives, and she was hosting a small memorial gathering for Ken at her apartment. About twenty of Ken's friends and a couple of distant cousins gathered there. I sat down on the couch next to Richard Solomon (he's an MIT telecom policy hacker), who was next to Red Burns (she directs the very creative department at NYU where Ken taught). It was not hard to reminisce.
Ken was one of the sweetest friends I had, and he was one of the most remarkable, bubbly, and natural creative geniuses I've ever known. I first met him at MIT. Walking into my lab one day, I heard some very unusual piano playing: it was Ken, improvising. I don't think he read music, but he sure could play the piano, and he got a big kick out of our computerized Bosendorfer. I looked closely and noticed that, oddly, Ken used his fingers but not his thumbs (a little like Art Tatum). He was spinning out ribbons of arpeggios with his right hand over a sort of passacaglia left hand, weaving in strands of Bach and Beethoven tunes. Like everything else he did, his music tapped a truly unusual and free flowing stream of consciousness. It's an exaggeration to say he could hear a piece and play it back note-perfect. He wasn't that sort of savant. What he did play was a kaleidoscopic impression, a sort of fantasia-commentary on what, musically, had just happened. That was a lot more interesting anyway.
For about eight years (my doctoral student years and a few beyond), whenever I nipped down to New York, which was every two months or so, I'd stay with Ken at his apartment on 10th and 5th. It was my kind of place. A Steinway B filled the living room, along with shelves from floor to ceiling packing an amazingly eclectic collection of books, CDs, records, and ultra high-tech audio gear. My own bedroom is full of books, and who doesn't love sleeping in libraries, so I always felt at home and cozy chez Ken, though his place was more like a secret overflow annex of the Strand bookstore. The head of the sofabed was next to his huge collection of strange dictionaries.
The rhythm of these trips was generally the same. Usually we'd catch up on the latest techno-hacker mad scientist rumors, tinker with the local phone switch, and then Ken would throw a handful of cassette tapes in a big leather satchel and we'd stride over to his favorite Greenwich Village cafe (Gran Caffe Degli Artisti, at 46 Greenwich Ave). We always called it Ken's cafe. Ken was a longtime patron of the place, which served the best Italian pastries in New York. He'd pay with music (those cassettes) and seemed to know a lot of the male and female models who worked there. We'd get a couple cannolis and cappuccinos and start talking. I'd try not to let the conversation drift into Jungian theories of Hermann Hesse (Ken's pet area, out of my depth) by sticking to music or digital telephony or crackpot rumors of Nikolai Tesla. It was hard to avoid Jung with Ken around.
During my first few encounters with Ken, he seemed to speak with such authority and depth on just about any subject that I became convinced he was a consummate and probably pathological bullshitter, and was making most of it up. He spoke about founding a hospital for Koalas in Australia; advising the Pope on satellite telecom policy; working with royals to plan music and creativity festivals; programming telephone switches to circumvent the usual problems (like billing); borrowing eggs from Leonard Bernstein on Brattle Street; on and on. Turns out all of it was true. One night in a hotel room, I caught a news broadcast live from the San Francisco Zoo, where Ken was dedicating the new Koala wing, and providing expert commentary. Sometime later, I received a call from the Archbishop of Naples who was referred by Ken while they were working on the Vatican's telecom system. Planning a trip to New York, I once or twice made the mistake of phoning early in the morning: but the phone did not ring. Instead the voice that answered was an executive at AT&T headquarters in Basking Ridge. Wrong number? I tried again (and again, no ring) and got a porn shop. Or Livermore labs. Reprogramming his local PBX was Ken's way of saying "I'm not answering right now." When I arrived that evening, Ken was on the phone: "Yes your majesty, the general session will run from..." Ken seemed particularly hard hit by Bernstein's death. I know Ken spent some summers teaching at Tanglewood and can only assume that their friendship meant a good deal more than borrowing a few eggs.
The only pictures I have of Ken show him with his Koala friends. He loved the Koalas. He always referred to them as his children. And he loved the hospital in Port Macquarrie, where he spent August every year. I helped him with introductions through a literary agent (my friend Nina Ryan) to produce his book on Koalas, which is really very personal, very beautiful, and very Ken. Needless to say, Nina didn't know quite what to make of Ken ("He does what...? And wants to write a book about ... Koalas?!") There is a lot of Ken's wonderfulness in that little book, and some of his specialness glows in these pictures, too.
Something about the way he's holding that Koala recalls the affection he had for other friends, and for creative ideas.
Ken had a deep interest in dreams (he was a practicing Jungian psychoanalyst after all), as this passage from his Koala book reveals (p142). Richard's wife read it at the memorial:
Near the hospital is a magnificent piece of land that extends out into the Tasman Sea. At the tip of the land is a beautiful white lighthouse. Though it is very windy most of the time there, I often drive to this point and am carried away by the sound of the rough sea bashing against the large boulders far below the lighthouse and the feeling of the wind gusts against my face and hair. Standing there constellates the feeling of being literally at the end of the world. The night after my first discovery of this magic lookout, I dreamed that I was there on a moonless misty night and that the lighthouse was a huge koala. One intensely white beacon of light, blinding in strength if one looked directly into it, originated from each eye, cutting a perfectly straight path miles long out to sea, providing the way for lost souls.
It
is now clear to me that such animal totem dreams, as with other types, have a
far more significant and transpersonal meaning than ever understood by the major
schools of Western psychology. The animals are there to help us see in the
dark --- our darkness. The elements of one's totem correspond to those
elements we need in order to see into our own darkness: not a threatening,
horror-laden darkness, but rather the darkness of the night --- of eternal
return...
The conversation at Rachel's apartment touched on many marvellous and eclectic impressions of Ken. No surprise. I was especially moved that there were half a dozen students present, men and women who had plainly fallen in love with Ken's ideas and liberated ways of thinking. Richard Solomon recalled the infamous story of Ken being busted in Toronto by the RCMP for blue box phone phreaking --- and winning the case because he was carrying only a radio shack calculator. Apparently the Mounties brought in experts like Arno Penzias to look at that calculator, but nobody (except Ken) knew how to use it to play the signal tones you needed to crack the phone system. So Ken's lawyers countersued for false arrest, and won, and Ken went on to become executive vice president of telecommunications for Citicorp.
One of the people at the memorial mentioned Ken's prescription for remembering dreams. It works. The moment you begin to wake up, lie perfectly still: do not move a muscle! The slightest movement will dissipate the dream from your memory, like clouds in the wind. Just lie very still and think about the dream, and play it back, episode by episode. That's usually enough to cache it in memory. Writing down a word or two helps also. I tried this the very next night, had a wild dream which I vividly recall, and have enjoyed puzzling over it since.
It was Rachel who undertook the Augean task of emptying Ken's apartment. His piano was sold to a struggling artist, a once in a lifetime purchase. His collection of books on Jung and Hesse were donated to a Jung library downtown. A huge pile of Apple disks and writings went to Richard Solomon. I cannot imagine going through all of that stuff, packing it up on sweltering August dog days. Rachel brought a psychic friend in who told her, at first, that Ken was still hanging around the apartment. Later he said that Ken had moved on, probably heading to Australia for reincarnation.
Ken left all of his moneys to the Koala hospital in Australia, and requested that his ashes be sprinkled in the forest where firemen had rescued his Koala friend, Terry Glen.
His lovely book (all the proceeds of which went to the Koala Preservation Society) is out of print. But you might be able to get a copy from Rachel Epstein (send a $50 donation to: Gerald Epstein, M.D., 16 E 96th St, Suite 1A, NY, NY 10128). You might try phoning Rachel first: 212-988-7764
Shortly after Ken died, Richard Solomon sent the following obituary:
Dr.
Kenneth L. Phillips died on Saturday, May 27th in New York's St. Vincent
Hospital after a long illness. Ken was a good friend and an inspiration to many
of us in this dizzying world of ever-changing telecommunications technology. He
was a vice-president of Citicorp for many years, where he spearheaded their
entry into global telecom-based banking and finance, and headed an industry
group of top U.S. firms lobbying for more competition in telecom services. In
this latter effort he was most successful.
Ken touched an incredibly broad and fascinating range of people. I doubt he realized or even scarcely appreciated the high esteem in which his friends held him. He was a remarkable man, and I have outstanding memories of all of our many eclectic, intellectual evenings together, shared by many others.
When a dear friend dies, the full force often doesn't hit
until sometime later. I was stunned when I first heard the news.
I was not especially sad at the memorial; that was uplifting. But a few
days later I was walking around in Greenwich Village and passed the second-floor
Cafe Degli Artisti where we used to hang out and pay for cannolis with
music. I couldn't hold back the tears.
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