David Byrne's Journal

02.01.10: The Good News and The Bad News and the Good news

2010-02-01T16:00:00-05:00

Good news part one is that Sagmeister Inc. won a Grammy yesterday for their design of the Everything That Happens CD package. Enjoy your stay in LA, Stefan.

This from an e-mail he sent:

....the night before at the nominee party, Tia Carrere asks me: "What category are you nominated in?"
"We are up in the most significant and glorious category of them all: Packaging!"
"Oh, you are wrong dear, wrong. 'Best album notes' do KICK YOUR ASS."

In other news today, the NYC Design Commission met—that’s the committee that “reviews permanent works of art, architecture and landscape architecture proposed on or over City-owned property” and determines what sort of public art can become permanent additions to New York’s landscape. Part of their agenda was deciding issues involving my bike racks. I didn’t go. The upshot is they decided that the ones that are already up could stay, but that, for example, the one I designed and that was approved by the New Museum, can’t go up.

It’s a pretty tame design—basically a standard staple shape, like regular bike racks, but slightly larger and with indentations in the outline of their unique building:

The other one I offered them—in the shape of a bottle of Thunderbird—was deemed to be in bad taste by the museum (this one didn't go to the Design Commission for approval, just the building-shaped one):

According to someone who was there it seemed like it was mostly a political decision and not an artistic (or even practical) one, though who knows? The DOT, who put up my bike racks, is by law allowed to erect things and make changes here and there without the Design Commission’s approval, with the provision that they are not permanent additions to the city landscape. Such as placing a geodesic dome (on loan from a gallery) on city property on the occasion of an exhibit celebrating Fuller’s design work, or bringing in a muralist to paint over an ugly and temporary wall. (See DOT’s Urban Art Program for more examples.) These things go away after a while, and my bike racks were no exception. They were legally allowed to be up for 364 days, but if they stayed up one day longer—if they crossed that line—their continued presence would have to be voted on by this committee of experts on cultural matters.

So, between my office, the New Museum and the DOT the requisite applications were filled out and filed in the fall and then the wait began—months later the day of reckoning arrived (that would be today) and the cultural gatekeepers who would decide the matter were, it seems, mightily pissed off. They were annoyed that the DOT had—in some of their eyes—encroached onto their territory, and this effrontery would not stand. As a compromise they would allow the existing—and can I say well-received?—bike racks to stay, but as retribution for not going through said gatekeepers the DOT (and the rest of us) would be punished by no more additional bike racks being allowed. Well, not funny designed ones at least.

It was suggested by the gatekeepers that more artists and Parsons and SVA students etc. etc. who had ideas for city projects should come to them—maybe via Creative Time or other organizations (with whom I have collaborated more than once)…I wonder how many emerging artists would have the patience for the form-filling, waiting, and political stupidity that is involved in going via the gatekeepers—not many, I would think.

The DOT did in fact obey the rules, but in putting up something a little artier than bollards or such they were perceived as making cultural decisions and incursions—and that—in the view of the gatekeepers—was intolerable, even if the work was practical and popular! So, no more bike racks from me for NYC—unless a building or institution wants them on their own and not on city property. Sorry folks, sometimes stupidity wins the day. (But at least the ones that are up can stay.)

01.01.10: Mérida

2010-01-01T15:47:00-05:00

Went to a friend’s, Ford Wheeler’s, new house in Mérida (Yucatán) on the 27th through the New Year. Mérida is now a sizable town, but a bit of a backwater, and therefore its colonial center is more or less intact and there are few tourists — they all head west towards Chichén Itzá, Tulum and Cancún instead. I’d been here a few years ago and there are two blog entries on the ruins that are all around the area, the Maya and the collapse of their civilization. Now I wondered about the collapse of the massive European-based civilization that flourished here.

Mérida used to be one of the wealthiest cities in the New World. “For a brief period, around the turn of the 20th century, Mérida was said to house more millionaires than any other city in the world” [Link]. Who’d a thunk it? The money came from henequen — an agave-type plant that, when processed, could be made into rope and other durable products. It is sometimes known as sisal, after the Caribbean port town nearby where it was shipped off in massive quantities. Green gold, it was called.

[Source]

I used to have a kind of carpet made of “sisal.” When nylon and other man-made products were created that could replace henequen, the Yucatán monopoly collapsed and the millions evaporated. This was the second collapse of a civilization in that peninsula, the first being the collapse of the Maya civilization, which had already begun, but proceeded more rapidly after the arrival of the Spanish, who claimed the city from the Maya in 1542. Because it was a pre-existing city, it is considered the oldest continually occupied city in the New World. That doesn’t mean there is an abundance of buildings that are 500 years old — but there are a few. Though the great Maya temples are now ruins, and their peninsula-spanning network of roads and cities has all but vanished, the people are still present, and much of their culture survives.

The Spanish, like the English in North America, instigated a feudal system when they arrived that was based on race — with the Spanish at the top, people of Spanish descent (Creoles) next, mestizos (mixed race people) in the middle and the Maya as slaves at the bottom. The Spanish built massive haciendas — huge plantations that were like self-supporting towns unto themselves.

Mexican insurgents fought for independence from Spain — a movement that started around 1800, ending with independence in 1821 — though it was hardly democracy. Agustín de Iturbide declared himself Emperor after victory. But Mexico was not the Yucatán. With independence from Spain, some here hoped that the brutal caste system would come to an end — but what happened was the Creoles simply took over from the Spanish as rulers and nothing much changed. Besides, the Yucatán wasn’t considered a part of Mexico proper — it was a separate country. Eventually, and not surprisingly, a war erupted — the Caste War.

The Caste War was long coming — private interests had been usurping Maya lands for some time — and it was the execution of three Maya that triggered the uprising. It continued for decades and by 1848 the Europeans had been driven from the entire peninsula, except for the cities of Mérida and Campeche… and the port of Sisal. The Maya had almost won, but then something strange happened.

Swarms of flying ants appeared, which we might interpret as some Biblical omen, but the Maya realized this meant it was the perfect time to begin planting their crops — so they abandoned the battlefield and walked away, not realizing that victory was close at hand.

The Creole Yucatáns, still a separate nation, offered sovereignty — their country! — to anyone who would help them defeat the Maya. Mexico answered the call and the Maya were pushed back — well, halfway. The “European” Mexicans controlled the northwest (Mérida, etc.), while the Maya controlled the jungle and the southeastern portion of the peninsula.

The Talking Cross

In 1850, an apparition appeared to the Maya — a Talking Cross — that urged them to continue their struggle. This was in the area called Chan Santa Cruz, which Britain recognized at this time as an independent nation (it was close to British Honduras — present-day Belize — which was British-controlled, and they traded with one another). But as years went by the British began trading more with Mexico, and the balance of power eventually shifted; by 1893 they signed a treaty recognizing Mexican sovereignty over the Maya-controlled region — and stopped all trade between Honduras (still their colony) and Chan Santa Cruz. The “rebels” had been isolated. [Source]

Logan Hawkes attempted to find the Talking Cross. Here is an excerpt from his account:

Deep in the jungle…at the tiny straw-hut Maya community of Tixcacal Guardia, village elders fiercely guard what they swear is the authentic cross and will let no outsider near it. Kept within a 'city within the city', much like the Vatican, the talking, or speaking cross, is safely hidden away from all eyes except the Cruzob spiritual leaders - the head Shaman and a circle of Elders.
Down Highway 295 is the turnoff for Tixcacal Guardia, or Xcacal, religious and spiritual heart of the lower Maya world. It is home to the Maya who most fiercely defend their autonomy as keepers of the Cruz Parlante, or ‘talking cross’. The church in which the cross now rests is actually open to the public, but only on feast days, and even then the artifact is not on display – not even to the Maya themselves. It stands on an altar covered with veils in a blocked-off section of the church called La Gloria, and no one enters this inner sanctum. The cross is guarded day and night by armed Maya who hail from all across the region. [Source]

During the time when Chan Santa Cruz was an independent nation, non-Maya were forbidden to enter the region — they would be instantly killed — but after so many years of conflict, financial isolation, and the arrival of the Wrigley’s company looking for chicle (the sap that forms the basis of chewing gum!), the war was declared over in 1915. By then the world of the henequen barons was already collapsing.

So, that’s the story of what was once one of the wealthiest parts of the New World — and not so long ago either! Kind of puts things in perspective. There are decaying haciendas all over the peninsula, like this one with a chimney built to vent off the processing of the henequen, and many of them have been renovated as luxury resorts with swimming pools added.

12.13.09: The Limits of Multiculturalism

2009-12-13T11:50:00-05:00

I was told that a powerful rabbi based in Williamsburg objected strongly to the bike lanes that run alongside their ghetto on Bedford Ave. We were informed that the sight of hipster girls, their heads uncovered and sometimes their lower legs as well, is just too much to bear — though it’s winter now, and surely the gals are bundled up this time of year? Well, that was what, we were told, was the problem initially.

Photo from Streetsblog

So, the powerful rabbi insisted to the DOT that the lanes had to go — and shortly thereafter they did.

Sure enough, some (Jewish) hipsters repainted the lane by hand, and the rabbi’s wrath was aroused once again — his neighborhood watch (vigilante) group detained the hipsters until the cops came. After no subsequent action against the perps was taken by the city, he demanded that the kids be re-apprehended, which they were — they voluntarily turned themselves in.

OK, on the face of it this is all pretty silly if you live in NY. Hasidic men are not supposed to see scantily clad women. (The man in the photo above has turned his head, but the gal is having a good long look.) In the past they’ve also complained about sexy billboards (ads for Sex and the City) on the BQE and elsewhere. How do they manage when they travel to Manhattan to deal diamonds and cameras? Are they blindfolded until they enter B&H? In addition, that corridor alongside the Hasidic ghetto is just about the only way to cycle from Williamsburg to Dumbo, Vinegar Hill or Brooklyn Heights. The stream of sexy cyclists will therefore continue, though at greater risk to their own safety. Maybe there could be a service offering wigs and wraps for cyclists passing through the No Skin zone.

Some on the blogosphere claim it’s actually not about immodest dress at all — that it’s a ruse, and the real idea is to keep the number of car lanes in the ghetto intact, and to reinstate parking spaces that were cannibalized for the bike lane. The need for plenty of parking is due to the fact that the Hasidim often don’t travel with the rest of us on subways and buses, but in their own vans and bus services — and local transport (food shopping, etc.) is mostly done by private car as well. School kids are dropped off in buses that park in what were, until recently, the bike lanes. This lifestyle requires plenty of parking — more than most other folks need. And I suspect that yes, at times some hipsters probably zoom a bit too carelessly and too close to the school kids. Well, bike lanes or no bike lanes, parking is scarce and getting scarcer in NY, so there may have to be some adjustments eventually. In Antwerp, the European center for Hasidic diamond dealing, the Hasidic kids ride bikes around town.

Although I might be expected to champion anything bike related, I think my problem with this situation is more general — how much do we allow ethnic and religious groups to not blend in and to not become part of the general social fabric, especially in a major metropolis? (We’re not talking about rural communes, where folks can wear what they like and be as freaky as they like on their own.) Multiculturalism, I gather, is the idea that we shouldn’t force outside cultures and immigrants to conform to the culture of the dominant ethnic group — we should respect the integrity of their beliefs and customs. More than just allowing halal or kosher butchers to move in, this idea implies that we might start to see things from the other’s point of view — and sometimes accommodate their wishes, even if they don’t conform to those of the majority. This idea has met its match since 9/11 — Europe, previously a bastion of Muslim enclaves and ghettos of various types and ethnicities, has in recent years pushed back against multiculturalism, and a more nuanced idea is taking hold — sometimes. Other times intolerance rears its ugly head.

Likewise, cyclists, thus far a minority, might be seen in the same light — as a fringe culture that mainstream culture accommodates and tolerates as long as the cyclists don’t insist that the dominant culture bend to their specific wishes. This, in a nutshell, is the argument that some NY communities have made when Janette Sadik-Kahn throws a bike lane in their hood. The argument might be valid, though often the local businesses discover that, for example, bike parking by their shop fronts brings in more customers, and there’s less of a chance that a van or truck will block the view of their windows. And in many cases, the complainers were outvoted by the rest of their own community.

Plus, in NYC, drivers and car owners might be in the minority — most of my friends who live here don’t own cars.

In Holland, the most tolerant place on the planet, it is becoming accepted that tolerance has to go both ways. In other words, the Muslim immigrants are increasingly expected, even by fellow Muslims in Amsterdam, to become “Dutch” in some respects. Which means they must accept that there is a long tradition of tolerance in Holland, especially in Amsterdam, and if one is to move to Holland one should expect to accept this typically Dutch way of thinking. The Muslim community, for example, has to get used to the fact that there is a district with sex shops and scantily dressed women in the windows, same-sex couples might kiss in public, and coffee shops selling hash are a common sight. The implicit agreement is that living in Holland means you accept such things, as tasteless as you may find them. The Dutch, of course, allow the local Muslim population to maintain their own customs as well — as long as they fit in and don’t make lots of demands.

This is a change from a provocative attitude that, a few years ago, resulted in the death of Theo van Gogh. He had made a film, one that deliberately goaded and incited the Dutch Muslim population, in collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who received death threats and is now protected by the government — and is involved with the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing US think tank. Their 10 minute film features a naked woman in a see-through chador, with Koranic verses justifying the submission of women written on her body. Like the Danish cartoons, this was viewed by Muslims as a deliberate provocation… and a crude one at that. One might view it as liberal fascism.

An image from the film — and van Gogh dead on the street.

Not that van Gogh deserved to die. The Dutch rallied and demonstrated after his death, and saw the killing as an attempt to stifle free speech — to imply that public expression and criticism has limits. Some free speech advocates insist that one be allowed to say and express anything, barring the encouragement of violence. Others saw the film as being offensively provocative — in a way, they viewed the incident as if the filmmakers were asking for it. Free speech advocates feel that it’s an absolute, and that people should be allowed to say anything, as it’s “only words.”

Ian Buruma, a writer of Dutch background, has written about this incident and the issues that arise from it. He argues that freedom of speech should not be considered absolute — and that thinking in absolutes always leads to disaster. He says we limit our own freedom of speech all the time — around family and relatives over the holidays, I am reminded — and we do it to get along, to allow society to function, for our own happiness and the happiness of others. It’s not necessarily a lie to not blurt out the ugly truth whenever you think it. During the holidays we don’t tease Uncle Harry about his comb-over because we know it would just make the get together more tense than it already is — and who would gain from such insensitive honesty? Stifling free speech just a little, with some subtle self-censorship, makes life pleasanter for everyone.

A few years ago, Mamie Manneh, a Staten Island woman, was arrested for importing 720 pounds of monkey meat, including limbs, skulls and torsos, from baboons and green monkeys in boxes labeled “African dresses and smoked fish” [Link]. She argued it was her Constitutional right to bring monkey meat into the United States. Her lawyers claimed she needed to eat monkey during certain religious ceremonies for her syncretic faith, which merges Christian and African traditions [Source].

In my opinion, besides being disgusting, eating bush meat isn’t actually linked to deep traditions — it emerged as a food source fairly recently, out of hunger and dire necessity. And yes, it crossed the line among some people and was considered an element of ritual. I would argue that it’s not actually a healthy or acceptable food source in Africa, and if you immigrate to Staten Island that might be one of the things you compromise in the move.

Then, on the other side, there’s the recent Swiss minaret ban. Unbelievable! — Zurich has decided to ban new construction of minarets. I foresee other countries banning steeples typical of Christian churches in retaliation. Tit for tat. The Swiss right wing reasoning, if you can call it reasoning, is that mosques are not Swiss, and when in Switzerland one must be Swiss. McDonald’s isn’t Swiss either, and neither are a lot of other easily recognizable branded forms of architecture and décor. Who knows, maybe they even have a panel of guys in funny alpine clothes who decide if contemporary buildings are “Swiss” or not. Presumably, all banks are Swiss — except the ones with Arabic decoration.

Historically, erasing the culture of immigrants or ethnic groups within one’s borders has been attempted over and over. The Soviet Union tried to make all the groups within its massive borders Russian. Stalin shipped ethnic groups from one side of the continent to the other, to thwart any future ethnic unity and uprising. I’ve seen pockets of distinctly Asian-looking Kazakhs in the part of Russia that borders Finland!

In Tajikistan they banned the Persian alphabet, erasing Tajiks’ literary history, and outlawed Islam. This intolerance often only partly succeeds — in many of those former republics, now no longer part of Russia, Islam and local pride have reasserted themselves with a vengeance. Ripping out people’s identities has frightening consequences. When Tajikistan became independent in 1991, the country soon became immersed in a bloody civil war.

One wishes for some kind of common sense to prevail. What harm does a minaret do to the neighborhood? Well, I guess some have a sense of Swiss purity — and purity seeking of any kind always raises a red flag. Some small Italian towns have banned new kebab shops — again, claiming they are not Italian. Hello? Neither were tomatoes! To me, this is all just as silly as the rabbi in Brooklyn claiming that the hipster babes must be discouraged from passing through his neighborhood. Prohibition would probably be preferable — though he doesn’t want to build a wall just yet…

When foreigners visit religious shrines, temples, mosques and churches in other lands, we — if we’re at all sensitive — abide by the local customs. And people from those lands can be expected to reciprocate when they are within our borders.

From a New York Times advice column:

“My husband was at Starbucks enjoying a coffee and reading the paper when about eight people sat down, opened their Bibles and held a group prayer. Then one of them began a loud sermon that my husband found offensive for its content as well as its sheer volume. I say the group was within its rights. My husband says they made inappropriate use of the location. What do you say?”

(The advice columnist said the evangelicals were within their legal rights, but their lack of social empathy was disgusting.)

Like Rodney King said — Can we all just get along? Can we tolerate difference, without taking toleration to the extreme, where everyone is expected to accept insults and provocations? Tolerance shouldn’t mean we have to let anyone with a different lifestyle boss the rest of us around. It seems maybe there’s no absolute dividing line between what we tolerate and what we insist is unacceptable. The measure of how much we should tolerate is: does it help us get along? If it divides us further, then maybe it’s not a good idea. Granted we don’t want to have to compromise our own beliefs or ways of life — resentment will lie buried, festering, and will reassert itself in some form, later, maybe somewhere else seemingly completely unrelated. I don’t want to compromise my own activities, safety and way of life more than is reasonably necessary — but I can still accommodate somewhat. Where the line is might shift from time to time — it’s not fixed, or unchangeable forever. Adaptability and accommodation make us human. Absolutes are for machines and vengeful Gods. What we sometimes call common sense — not going by the book, whether that be the law or the Bible — might be how we survive. But being an ever-changing thing, it’s hard to define. It is learnt, I imagine, by living together, improvising, and innovating, not from a rulebook.

12.12.09: Art Funding or Arts Funding

2009-12-12T16:52:00-05:00

The LA Opry production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” is budgeted at $32 million. 32 million! Jeez, Broadway shows don’t cost that much; U2’s concert tour might, but then that’s a stadium show… and in those latter two instances the people who wrote them are still living! (And presumably get paid, which is part of the cost.) Wagner has been dead for a long time last I heard, so one assumes it’s not the composer or the librettist whose agent is charging the moon. Granted, it is a 4-part epic so that budget might be divided in 4. A recent article reported that they are worried about being able to cover $20 million right now. I shouldn’t wonder they’re worried, especially in LA, not known for its arts funding.

Here’s a production picture. Who knew that Wagner anticipated the light saber?

[Source]

Or that he was into profound silliness:

[Source]

A $14 million bailout for the opera is coming from the county, as the LA city government is called. The opry folks need that $20 million this week… so, reach into your pockets, opera fans. What makes this situation notable is not the amount of money — movies often cost a lot more than $32 million to produce — but the fact that the audience will be so small, and that the state is footing part of the bill.

Simultaneously, a number of museums around the world have scuttled their plans for new buildings or expansions, some of them designed by starchitects. Part of these austerity measures are of course due to the economic downturn, but my guess is that most of these projects were underway well before the crash, and were going to result in a mess anyway — as these insitutions simply thought that, like Bilbao, if they built a wildly impressive new museum in, for example, Milwaukee (Calatrava did the new entranceway and the car garage — the car garage!) or in Indianapolis, that folks from all over the world would come to visit. I was in Indianapolis recently, and would have gone to the art museum, but as we only had one afternoon, we went to the Indy 500 museum instead. Never was there ever any mention of what amazing and innovative shows would go into these future spaces, which were regularly featured in magazine articles with lovely renderings attached — that didn’t seem to be a priority.

Granted, Bilbao did work, in the sense that it gave tourists a reason to visit a place that many US citizens had never heard of before. It was truly amazing to behold how one building could change a whole town. The show that’s up there now is a Frank Lloyd Wright survey (previously exhibited in NY’s Guggenheim), and a permanent collection hodgepodge — not exactly reasons to make a special trip. One can imagine how tempting it must have been for city councils and museum board members to hope that the Bilbao Effect could be replicated in their own town. LA’s Disney Hall looks almost exactly like the Bilbao Guggenheim. Everybody wanted one.

However this mess ends up, my thoughts are that maybe it’s time to rethink all this museum, opera and symphony funding — and I refer mainly to state funding. A bunch of LA museums just got a bailout from LA real estate king Eli Broad, and that’s great, but I suspect there will be county money involved there somewhere too. I think maybe it’s time to stop, or more reasonably, curtail somewhat, state investment in the past — in a bunch of dead guys (and they are mostly guys, and mostly dead, when we look at opera halls) — and invest in our future. Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys. Not that works of the past aren’t inspirational, important and relevant to future creativity — plenty of dead people’s work is endlessly inspiring — but funding for arts in schools has been cut to zero in many places. Maybe the balance and perspective has to be redressed and restored just a little. Plus, there are plenty of CDs and DVDs of the dead guys out there already, should one be curious.

Funding future creativity is a real investment — there’s a chance these kids will build, write, draw or play something that will fill theaters, clubs, stadiums, web pages, whatever. The dead guys won’t write more symphonies.

The problem of course, as far as private funding goes, is that what billionaire wants to fund school education? Where’s the glamour in that? You don’t get your name etched in marble on the outside of a hall for that, or get invited to amazing galas, so what’s the point? That’s why I’m focusing on public and state funding — let the private funders bankroll the opry halls, if that’s where they want to hang out.

I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces. In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.

So how did things end up like this?

Well, there is the aforementioned glory of getting your name on a museum or symphony hall rather than on an elementary school — David Geffen got his start managing popular folk rockers, and now his name is on art museums (and AIDS charities). But I think there are other factors.

Thomas Hoving, the former king of the Met Museum in NYC during the ’60s and ’70s, just passed away. He and his rival, J. Carter Brown, king of the National Gallery in DC, both felt that democratizing art meant getting everyone to like the stuff that they liked. It meant letting everyone know and feel that HERE, in the museum, was the good stuff, the important stuff, the stuff with aura and depth. Here is a promotion the Met did in the ’60s in LIFE magazine:

[Source]

The idea was that even reduced to postcard size, reproductions of verified masterpieces still had enough power to enlighten the American heathen. It seems almost humorous — as if postcards of certified works of art had some mystical power to educate — or, more accurately, to indoctrinate.

Music is the same. Here’s an ad in today’s NY Times book review section:

This isn’t about learning to play for enjoyment, creation, expression or fun — it’s purely about valuing the classics more than anything you and your pathetic friends can make. It’s a little more expensive than the $1.25 the Met was asking back in the day, but then, times have changed.

Hoving and a couple of others, following this line of thinking, created the blockbuster museum show — which famously brought Tut to the masses, and made the Met and other like-minded museums into temples for all, instead of the dusty halls for academics they had become. Hard to remember, but the Met was once a fussy old place, and now it’s super popular — which is not in itself a bad thing. Although the idea was loudly espoused that art was for all, and all could benefit from exposure to it (something like a flu shot), this idea was not exactly democratic, not as I would define it — though it was certainly portrayed as democratizing art and culture. What the movement was actually doing was letting more people know that culture was, and is, HERE, and you slobs, you hoi polloi, are over HERE. We want you all to look at it, and listen to it, but don’t even think you could ever make it, or that your feeble efforts are anywhere close to these Himalayan peaks we have on display.

I know it’s not exactly the same, but I would say: show someone three chords on the guitar, show them how to program or play beats, or play a keyboard (something I can’t really do), but don’t expect virtuosity right away. Everyone knows you can make a song with almost nothing, with really limited skills, so be satisfied and enjoy that, and don’t feel inadequate because you’re not Mozart. I myself wish I’d learned keyboard, but I did find that on guitar, I gravitated to where my interests (and abilities) took me. Over time I learned a lot more chords, began to be able to “hear” harmonies and tonal relationships, and, of course, I learned a lot more grooves over the years — how to feel and enjoy them. But at first I found I could express something, or at least have fun, with my really limited means. When I made something, even something crude, I could momentarily discredit the feeling that if I couldn’t match the classical model, then I was less of a musician.

There are some classical musical works that I can groove with — but, for example, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven I never could get, and I don’t feel any the worse for it. There’s plenty left to love and enjoy. This whole rant, I guess, derives a little from the fact that I resent the implication, and sometime-feeling, that I’m less of a musician and even a person for not appreciating those works. It’s not true!

Ditto with visual art and literature — some of the classics I love deeply, but like many people, there are many Great Works of Literature that lie unfinished on my shelves, and thank God for that, as I was probably doing something more interesting instead… maybe reading something more inspiring, or even trying to write something myself.

It’s true that sometimes the newest thing on the block is 500 years old — and sometimes the way forward is through the past — but not exclusively! And we don’t have to stay there. It’s more important to encourage creativity than to imply that good work can only be made by professionals — your betters.

Hoving, however, did ride a bike, so he can’t be all bad. In fact, his stint as Parks Commissioner before his Met years was incredibly fruitful — and he was offered the job with no prior experience (so much for letting experts tell us what to do!). He closed Central Park to cars on weekends and established over 100 pocket parks around the city, using vacant lots and weird, unused parcels of real estate.

[Source]

11.26.09: Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T12:30:00-05:00

On this day we sincerely give thanks for life, for being alive — an experience unlike any other. Well, we don’t know any other anyway, most of us. The floats and balloons go by a couple of blocks from my house, which sounds glamorous and exciting until you see the crowds and the frantic behavior by both parent and child out there.

My Daddy Says

My mom and dad are visiting. Mom is watching An American in Paris on TV (though she nods off regularly) and dad is devouring my New York Review of Books issues that I save for him.

I hollered out to dad, “Dubai is broke!” but dad (surprisingly) didn’t know about the existence of the tiny desert enclave that, with no real resources, has built up a massive amount of real estate and wealth. It's a self-invented mercantile hub — a nexus of shipping, trading and banking.

[Photo]

Lightning strikes the world’s tallest building in Dubai… often…

It's much like Hong Kong in a way. They went crazy with the tall buildings and the splashy lifestyle, but now the piper’s come a calling and they have built much of it on debt. Debt they can’t repay. Ooops. I recall articles a couple of years ago about Americans living the good life in Dubai, making tons of money quickly, boozing it up in luxury apartments, hanging mainly with other newly rich expats.

I imagine other cities and territories that have no real assets will find themselves in a similar spot quite soon. Detroit is already just about gone — though urban farming is rumored to be a novel use for the vacant acreage; as is Phoenix, though they do have mineral wealth in the surrounding deserts, which is why it was seized from Mexico in the first place. The suburban town my parents live in, Columbia, MD, is in a comparable situation. It is a corporate development that was traded to a Chicago company, which has built lots of new condos and office buildings in recent years, as has been done all over NYC, imagining that the real estate bubble would go on expanding ad infinitum. Meanwhile, the town has no resources and they don’t actually make anything.

It seems to me these systems are all based on faith — faith that is easy to sustain when the money is fast and flows easily, and when there is no end in sight. Faith then seems justified. Those who doubt get laughed at. It’s not a reality-based system — as the Bush administration used to say, “We make the reality.” It’s true, to an extent, that faith certainly does make reality — if enough people believe something to be true, then you can predict that things will occur as if it is… until someone or something pulls the bottom card out. The art market is, and always was, a faith-based system — and so far, many of the believers still feel secure.

My dad pointed out that the country’s banking problems are only the tip of the economic iceberg, but we know so much about them because bankers whine louder than many others, and have connections — so folks hear their whining. But, my daddy says, the unemployed are a huge and growing financial drain, as are the massive number of prisoners in the US — not Gitmo folks, but regular jails are a massive soak… as are health care costs (the US insurance and pharma companies have managed to create the most expensive health care system in the world, though it is not always the best!)… and finally, duh, Afghanistan and Iraq are bleeding trillions out of the US economy and flushing them down the drain in the sense that only a miniscule percentage of those trillions, trillions!, actually creates anything — very, very little of it creates jobs, employment or infrastructure. It’s basically money down the toilet as far as the US economy goes — and now we really can’t afford to throw that kind of money away. Granted, those trillions are supposed to be guaranteeing us some kind of global safety and security — or so we were told — but pretty much the exact opposite has happened, as the brushfires spread to neighboring hills that were previously fairly safe.

The wars (or, more correctly, invasions) in Afghanistan and Iraq are tied, intimately, to the global economy and also the daily lives of every American. A country that threw away trillions on invasions that have not accomplished their objectives (which often were not even clear in the first place) is in no position to deal with the costs of exploding unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, education and economic collapse. The public is beginning to sense this, and as their pockets become increasingly empty they, I sense, feel that maybe now that there has been sufficient “revenge” for 9/11, and maybe the venting has been accomplished — the dubious mission has been accomplished — it’s time to move on.

11.14.09: And the Winner Is…

2009-11-14T12:34:00-05:00

I was invited to be on the jury of the Estoril Film Festival, which, like many others, has a number of sections — tributes to directors (David Cronenberg, Victor Erice — Spirit of the Beehive) and actors (Juliette Binoche), a smattering of crowd pleasers (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Antichrist) and an actual film competition. The force behind the festival, Paulo Branco, a Portugal-based art film producer, had his folks select competition films from the pile that often gets overlooked at the other big name festivals, where films by big name directors are often in competition. So, we got some small to medium (Moon) films that often deserved another look or more attention than they’d gotten, though a few had indeed won prizes previously. Unlike Cannes this festival is not a marketplace, but an award or series of awards might help a small film find distribution. As it gets slightly easier to make a film — with digital projection and computer editing — marketing and distribution are no easier or cheaper than before, though innovative strategies appear, as with the super cheap to make Paranormal Activity in the US, which Paramount released city by city before it blew up.

We’d usually see 2 movies a day, and after viewing the dozen selections, we 4 members of the jury haggled over a nice lunch. Here are the winners and some others we all liked a lot.

Best Film: Dogtooth, a Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos.

Wow — I loved this film, even if the video projected version wasn’t so great looking. It’s very formal and stylized, and it begins in a way that appears to be completely hilarious and absurdist (one juror said it just seemed random at that point) — but soon it turned dark and became very disturbing. I noticed online that some people absolutely hate it. There was one scene where I turned away.

[Source]

Here’s a trailer. (Spoiler alert: some images in the trailer give away too much, in my opinion.)

This from Variety: “Three indefinitely grounded siblings are stuck in an alternative universe dictated by their parents' cruel whimsies -- think an eternal ‘Big Brother’ house as designed by Lars von Trier.”

We split the second prize, as we loved both films.

The Girl, a Swedish film by Fredrik Edfeldt.

This is a beautifully made and shot film about a young girl in a rural house who is left in the care of a young aunt while her parents go on a good works trip to Africa. Soon enough, the young aunt abandons the girl as well — and she has to fend for herself, which isn’t completely bad, as most of the adults seem like jerks.

[Source]

And:

Eastern Plays, a Bulgarian film by Kamen Kalev about a young, artistic though aimless man who drinks a bit too much beer (the actor was also a junkie in real life). He rescues a Turkish family (and their beautiful daughter) after they are attacked on the night streets of Sofia by some fascist skinheads — one of whom is our hero’s brother. Slow moving, but wonderful. Sadly the lead actor passed away before the last few scenes in Istanbul were to be shot. The film integrates news footage of soccer hooliganism, racist attacks and Eastern European street fighting with the characters and the story in a way that feels natural.

[Source / source]

Other films we all liked were:

Le Roi de l'Evasion

This hilarious French film by Alain Guiraudie is about love among French farmers and tractor salesmen. These middle aged and older guys all appear to be normal hicks, but they love to frolic together in the woods and elsewhere. It’s a farce, I guess — I laughed a lot. The lead is an overweight tractor salesman named Armand who rescues a young girl from a group of teen bullies — she, though only 16, then falls obsessively for him, and he decides to try going straight, and the two end up on the lam, with the young girl chasing big Armand in his skimpy briefs though field and forest. I could just imagine the director pitching this concept in Hollywood!

[Source]

Les Beaux Gosses is a French film by Riad Sattouf about pimply teens and their attempts at scoring girls. Sounds like a typical American Pie scenario, but these kids are (to me) funnier and more realistic in their awkwardness and geeky looks. Much, much better and funnier than any recent Hollywood teen movie. I think this one could be the most popular of the films we saw — the audience, like me, was laughing a lot. If close-ups of awkward tongue kissing and pimples turn you off then avoid this one.

[Source]

Lastly: Le Famille Wolberg, a Belgian film by Axelle Ropert about a Jewish family — the husband is a mayor, the wife had an affair, and we watch the model family fall to pieces in a very subtle way. The film touches on a lot of hot topics in Belgium, so it’s not just about one family’s problems.

11.10.09: Sintra — A Mystical Home in the Clouds

2009-11-10T13:47:00-05:00

Slightly inland from the seaside town of Cascais, nestled on a low mountain that seems to generate its own cloud cover, is the retreat of former royals and wealthy citizens called Sintra. The mountain and its cloud cover must have made for a pleasant coolness in the hot Portuguese summers. C and I made a couple of day trips up there to visit some former palaces, residences and monasteries.

One of these is called Quinta de Regaleira, the former home of a baroness that was later bought by Carvalho Monteiro, a super wealthy Brazilian, at the turn of the century. After buying the house he then bought up the rest of the hill where the baroness’ home was situated. After a false start at commissioning a design for a place for himself, he decided to hire an opera set decorator to design both the house and its chapel, but also to effectively turn the whole mountaintop into a colossal set, with fake ponds, underwater labyrinths and a series of underground tunnels that functioned as a metaphorical voyage of initiation and self-discovery — a voyage inspired by the Knights Templar, the Freemasons and alchemists as well. Disney take note — this guy was doing freaky cosmic theme parks before anyone else.

So I asked myself, as readers of Dan Brown’s books no doubt have, who were these Knights of Templar?

They came into existence after the crusades had gained a foothold in Jerusalem. The first crusade, or shall we call it invasion of the Middle East by western Europeans, was in 1099. Jerusalem was captured from the Arabs, and Europeans began to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land in significant numbers to see and feel the aura of the place where their faith originated. While Jerusalem was, for these pilgrims, a kind of protected Green Zone, the approach to it was not. The route from the port of Jaffa (alongside present-day Tel Aviv) inland to Jerusalem was dangerous, and scores of pilgrims were slaughtered by what we might now call insurgents, or freedom fighters…or defenders of their homeland? The hapless pilgrims needed to call Blackwater or some other ruthless mercenaries for hire to protect them. So, one hundred years later a French knight proposed the creation of an order that would attempt to protect these pilgrims — the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, so called because they were given a headquarters by King Baldwin II: the Al Aqsa Mosque, which, significantly, had been built over the former Temple.

What was this Temple of Solomon, I ignorantly asked myself? According to Wikipedia it was, in its first incarnation, “the first temple of the ancient religion of the biblical Israelites, originally constructed by King Solomon… It was designed to house the Ark of the Covenant” — so we’re in Raiders of the Lost Ark territory now. Other powerful relics were rumored to be buried at this site, but all we know is that the Templars got hold of bits of what were referred to as pieces of the “True Cross.”

The Temple of Solomon was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times…marking important events in Jewish history. Here is a (somewhat exaggerated?) visual depiction from a Freemasonry website — it brings to mind the Merchandise Mart building in Chicago. Freemasons sometimes claim that the architects and masons who built this massive thing were the original Freemasons — hence the association with the Knights.

Eventually the Romans took it over, and built their own temple there — and at present there is once again a mosque on the site, which includes the oft-disputed Dome of the Rock.

[Source]

Beneath a section of the Dome of the Rock there is a cave known as the Well of Souls. All sorts of wild myths abound: “Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad ascended heavenwards from the stone above the cave, a related tradition has grown up that states that the Last Judgment will happen at the Sakhrah, and that the souls of the dead gather in the well of souls to wait for that event, and to pray… [and lastly,] according to pre-Islamic folklore, the well of souls was a place where the voices of the dead could be heard along with the sounds of the Rivers of Paradise.” [Source] That’s a lot of mythical weight to bear!

The Knights were quickly endorsed by the Catholic Church, and wore recognizable white mantles featuring a symmetrical red cross (this cross appears regularly at Monteiro’s theme park). They became an expert fighting unit — proto-Jedi Knights, spiritual warriors and protectors. About 100 years after their founding the Pope not only recognized them but gave them special privileges — one can imagine how noble their cause would have seemed to the European imagination. They were granted tax-free status, and were allowed passage anywhere they wanted to go — borders were no longer of any import to the Knights. Being a kind of military and financial institution (see below), this papal bull was immensely helpful.

[Source]

Though as individuals they were legendarily poor and relied on donations to continue their work, their order quickly amassed massive assets and devised innovative financial techniques. For instance: a pilgrim or entourage might want to visit the Holy Land but not leave their valuables unattended back home. So, they would place them in the hands of the regional Templars in their hometown, and in turn they were issued a paper certificate, which they could redeem for money in Jerusalem. The first form of checking, and banking of a sort, was born. Already the plot thickens — you can imagine the kinds of assets the organization accumulated. The whole island of Cyprus belonged to the Templars at one point!

Their power increased and they became an established institution (partly financial) in Europe and elsewhere in the following centuries. But not everyone was happy about this. King Philip of France ended up owing them a lot of money and he wondered how he could get out of his debts. He pressured Pope Clement V to go after the Templars. At first the Pope was timid in his attack on the Jedi — but King Philip must have had some leverage, because after a bit the Pope summoned the Templars to him and arrested and tortured them all, accusing them of heresy, homosexuality and weird initiations. Some signed confessions under torture (which they later recanted) and most of the powerful Templars were burned at the stake.

[Source]

One cried out to the King and Pope as the flames consumed him that he would see them later; both of them died within the year…but not before the church and king had usurped the accumulated lands and property of the order.

By around 1300 the Templar Order was effectively gone, but as an inspiration they lived on.

Reader Luís Bonifácio adds: "The Order was disbanded in all countries of Europe with the exception of Portugal, where King Deniz, when notified by the Pope to disband the Templars, proposed to confiscate all their belongings, and to form a new Knight Order called the 'Order of Christ.' The Pope accepted, and all the knights, churches, monasteries and territories of the Knights Templar were transformed into the 'Order of Christ,' which was simply the Knights Templar by another name, commanded by a member of the Royal Family. Their symbol continued to be the red cross, with a different design, which you can still see in the sails of the NRP Sagres (sister ship of the USS Eagle). A century later, the Knights of this Order, led by the Grand-Master Prince Henry the Navigator, started the Portuguese Discoveries, an expansion towards Africa, America, India, China and Japan. The Order remained in the lead of the Expansion until Portugal's annexation by Spain in 1580. After 1580, the Order was disbanded, and today remains one of the most important honorific orders of medals in Portugal. In the XVI century, the role of the Order of Christ in Portuguese history was taken by the 'Company of Jesus' (the Jesuits), until the early XX century."

Both Knights Templar and Freemasonry were essentially secret societies — though very different from one another — which led to lots of speculation and rumor. They both also had a vaguely spiritual bent — an idea that initiates might be given special knowledge that was passed down, and strange rituals that both bound the members together and were metaphors for personal discovery. [Source]

Various spinoffs of the Masons in the US in the earlier part of the last century made the initiation and other ceremonies into lovely little quasi-theatrical events. Here is a “set” and backdrop from one such ritual that was for sale via the Webb Gallery in Texas:

One could argue that here was a whole genre of theater that existed out of public view.

So, back to Monteiro’s theme park mountain. The house is pretty great — with Arabic-themed rooms, and a hunting-themed room with mosaics of beasts to be killed and a huge tusked boar bust in marble looming out from the wall — but it is the gardens that folks come to see. Visitors head up the hill, along winding paths, past follies and fountains, through a forest of exotic plants imported from Brazil until one reaches a pile of moss covered stones.

We were told that in the past a hidden staircase led to the top of the pile, but as that route led nowhere, one was sometimes led through a crevasse to a hidden stone door with no handle. And the door was way too heavy to move by hand. How to get inside? Our guide showed us a hole in a crack near the rock door, in which was concealed a lever that released a counterweight, allowing the door to swing open — like a fairytale or an episode out of Arabian Nights come to life! Through the door was what is referred to as the initiates’ well…though it was never used as a well.

In Monteiro’s conception this allowed one to metaphorically descend into the underworld — a realm of self-testing, self-discovery and rebirth. At the bottom of the stairs was the entrance to a couple of tunnels. Our guide escorted us into one of them, saying the other led to a dead end. We pulled out our little flashlights.

Monteiro had a whole maze of tunnels constructed under his mountain — some led to grottoes, with no way out, and one led to another well that had no winding staircase to bring one up and out. To really leave the tunnel complex, and symbolically escape from the underworld (the subconscious?), one had to take a tunnel with no light at the end — to head into darkness. Eventually one emerged in the back of a little (man-made) grotto, and had to exit using stepping stones — stepping in a proscribed manner, right foot first.

Fun, eh! None of it is natural, but with the algae and mossy growth it all seems quite believable.

There is a chapel with a Knights Templar cross on the floor and a Masonic eye in a triangle on the ceiling. A mosaic shows a saint on a seashore preaching to fishes — the fish are leaping out of the water with their mouths open in rapt attention. Inside the main house there is a library that must have been constructed as a kind of contemporary art installation. The walls were filled with books on all sides, and around the perimeter of the floor was a mirror that appeared to extend the bookshelves down below the floor we were standing on. The carpeted ground in the center of the room seemed to therefore “float” — it was a creepy, unnerving sensation. I believe the lowest shelf you can see is actually a reflection:

Nearby Quinta Regaleiro is the remains of a small monastery formerly belonging to the convent of the Capuchos order. Like the magic mountain, it too was somewhat peculiar. There was no sign of a large building that might harbor loads of monks — just a small, rough cobblestoned area with two crosses on top of vaguely triangular stones. C looked behind one of the crosses, and sure enough there were steps that led to a crevasse between two huge boulders. In the crevasse was a door.

The monastery itself was not huge, and was tucked into the natural boulders and vegetation — we were told that these monks sought a kind of enlightenment in harmonizing with nature. Inside, the rooms were often lined with cork bark, as those trees were growing everywhere around. The bark walls, and bark covered doors and window blinds, made the tiny rooms appear even more primitive — as if some other kind of civilization lived here. The rooms for the individual monks, their cells, were so tiny and the doors leading to them so low and small, it seemed the monks were a species of Hobbit.

11.09.09: Estoril, Portugal — The Future, the Past, the Present and…

2009-11-09T18:08:00-05:00

C & I accepted the offer to be jurors along with a couple of others at a modest film festival in an off-season, seaside town 25 minutes outside of Lisbon. For me it’s a way of taking a forced vacation, as I dove right back into various kinds of work and projects as soon as my year-long tour ended.

We had dinner with some of the other festivalgoers, along with a classical pianist who was visiting. Some wondered what was to become of music as filesharing and illegal downloading becomes more prevalent. I offered that yes, it is a huge problem for record companies and for some types of musicians — but it seems that not coincidentally, the illegal downloaders are the same people who spend the most money on music and music-related “products” (concerts, etc.). More than anyone else, these “offenders” are passionate music fans and consumers. I suggested that maybe if buying music online had been encouraged sooner, and if the process didn’t have so many catches (like DRM-hampered files), things might not have gone badly so quickly for the record companies.

I mentioned that this digital technology gives many types of artists more power over the means of production, and even distribution — which might not be such a bad thing. I then began to speculate about other media beyond music that are going digital — films, books, television — and that the “view on demand” technology that Netflix uses, or something similar to it, might allow indie filmmakers to take charge of their own distribution (not via Netflix, but through their own sites, giving them a larger income percentage). The communal theatrical film experience might be lost, but that seems to be the case for those small films anyway — so there isn’t much of a trade-off. There’s little downside in trying out a non-theatrical kind of distribution.

I could sense the eyes glazing over as I talked excitedly about various possibilities and somewhat optimistic scenarios for the near future. The conversation then turned to European cultural history, and the patronage that supported Mozart and Bach. Our fellow juror, choreographer Rui Horta, mentioned that André Malraux had been innovative and influential in this regard in the last century. Malraux was, from 1959 to 1969, the Minister of Cultural Affairs in France under De Gaulle, during which time he developed maisons de la culture in several small French towns. These were the first state-supported culture centers in France — basically performing arts centers with rehearsal rooms attached; the latter implying that new works would be created on-site. This aspect was the innovative and radical part, as it meant that creation would be decentralized — that more than a few officially sanctioned organizations and artists would be allowed, theoretically, into the fold of cultural production. Rui had been artist in residence at one of these centers in France, and had more recently initiated a similar center in the Portuguese countryside.

Malraux was also a novelist and anti-colonialist activist in Indochina and elsewhere. I’ve read his book The Voices of Silence — an amazing art history book in which he proposes that art has replaced religion in the West. Here he is editing Museum without Walls, in which he argued that art books are portable museums — again a move towards decentralization, putting creation in the hands of folks all over the country.

[Source]

Days later, during a magazine interview with Inês de Medeiros, the senator for culture in Portugal, I put my foot in it. I suggested that it was more important that children, and everyone really, be imbued with a sense that they themselves might make things — that the things they might make have value — as opposed to learning mainly to appreciate the great masters, whether they be Bach, Picasso or the literary canon. I proposed that the value of art might be of more use to society in that regard, rather than focusing on supporting, well, museums and symphony halls. Naturally, to a senator who has made it her noble mission to argue for more support for the arts, this is slightly heretical and, as she said, “very American.” America’s lack of state support for the arts and skepticism of the value of fine art is legendary.

I qualified my opinion by saying that I myself love a lot of “refined” contemporary art, and some highbrow or academic music as well — but I don’t assume that everyone should. Those who enjoy that stuff are not all wealthy, but they do constitute an elite, rarified world. By this definition, comic book fans and heavy metal fans are elite bunches as well. Every subculture is, in a way. I don’t presume that my tastes or those of my friends require lots of state support — although a little more in the US would be nice — and I would argue that supporting the arts and culture in schools at all levels is worth a lot more to our future quality of life. Encouraging students to write, to make stuff, to cook, design, to draw, play an instrument, record music, sing, edit films, etc. — all of that creates a sense of self-worth, curiosity and experimentation that has applications way beyond each of those disciplines. I would argue that this is where the greater percentage of state funding should go. Of course in the US, it’s the part that has been eliminated almost completely.

A couple of days later at the hotel breakfast table, I overheard FF Coppola at the next table espousing the merging of live performance and film as where the future of film might lie. C and I thought that he must not be aware of many of the performance groups we know who already do this — the Wooster Group has been doing it for years, and Big Dance Theater just did a short run at The Kitchen in NY that was a seamless blend of live projected video and live performance. But yes, other than in isolated scenes it hasn’t caught fire in a big commercial way just yet, although arena rock concerts do it all the time.

I noted to myself that we North Americans (and I’m not even native born) tend to get excited (with reservations) about future possibilities. We are curious about what is to come, good or bad, and how we might be part of it, and possibly find our niche or avoid the worst. Here in Europe, where admittedly things are often more “civilized,” the weight of the past consumes people’s thoughts. While a European sees oneself as part of a continuum — a long line of culture receding into the dim and distant past — North Americans can only feel in their guts that they are standing upon a thin veneer of history. They are both excited and stimulated by the idea of what can be imagined, what might come into existence that never existed previously — sometimes stimulated to the point of dangerous insanity. This is, I guess, a bit of a cliché, but here I was having examples thrown in my face. There might be a grain of truth to it at least.

In a recent New Yorker article on murder, German sociologist Norbert Elias is mentioned as promoting the concept of the idea of a “civilizing process” that encompasses many of our behaviors…a process that requires increased self-control and restraint. The growing dominance of the state, especially in Western Europe, is seen in this view as part of this process, whereby the application of justice is entrusted by the people to the state. It involves the “replacement of a culture of honor [and honor killings] with a culture of dignity… Duels replaced feuds,” resulting in fewer casualties.

In much of the US, it might be argued, this process has a ways to go, as many North Americans are loathe to give power to the state, and prefer to exact revenge and justice on their own (and to take responsibility for their own medical costs and health — or lack of it). This is one possible explanation as to why the US has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy — we are the least “civilized.” Our wildness is often a well of creativity and gumption; it’s a font of opportunity and hope, a draw and seduction for immigrants, and maybe equally an explanation for the extremes and prevalence of stupidity that exist in the US as well.

In the end, I wondered to myself, if we assume, cliché though it might be, that Europe focuses on the past, and North America on the future, then does it follow that there is another continent that is more oriented to the present? Africa? The line of reasoning is ridiculous, but I’m curious where it leads. I wonder if each continent might have a temporal focus. And if so, does this mean that there are more kinds of time than past, present and future?

10.24.09: Internet Antichrist

2009-10-24T12:24:00-04:00

I started thinking a few days ago about how the digitization and networking of so much of what we hold dear has changed things. I see that in my lifetime I will witness the end of books, or most of them, physical copies of recorded music and probably physical newspapers too. Stuff that’s been around for a thousand years will be gone in my lifetime! Film based photography is pretty much a remnant, an art form, an artisanal craft used by fine artists and high-end fashion photographers. And writing letters to one another? On paper? And dropping them in the mailbox? When was the last time I wrote and mailed a physical letter? All those academic books filled with Auden’s or Jane Austen’s letters — it’s hard to imagine a collection of someone’s text messages, tweets and e-mails. I suspect that television as we know it will be gone soon as well. All right, film and recorded music have only been around a hundred or so years, but books! All of which led me back to wondering — how did this get started?

The Internet, the World Wide Web, as much of a boon as it has been, has left an awful lot of wreckage in its wake, beyond just the elimination of those formats we thought of as eternal and the industries that produced and delivered them. Interconnectivity has facilitated the loss of privacy of many of the world’s citizens. We’ve been liberated and captured at the same time. I sense that the loss of privacy — which to me seems inevitable — is part and parcel of the whole project. You can’t have efficient search algorithms, cloud computing and digitized everything and anything and expect to retain the anonymity of the past.

Security races to keep up, but I wonder if the dream of unlimited access and personal and corporate data security aren’t simply incompatible. Maybe we just can’t have them both. Maybe we need to throw up our hands and give in. Stop resisting and surrender. Live totally and completely in public. The world would truly be the village that McLuhan predicted — a small town where everyone does know your business. Maybe that would keep us honest, and push the realization that as custodians of the planet we really are all in this together.

This “creative destruction” began in the ’60s, as did many things that we now both love and regret, and it was initially a spinoff of a project funded by US military agencies. The military (along with the space agency) gave us Velcro and (I believe) cheap integrated circuits (i.e. gizmolandia), as well as the blowback that helped nurture the current mess in the Middle East, South America and Afghanistan. The Internet’s connection to the military, as much as I would love it to be a big secret conspiracy, seems a lot more benign than that. Mephistopheles came to Faust in the form of a poodle. After all…in some versions of the story, he cannot enter your house unbidden — you have to invite him in, like a vampire.

One man foresaw a global network before any such thing was close to being possible. J. C. R. Licklider (sounds like a character in a Coen bros movie!) envisioned, in a 1960 paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis, "A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines…[which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions." [Source]

In other words, he saw it all coming.

[Source]

Is this man the antichrist? Or merely a prophet?

In a weird coincidence, Licklider began his career studying psychoacoustics (more on that later), and wrote a paper called “Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception” in 1951 that forms the basis of contemporary concepts of how we perceive pitch, even though it sounds like it might be about two-story apartments with uneven floors. That the man who predicted a worldwide information exchange network was initially interested in how we perceive music is slightly uncanny.

More about Licklider from Wikipedia:

“His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. He has been called ‘computing's Johnny Appleseed’ for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age.”

Now, it’s been pointed out that he didn’t actually invent any of this stuff — he merely “planted the seed.” But often it seems that putting out the idea that something might be possible encourages others to actually make it possible. In a way, to imagine is to create.

In the ’50s, Licklider “worked on a Cold War project known as Semi Automatic Ground Environment (better known by its [weirdly appropriate] acronym ‘SAGE’) which was designed to create a computer-aided air defense system. The SAGE system included computers that collected and presented data to a human operator, who then chose the appropriate response. In 1957 he…conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing,” [Source] which is when multiple parties can share the use of a single large computer. And in 1958, he became president of the Acoustical Society of America.

“He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPANET [acknowledged to be the predecessor to the Internet]. His 1968 paper on The Computer as a Communication Device predicts the use of computer networks to support communities of common interest and collaboration without regard to location.” [Source]

“Without regard to location”— the phrase resonates for me. It implies disincorporation — an out-of-body experience. In this case, it’s data that has no fixed place, no physical manifestation. But I sense it’s happening to us, too.

I had thought that the Internet began with the linking of some military computers in the Pentagon (ARPANET) in 1969, and that this network was an experimental project to create a system which was specifically designed so that its data could survive a nuclear attack. It turns out my hunch was wrong, although the military were indeed involved in funding the research. ARPANET (which Licklider was involved with) did give birth to internet protocols — how computers “talk” to one another — sometime later in the 1970s, but it was not, it seems, all about securing secret data from the electromagnetic pulses associated with nuclear weapons.

Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or ARPANET) program, insists that its purpose was not military, but scientific. Though we might take whatever the Pentagon says with a big grain of salt, he could be telling the truth. Larry Roberts, who was employed by Taylor to build the Network, states that ARPANET was never intended to link people or act as a communications and information facility. So, the evolution into the Internet was completely unintentional, though Licklider foresaw it. ARPANET was primarily about finding a more efficient way of time-sharing.

Those were the days when computers looked like this:

They were extremely expensive, and there weren’t a lot of them, so many people, like my friend C’s brother, made a good living managing access to them. Time-sharing was a big issue. If however, access could be accomplished remotely, through a network, then the efficiency of the time-sharing would be increased. Time-sharing via these networks was focused on making it possible for research organizations (and the military) to use the processing power of other institutions’ computers when they had laborious calculations to do, or when someone else's facility might do the job better.

Because this research (used to develop ARPANET) was government-funded, its use was restricted to the military and university research facilities — C’s brother couldn’t use it to create or enhance the commercial enterprise he had established to manage computer access, for example.

“During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were.” [Source]

We can see by the involvement of these companies that the line between non-commercial use and commercial and public access was already getting fuzzy.

“Several other branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPANET. In the mid 1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP.

“In 1984 the NSF…supported departments without such sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. [For those who don’t remember or are too young, one used to access the Internet and send e-mail by modems that would “dial-up” using regular phone lines…a web page in this era would take many minutes to load; these were NOT the good old days in that sense.] This grew into the NSFNet backbone, established in 1986, and was intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF.

“In 1992, Congress allowed commercial activity on NSFNet with the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, permitting NSFNet to interconnect with commercial networks. University users were outraged at the idea of noneducational use of their networks. Eventually, it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education and research […and soon the rest of us].

“By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies and the project came to a close.” [Source]

The mother, seed or egg that gave birth to the Internet was gone, and the floodgates had opened.

By the mid-’90s, access became easy enough that the commercialization of the Internet proceeded rapidly. I wondered to myself if the military kept a parallel World Wide Web, inaccessible to civilians, since they were so involved in the early stages of its development. They do, or did — it was called MILNET.

[Source]

A quarter of the earth’s people now use the Internet and the World Wide Web. We don’t know how many use MILNET. Finland and France are about to make Internet access a right, like a legal right to a trial, free speech or health services (well, these rights exist in some countries). The Finns want everyone in their entire country to have broadband (5mb) in a few years. (FYI, 5mb allows streaming video like most of us can see now, 10mb would allow HD streaming video and 100mb, which the Finnish government proposes offering by 2015, would, well, increase not only ease of access to information, but interactivity on a level and with repercussions we can hardly imagine.)

In the Meantime

While these networks were evolving, there were simultaneously a number of innovations and technological breakthroughs that allowed for the digitization of all sorts of media — the stuff that would soon be flying around those same networks.

The technology that allowed sound information (and soon all other information) to be digitized was largely developed by the phone companies. Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T, wanted to find more efficient and reliable ways of transmitting phone conversations. Phone lines up until that time were all analog, and with that technology the only way to squeeze more calls through a line was by rolling off the high and low frequencies, and turning the resulting lo-fi sound into waves that could run in parallel without interfering with one another — like terrestrial radio transmissions. TV and radio communications had the same problems.

Bell Labs was huge, and they had branches in many states, most of which are closed now. They invented the transistor and the semiconductors that made the integrated circuits in our tiny devices possible, they developed the laser — the list goes on and on. Their scientists won a lot of Nobel prizes.

When Bell Labs figured out how to digitize sound — to, in effect, sample a sound wave and slice it into tiny bits in a way that was not prohibitively expensive and that still left the human voice recognizable — they applied it to long distance calls, switchers and all manner of phone technology, allowing more calls to be made simultaneously, especially considering the limitations imposed by underwater cables. Much of the research regarding what makes a sound understandable (like a voice, in AT&T’s case) involves applying lessons from the science of psychoacoustics — how the brain perceives sound in all its aspects. We’re back to Licklider!

Out of this combination of psychoacoustic and technical research emerged digital equipment that was used in, among other places, recording studios — where I saw this technology. In the ’70s, the Harmonizers and digital delays that appeared little by little were in effect primitive samplers — the samples were usually less than a second long. These were quickly followed by machines that could hold longer samples of greater resolution, and manipulate those “sounds” more freely (clumps of data more than sounds, technically). All sorts of weirdness resulted. Bell Labs was involved in manufacturing a sound processor called a vocoder that would preserve certain aspects of talking (or singing), like speech formants — the shape of the sound apart from its pitch. Using this machine one could transmit these aspects of the voice separate from the rest of the vocalization in ways that rendered them unintelligible. One use for this was a sort of cryptology for the voice — a garbling that could be “decoded” at the other end. These machines were also adapted for music production. Here is Kraftwerk’s vocoder, made especially for them:

[Source]

I once used a vocoder borrowed from Bernie Krause when Eno and I did the Bush of Ghosts record. It was beautifully made, but rather complicated and very expensive.

A Harmonizer cost thousands of dollars, a digital reverb set a studio back maybe 10K, and a full-fledged sampling device like a Fairlight or later the Synclavier cost much, much more. But soon the price of memory and processing dropped, and the technology became more affordable. Inexpensive Akai samplers became the backbone of music like hip hop and DJ mixes, and sampled or digitally derived drum sounds took the place of live drummers in many recordings. And we were off to the races, for better or worse. With the digitization of sound, digital recording and eventually the CD became possible — and not too long after that, the capacity and speed of home computers was sufficient to record, archive, and process music.

Some years ago I visited Bell Labs and was shown the famous anechoic (perfect, sound absorbent) chamber. This was where John Cage claimed that he could hear both his heart pounding and the high-pitched whine of his nervous system. His insight was that true silence doesn’t exist — even if we can block out everything else, we can’t stop hearing ourselves.

Here is one such chamber:

[Source]

They also showed me a processor that could squeeze what seemed to the ear to be CD-quality sound into a miniscule bandwidth. I’m not sure, but I believe encoding music as MP3s had at that date already been invented in Germany, so this compressing/encoding was not a big surprise — but like most people, I worried that something in the quality of the music might have been sacrificed in this rezzing down process. I was right, but MP3s have improved quite a bit since then, and now I listen to most of the music I own in that format. I believe what Bell Labs was working on is used for satellite radio — getting more hi-fi sound into smaller transmissions.

In 1988 I went with designer Tibor Kalman to visit a printing studio on Long Island. It had a machine that could digitize and then subtly manipulate images (we wanted to “improve” the image on a Talking Heads record cover). This machine was, like those early computers, incredibly expensive and rare — we had to go to it (it couldn’t be brought to the design studio), and we had to book time in advance. Sytex I think it was called. This was exciting, but its cost and rarity meant we didn’t think much about incorporating its talents into more projects at that time.

After a while, though, the price of scanning dropped, and manipulating scanned images using something called Photoshop became common. Who would buy a film camera these days? Who buys film for their old camera? There are some holdouts, and I have no doubt that there is a richness or at least some special qualities that have been lost, but, well, for most of us, the trade-off seems fair — and inevitable. Needless to say, as these images became digitized they could enter the river of networked data.

Photojournalism went digital a number of years ago. In the beginning, the photographers, realizing that their images would be reproduced in newspapers no larger than 8x10 (if that), didn’t need to shoot at the highest available resolution on their new digital cameras, allowing them to squeeze more images onto their data chips — and giving them fewer problems with storage and developing in the field. To compare these low-res images to video, it’d be like if movies past a certain date were all captured at the quality of YouTube files. While researching archival news footage at some point, I discovered that when it migrated to videotape from 16mm film, the quality went way down.

The confluence of digitized media and the capability of digital information to be shared, transmitted and stored anywhere in the world — this volatile, disembodied mixture that Licklider predicted and whose seed he planted — has, duh, had a huge effect on countless institutions. Many that deal with physical objects — newsstands, record stores, bookstores — will all go away, along with their support structures: trucks, warehouses and all the people that worked in those places. For many of us this is not all bad. The record stores like Sam Goody or Coconuts were never great experiences.

Maybe the first institution to disappear almost completely as a result of this process was the letter. Conventional mail still exists — I get bills, junk mail and announcements — but communication related to my work and between my friends and me is almost all by e-mail or text, as has been for a while.

Television, not a big part of my life for quite a number of years anyway, is bound to migrate online and become something very different.

It’s not so surprising to witness the end of many of the delivery systems for recorded music — vinyl, cassettes and CDs. Somehow those changed from one form to another so rapidly over the decades that to see them all go away isn’t that much of a shock. I don’t really miss them all that much, to be honest. But to imagine that I might live to see the end of print — books, newspapers and many magazines — is mind-boggling. Publishers and news organizations might argue that they are not like the music business, but the patterns are too similar to ignore, except by those who don’t want to see them. Print and books have remained more or less unchanged since Gutenberg, but all that seems about to become history.

I’m not advocating trying to stop this — it all seems inevitable, and the access to information and convenience will be unprecedented — although without newspapers as a Fourth Estate, a check and balance, democracy as we were taught it, will not be, um, the same. We can’t rely on bloggers to police the entire government. Danielle comments, however, that the death of physical newspapers isn’t the same as the death of journalism — if the NY Times can find a way to make money as with digital distribution, it will continue to provide a similar function in society. Whether that will be possible is still an open question — but digitization doesn’t necessarily equal death, at least not yet.

The End of Privacy

Now that the Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled data, content and information to be shuttled anywhere in the world — even around China, sometimes — it seems inevitable that the flow goes both ways, or actually in many ways. The ability to access the Internet is incredibly useful to us and we can’t imagine life without it, so we don’t seem too bothered that as a result of this interconnectedness, the National Security Administration, for one, has access to our web lives and loves — and we don’t seem all that nervous that cloud computing will eliminate any real sense of privacy (despite assurances), or about the massive amounts of information Google and other commercial enterprises have about us.

Danielle points out that many people are in fact very nervous about this — that privacy & the Internet is a huge topic of concern. Google data mining, the ownership and confidentiality of social networking data, security of financial data, etc. — these are all topics that are regularly reported on in the press and about which people have very strong feelings. However, the sense I get on the street is that most ordinary folks are happy (so far) to give up some personal security for all the convenience they’re getting.

Google’s batteries of server farms allow us to search, so, naturally the NSA can also search, dredge and process. I typed in someone’s name yesterday and found that for a small fee, I could see how much they paid for their house, who their neighbors are and what their credit rating is! I was flabbergasted. That’s me, a private citizen, who can know stuff I’d sort of rather not know, not some corporation or governmental agency.

Here’s an NSA data mining facility in Yakima, Washington. (A massive one is being built in Utah.)

[Source]

So far I’m not aware of malicious use of all that information, not on a large scale anyway — though identity thieves and guys sucking up US credit card numbers by the truckload in Ukraine are a start.

I recently read an article regarding the security of so-called “scrubbed” data. Netflix or some other company wanted to employ a third party to analyze some of their customers’ patterns of purchase — but as a precaution they removed (scrubbed) the customers’ names off the data. So theoretically, the people being analyzed were now abstract entities. However, out of curiosity they hired another company, to see if any of those unidentified customers could possibly be re-identified. It turned out they could. Not due to a fault of the scrubbing, or some security or software malfunction, but because other data and patterns of customer and citizen behavior were available online, and correlating these with the patterns of the anonymous customers led to conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, the re-identification of many.

To me this means that, yes, information already flows both, or rather all, ways. Privacy and security, as much as we might strive for them, are phantoms that we chase but can never truly catch. As much as we love getting information, data, media and connections, so we ourselves become available as data. Social websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter seem to use these conflicting urges — the urge to reveal oneself to the world, in all one’s intimate details, and yet simultaneously maintain some kind of privacy. Good luck with that.

The end of privacy in parts of the world is near. It will be traumatic for some, and a comfort for others — for to relinquish one’s privacy is to become a part of the hive and the herd, and there is a certain reassurance there. How our corporate culture and its twin, the government, make use of this process and this massive change in society leads one to imagine something closer to a paranoid Phillip K. Dick scenario than a return to the nurturing tribe (or the Global Village) that it will be for some. I suspect it will be both — liberating and restrictive. Conflicting and opposite tendencies, operating simultaneously.

So, there it is. The free flow of information, and the ability to digitize all media as it enters the river, has a lot more repercussions than the end of books, newspapers and CDs — it portends a massive social and political shift. Licklider may have seen this coming as well, but he didn’t let on about it.

10.18.09: A Cooking Ape

2009-10-18T11:43:00-04:00

I read a review of the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human in the NYRB. As usual the article summarized much of the book’s ideas. The author, Richard Wrangham, argues that the eating of cooked food by early protohumans was, to a large and unacknowledged extent, what enabled them to walk upright, get brainier, become more social and even to verbalize. In a nutshell, he says that since cooked food allows a more efficient transfer and absorption of nutrients than raw food does, the digestive track could evolve into a smaller-sized part of the animal (raw foods require large stomachs and long digestion), which then allowed the little guys to begin to stand up more, as their bellies were smaller. It also enabled the brain to evolve into a larger organ, as large brains require a lot of nutrition only available to hominids by eating cooked food. I’m beginning to see how some of these factors converged in ways that were lucky for us.

Cooking, Wrangham claims, necessitated that some part of the household guard the hearth (and children), and it also meant that groups larger than a single family were more practical. It’s been argued by others that the increased social interactions of early humans were what formed many of the brain’s pathways that determine how we behave and get along, or don’t get along. These new complex social structures also required larger brain capacities, as others have suggested… and both allowed and demanded the evolution of language to help mediate some of that social drama.

Wrangham also says that once we started eating cooked food, our mouths and jaws no longer had to be equipped mainly for tearing, ripping and intense prolonged grinding… which left early mouths available for other purposes — vocalizing… and maybe singing, too?

It’s an amazing argument — to tie all these crucial protohuman attributes to cooking. And equally interesting is how each attribute facilitated the others — all seemed to be interdependent.

Needless to say, Wrangham doesn’t buy into the relatively recent raw food movement — which claims that we humans are more naturally engineered for eating uncooked food, which is therefore presumed by adherents of this movement to be better for us. The assumption there is that early man and woman didn’t cook. Wrangham says that if they didn’t cook they wouldn’t have survived, and could never have evolved into us, as cooked food is so much more efficient at delivering nutrients. He says that standing and talking would never have happened on a diet of raw foods.