David Byrne Journal

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.

10.13.09: Space Is Deep!

2009-10-13T15:27:00-04:00

I had a dream in which I was on a tractor, lurching along, pulling a wagon that was piled with large backpacks. Along for the ride were some rather well-known German DJs, one of whom was named Luke Vibert. (Luke is a real guy, and is not German — I had been listening to a Warp Records compilation earlier in the day, so maybe that’s how he got into my dream…)

[Source]

Then there was a kind of intercut scene, away from the slow tractor travel, of these DJs in a club, behind their decks and laptops on the DJ platform. Some had guitars slung around their necks (but were not playing them), shouting into a special DJ mike with their German accents, “Ve are African men!, Ve are African men!” The crowd was dancing wildly.

Cut back to the tractor, still lurching along, and the DJs begin some other shout outs — “Space Is Da Place!”...”Space is All That!”...and...”Space is Deep!”

At the time (in my semi-sleep state), I thought these phrases were wildly inventive.

10.02.09: Bikes and Cities So Far

2009-10-02T17:15:00-04:00

I did a week of events (NY, Austin, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and LA) around the theme of Cities and Bikes and how we get around. I began each one with a broad introduction that I hoped would set the scene — a background on how our cities became so car-centric, and some alternatives in various places around the world. There were some funny slides too.

As I mentioned earlier, at these events I was followed by a city representative, a representative of a local advocacy group, and an urban theorist. Different folks in each town. Q&A at the end.

The turnout was great — the theaters for the most part were lovely and averaged around 700 seats. It really does seem like this was a little catalyst for an issue that has reached a point of acceptance.

The “theorist” in San Francisco, Michael Teitz from UC Berkeley, proposed a lovely and surreal thought experiment in which the car had never been invented. An alternate present, with, for example, tunnels being a priority in many cities, as they make it easier for cyclists to avoid hills. In Los Angeles the man in this theorist role, Don Shoup, is a sort of famous specialist in parking. Such a thing may be laughable to some like me who don’t own a car, but in LA and elsewhere it is a serious issue with many ramifications. He pointed some out — if the price of a street meter (or a free spot) is lower than the nearby lot, then folks tend to circle the block in search of these bargains, to the point where the streets become clogged with naïve and hopeful drivers who spend a crazy amount of time looking for a spot. We’ve all done it, I know I have. I have also done concerts in “new” areas of LA (like downtown) and gotten complaints from folks who didn’t know if or where they could find parking close by. I think attendance suffered at those gigs because folks were worried about it.

The events in some towns, like Portland, well known for being bicycle- and public transportation-friendly cities (despite the frequent rain), were almost like little rallies; whereas LA, like Austin in a way, is so spread out that it has more obstacles to overcome.

I spent the morning walking around LA’s lively downtown district. One whole store sold nothing but glass pipes (for smoking) and another sold nothing but super realistic BB guns, and accurate reproductions of Glocks and Uzis.

An old cafeteria has a waterfall inside with a mechanical bear that emerged from a hole!

I suggested to the city rep that one might try adding bike lanes, etc. in specific neighborhoods, little by little, and not try to instigate a whole citywide program. Downtown, Santa Monica and Venice would be obvious candidates. Her response seemed to imply that the state of LA politics and bureaucracy makes that impossible — if one hood gets something, they all want it. Of course, if the mayor or other higher-ups were more sympathetic, as they are in Portland (or even Mikey B in NY), that entrenched bureaucracy might open up here and there. A poke from the top can indeed unclog a logjam.

Naturally there were some questions from the audiences about the messenger who nearly ran me over and, from the other side, why can’t I have a bike lane on my street? The question raised by the first issue is: can our behavior change? One is always skeptical if that can ever happen; one doesn’t naturally think that North Americans can be like the Dutch or the Danes. I think it was at the NY event where I came up with what I thought was a pretty good analogy in response to this question: who would have believed that those independent-minded New Yorkers, with all their attitude, would stoop to picking up doggie shit in little baggies and carrying it steaming in their hands to the nearest trash can? No one. But they do. Pretty much all of them. So, people can change some old habits — it happens.

09.29.09: Seattle — Angry Man Breakfast

2009-09-29T00:16:00-04:00

Reading the morning paper here in Seattle, I was struck by the mood of what appeared to me to be propaganda. I didn’t begin ranting, foaming at the mouth or spraying my yogurt across the hotel dining room.

At It Again

A front-page photo/graphic in today’s NY Times shows what is rumored to be an Iranian nuclear facility of some sort. Maybe it’s just the graphic style of these things, but it looks exactly like the various photo-graphics we were inundated with before the invasion of Iraq. Pictures of buildings where WMDs were being stored, hidden or manufactured…all of which were proven to be merely rumors spread to lead and lure us into the morass we are in now. Folks fell for it then, and given everyone’s short memories they might go for it a second time.

Now I’m not saying this is definitely NOT a nuclear facility — only pointing out that the manner of presentation of alleged facts is the same.

Perspective

On the same front page we are told that socialism is collapsing in Europe because a number of countries have elected center-right politicians. I beg to differ. As the article says, the center-right accepts as a given “generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, [and] sharp restrictions on carbon emissions.” Those three ideas would place them on the left in the USA, though the writer says, maybe correctly, that in Europe the left traditionally goes further. That those givens are still not generally accepted in the US, and are currently the yelling, screaming indications that politicians are “socialist” (and therefore un-American), puts this supposed “collapse” in perspective.

Resurgence

Another front-page article brings the good news that the economy is rebounding and getting bullish again. While in some ways that might not be surprising (no serious regulation has been put into place to prevent a recurrence of the meltdown, or to restrain the hubris and greed of the bankers), it seems sort of like good news just for the sake of good news — feel-good stuff. The economy has been out of whack for so long that to cheer its “return” and resurgence to what is essentially a misguided and broken system is maybe not the best idea right now. That much of the country is living unsustainably means that while Goldman Sachs and some others might be raking it in — profiting from the downturn, some have claimed — that isn’t the real world.

9.28.09: Austin

2009-09-28T11:50:00-04:00

Bikes, Cities and the Future of Getting Around

I’m on a one week tour — a series of events focusing on bikes and cities timed to coincide with the release of my Bicycle Diaries book. I told the publisher I didn’t think I’d be very good as a reader — which is the usual way authors are trotted out to promote their books — so I suggested instead we do a series of forums focusing on our cities and how bikes have become a symptom of a new interest in urban living in North America. (This has a little bit of the added effect of hinting that the book is not just about riding a bike.) The publicity department of Viking, the publisher, generously helped put these events together. Sometimes they are held in bookstores, as those are the venues the publisher knows; and sometimes, like last night in Austin, in small theaters.

At each event there will be a representative of the local city government; an advocate; a theorist/designer/planner or historian; …and me. We each do short (10-15 min.) presentations about our area of expertise and then there is some Q&A and then we’re done. So far, I’ve been to NYC and Austin and Seattle and it’s working pretty well. By bringing these elements and people together the events serve as a catalyst, a reminder and a symbol that perception and policies are changing — about bikes as a way of getting around and about how our lives in cities can be. The interest and turnout might be as much for the content as what’s on stage.

The morning after I arrived here I rode around Austin and discovered that a surprising amount of the downtown area has been given over to parking.

There are parking lots everywhere and, maybe because of the oppressive heat in the Texas summers, lots of indoor parking structures as well. Some of these take up a whole block and some only take up the ground floor of a downtown building. Either way, they kill any potential for life, business, interchange and encounters on those blocks. It seems that not only did the city accommodate cars with some massive freeways that are often jammed up, but they have given some of their best downtown real estate simply to house automobiles. I was reminded that the vibrant “people” streets (South Congress and 6th St.), no matter if you love or hate those scenes, would never exist if there were massive parking structures on every block there. The vacant lots on S. Congress are now filled with tent kiosks and tiny Airstreams and other trailers that serve as specialized food carts (like the ones in Portland). I got a mushroom tamale and berry smoothie at one, and they were great.

Austinites were surprised when their city bike lane and trail rep Annick Beaudet revealed how many of the city’s residents commute by bike already, and how much new infrastructure is going to be added in the coming years. If they can conceive of replacing some of those parking lots and structures with mixtures of cool housing, office and retail they would inevitably lure more folks into the central district, where cars are not absolutely essential for every activity. Where will all those new workers, consumers and residents park then? — well, some will find it more practical to use public transportation and some will…ummm…ride bikes. The policy of infinite accommodation to the car needs to stop and be reversed if our cities are to survive as more than clumps of offices and parking garages.

After the Austin event I rode to the Continental Club (the hotel has loaner bikes) to see the guys in Heybale do their usual Sunday evening set. The band, partly made up of veterans from the bands of artists like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, play their repertoire of mostly classic country songs (Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, George Jones, Webb Pierce) and a few originals with consummate skill. The guitar player Redd Volkaert and the pedal steel player in particular are amazing musicians — their frequent and concise solos are both surprising and inventive, and technically mind-boggling. More than once I’ve seen young musicians standing close to the stage with their jaws hanging open as these guys whip off another effortless solo. I was reminded of the days when Clapton was heralded as a guitar godhead — well, these guys are in that class, though the tunes are a little different. At least three of the band members sing, and pretty well, too.

I happen to love those songs, though I realize they’re not to everyone’s taste. What’s just as wonderful as the band is the audience they’ve amassed over years playing this Sunday night residency — all ages: 20-somethings and folks my age and older, many of whom have come to dance the two-step or the waltz, depending on the song — and they fill the floor as soon as the band starts. I’ve seen 20-year-old girls in dancing dresses and grandmas in the same outfits. Last night one of the very best dancers in the joint was a young man who didn’t look like your typical country music fan — he could have been Mexican, Indonesian or Syrian. All the girls were happy to dance with him.

Living the Dream

The next morning, as I changed planes at Dallas Ft. Worth, I saw a guy talking on a cell phone outside a fast food place on one of the endless concourses. He was in full cowboy costume and it was, to me, so extreme and clichéd that he could have been a member of the Village People. I don’t think he would have appreciated hearing that. He had the full gear — a checkered Western shirt, old Tom Mix-style hat, jeans, boots, a belt with a giant buckle, and a handlebar moustache. Halloween ain’t for a few more weeks!

I guess you can get away with that here in Texas, though this guy was pretty out there. There isn’t much call for ropin’ and herdin’ around DFW, unless it’s rodeo season, but even then the rodeo guys I’ve met don’t dress like this. This guy, it seems to me, is role playing. If he’s not that guy he’s going to at least look like that guy. If he were to walk into a NY office in that getup, folks would point him to the casting call across the way. But Texas is, sometimes, big and crazy enough that one can take the risk and reinvent oneself and folks go along with it.

Flying out of DFW I marveled at the sprawl.

09.07.09: The Invisible Manifesto — Battles @ Terminal 5

2009-09-07T11:44:00-04:00

Biked up the west side to Terminal 5, a venue that has put on a lot of shows recently, but that I hadn’t been to since its days as a kind of sleazy disco, when I saw Fischerspooner some years ago. The physical aspect of the place hasn’t changed much — it still feels like a massive, cold, corporate club — but tonight’s show was a parcel of acts on the innovative Warp label, with Battles headlining, so it promised something new.

[Photo: Global Graphica]

I liked much of their first record, and the video of the band playing in a mirrored room is incredible, so I was curious. I heard they’d be playing new stuff, so I wondered where they would take whatever it is that they do.

It was pretty amazing — fairly constant driving beats over which guitars, keyboards and loops, fed through all kinds of effects, were layered. The vocals, if you can call them that, were also looped and treated so that they emerged as incomprehensible textures, articulating vaguely melodic riffs. All this leapt from one section to another in ways that made it hard to discern the underlying form or structure of each piece — though the sounds were generally and consistently engaging and involving. They could have been making it all up on the go, but I sensed there was a lot — a LOT — of pre-planning that went into the set. (This was confirmed by some friends who know them and said, yeah, they practice all the time and it’s all very worked out.)

[Photo: Music Slut]

Their poor drummer sometimes looked shagged out, his shirt soaked as he slumped over his kit catching his breath during the few moments when he wasn’t playing — though he never tired or flagged. When the time came he started up again, like a machine recharged. Some of the loops and abrupt changes were hilarious — I laughed out loud — as they sounded like they wouldn’t work, like they were all wrong, but then somehow the insane part would find a context and surprisingly plop into place and it all seemed right. There were pedals all over the stage; even the drumming was going through pedals and loops. The guitarists had their instruments slung way up high, and I realized that was because they were constantly leaning over to hit pedals on a table or tweak the software on their laptops, and if the guitars had longer straps they would have been swinging around smashing all the gear to pieces. It made for a semi-geeky look, but they’re obviously geeks with a mission and purpose, no nonsense.

The “songs” had plenty of dynamic structure within them — ups and downs, and quiet bits and explosive bits — but there were no crescendos and the set as a whole had no typical dynamic build, unless we were all supposed to recognize the last two songs, which from an audience point of view would have signaled “here’s the single.” The dynamics within each “song” were also fairly abrupt — the changes from one section to the next were sudden, like edits. The band is often grouped under the “math rock” genre — which I guess refers to the “cold,” abrupt lack of transitions and inscrutable structure. Parts started, went on for bit, and then ended, just as suddenly as they had begun. No easing into sections, no chorus and verse, no emotional builds and transitions — those seemed to be verboten. There’s a dogma at work here — rules that guide, restrict and limit the music — but I’m only guessing regarding some of the clauses in this invisible manifesto. It was pretty amazing, but not for everyone.

09.05.09: NY Bike Share Coming

2009-09-05T11:19:00-04:00

I went to a show-and-tell demonstration of the BIXI bike share system that will be coming to NYC in the not too distant future. It will be a pilot program, subject to tweaks and adjustments, and will begin in a few logical neighborhoods — the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, the Village etc. It is a system that has already been installed in Montreal, so it’s been road tested. I used it to bike around there the day before Halloween [link to Journal]. As long as one avoids the Royal Mountain it’s a perfectly acceptable city to bike in, though in the middle of winter I think it might be inhumanly freezing. In summer the city is funky and beautiful.

Here’s what the BIXI system looks like and how it works. As in Paris, Barcelona, Lyon and of course Montreal, there are racks of these special bikes (made specifically to fit the racks, with a limited but adequate number of gears and a holder for bags and groceries) spaced around the neighborhoods.

The idea is that you use the bikes for grocery shopping, going out at night, running errands and going to meetings — trips that are usually under a ½ hour. They’re not for day trips to Nyack. You swipe your credit card and you are charged $5 for 24 hours of use. (Or you can subscribe to a monthly or yearly plan, which includes a BIXI key.) After swiping, the machine spits out a ticket with your code to release a bike. You punch in that number at any dock with an available bike, and it releases. I presume that if you don’t return your bike within a 24-hour period the system will assume that you’ve stolen it — and you will be charged accordingly. If you take a long ride there’s an additional fee, but you can take as many short trips in the 24-hour period as you want with no surcharge. One trip and you’ve saved a cab fare; a few trips and you’ve saved the equivalent MetroCard fares.

Yesterday, for example, I biked from my home in midtown to my office in Soho; then, after some meetings there, I picked up some groceries and took them home. Later I went to Joe’s Pub to see Emanuel and the Fear and then up to Terminal 5 to catch Battles. Then home. All of these trips were, I’m pretty sure, under a ½ hour. I have room in my loft for my bike(s) so I normally use my own — but many New Yorkers, and certainly visitors, either don’t have bikes or don’t have room for them in their NY-size apartments. (There is a movement to outfit all new apartments and offices with built-in bike storage space, but that hasn’t happened yet.)

If the stations are as tightly interspersed throughout the city as they are in Paris, one is never more than a couple of blocks from a place to pick up or deposit the bike, so you’d never have to lock it to a No Parking sign or to one of my bike racks. These share bikes do not come with locks — they’re meant to go from station to station, so theoretically there should be no reason to carry your own lock.

How is the bike itself?

They’re fine for what they are. There are chain guards so you don’t get grease all over your nice white pants or dress, and the gear switching mechanism is inside the axle, so no grease there either. In other words, you can wear normal working clothes to ride these, as you would wear the rest of your day. You don’t HAVE to dress like a messenger unless you want to. There are fenders as well, so if there is some wet area or a puddle you won’t get a gray/brown streak of NY street water up your back. The bike I tried seemed sturdy, which made for something a bit heavier than what I would personally choose. The front wheel has a limited turning ability, so no tricks or super sharp turns are possible.

In Montreal and other cities the adoption of these kinds of systems has been rapid — even Parisians take to them. It has relieved a lot of congestion and has probably lowered the carbon footprint of those places as well. I have heard that people have begun to change their habits based on the convenience and availability of these and similar bike systems. Folks don’t have to plan their evenings, for example, based on where or how they can get a taxi or last train home. They also have begun to re-form their mental maps — now free from concerns about heavily trafficked routes, congestion or nearness of subway lines. They have begun to experience their cities in different ways — ways that are more self-organized, improvised and accommodating to change.

08.25.09: The Kindle Experience

2009-08-25T13:37:00-04:00

I got an Amazon Kindle DX (the large-size one) before leaving on this last 6-week European tour leg. I thought that I could afford to be a guinea pig (it’s almost $500!) and try this way of reading. I loaded up a bunch of books ($10 for most, many just out) and some New Yorker magazines before I left, and as a result saved some space in my luggage, which usually gets filled with books I brought or purchased on the road. My luggage, as you can imagine, still got pretty full — mainly CDs and DVDs I was given — but a pile of books and magazines would have put it over the top. You can therefore “carry” more books than you might read, and if one is boring you can easily just dip into another.

Here’s my report.

The screen contrast approximates reading a newspaper — the background is off-white, rather than the ivory or white of most books. So it’s not super contrasty, but for me it’s OK — I didn’t feel eye strain. The device is heavier than a small paperback, but lighter than a hardback, so that part was no problem — and it’s MUCH thinner than any physical book, so it slips in a bag easily. The B&W screen isn’t so good with photos, though they’re often no worse than a B&W newspaper image. But, since most of what I was reading wasn’t photo- or chart-heavy, that was OK too. Reading The New Yorker, for example, was pretty great — no ads, you can skip around to various sections of the magazine, and the new issues download via a cellular network automatically.

There are a few websites that offer thousands of public domain books — Jane Austen, Dickens, Melville, Joyce and lots of wacky, forgotten, orphaned volumes as well. I got one by PT Barnum. So, if you wanted, you could have hundreds of books in this thing and not pay for any of them.

One of Amazon’s selling points is instant gratification. You want a book (at least in the US — there’s no coverage in Europe or elsewhere) and you can have it in about a minute — if there’s a Kindle version — and… you can shop only at Amazon (or through certain other Kindle content providers).

Here’s where the rub is. This machine only reads Kindle files and PDFs. And nothing else out there reads Kindle files. It can read other types of files — Word DOCs, MOBI, TXT etc. — but you have to go through Amazon via email, where they’re converted for a small charge, then sent directly to your Kindle. And, you can’t share a book with your friends, even if they too have a Kindle. No doubt, as with MP3 and iTunes, book publishers would only agree to this system if people couldn’t share their purchases. As we know, Apple has relented on this, and has taken DRM off many of their music files. But which ones? How do you know? Years from now, having gone through a few computers, your music collection is unplayable except for the files without DRM. Well, same with these books — if you migrate to a different tablet (the forthcoming Apple one we hear so much about, for example), you are fucked. All the unread books in your Kindle library are stuck on what will eventually become antiquated technology.

There are other e-book formats out there (EPub is being touted as a cross-platform format, but still, ugh, with DRM). I saw a guy at a bar reading a Kindle book on his iPhone, as the files are available for those and for the iPod Touch through an Amazon app, but it looked kinda tiny, and the backlit screen will drain a battery in a couple of hours of constant use. The slightly strange electronic ink system in the Kindle (and in the Sony Reader) has no backlight — so, like a book, you can’t read it in bed at night without a nightlight. This was an understandable tradeoff, as the battery life is unbelievable. With the wi-fi switched off (you only need it running to retrieve orders or magazine subscriptions), the thing stays charged for weeks.

Do I miss the “physical experience”? I will certainly miss being able to read books from my personal library, but if the title I want to read is all text it doesn’t make much difference to me. The smell will be a bit of nostalgia, as will fading and water damage. The Kindle only uses about two fonts at present, so some may miss type layout and design. But I suspect additional fonts will be added soon. On the e-book file I can still highlight sections to refer to later, and there’s a built-in dictionary! I forgot that! You put the cursor next to a word, and a little definition appears at the bottom of the page! Students will love that. I do.

[Source: left / right]

I hear that the Apple tablet will use a format that is more cross-platform, but will that mean I can share a book with my friend? It’s surely a way we make friends sometimes: “I just finished this GREAT book, do you want to read it? I’ll pass you my copy.” As with music, sharing things is a way of getting to know one another and a form of reciprocal debt — if I “lend” you my book, you sort of owe me… a book, or something. We’re linked now, which is how we use these things that represent our inner selves — as social connectors. Take that ability away, the ability to exchange stuff that represents us, and I’ll bet some of the “value” of these kinds of e-books goes too… the social interconnectedness value, not the dollar value.

The Apple tablet looks to have illumination, which will drain battery life really quickly in book-reading time (many, many hours on a train, plane, bus, back porch, bed) — but sometimes the color, photo quality and ability to read in low light that Apple promises (and the touch screen!) might win out. We’ll see. I do think, based on my limited experience, that if some of these bugs and proprietary issues can be worked out in any of these reader things, then yes, the future of reading (and of selling books) will be very different, whether it’s this device or another one.

The bookselling and publishing worlds will be shaken with repercussions. Imagine the hundreds of pounds of textbooks a lot of college students are expected to lug around every year — and pay hundreds of dollars for as well. And the resulting medical bills. If those textbooks can be sold as weightless $10 downloads the students and their parents will cheer, and the chiropractors will cry. A LOT of publishers count textbook sales as their bread and butter, because the poor students HAVE to buy them — which is why they are so damn overpriced. If the income from those textbooks shrinks by 90%, they’ll be hurtin’.

Likewise, if, as Amazon hopes, all books will be priced around $10, then publishers who regularly charge $25 for a new hardback (cheaper than a textbook) will also be crying. Or going out of business unless they jump on the wagon.

The upside for publishers is that with digital files there is a much lower distribution cost. There is still the expense of setting up and maintaining the e-commerce situation — which is not nothing, but it is mainly front-loaded. The ever-recurring printing costs, trucks, warehouses or even, ulp, percentages to bookstores go away. (“Hello, Tower Records, meet Barnes and Noble.”) So the printing and distribution costs will be significantly less — though there are still the costs and skills involved in marketing. As things move in that direction, it seems obvious that writers will begin to realize that the percentages and royalties they normally give up for those services — well, why should they pay them? Kinda like the music biz.

Another parallel to the music biz is that writers will be able to self-publish and distribute. Who knows what they’ll live on, but there won’t be any printing costs or distribution percentages to subtract from book sales. Just like the musicians (like me) who sell downloads from their own websites, writers will sometimes bypass publishers. Would Tom Clancy or Steven King need their publishers to print and distribute their latest? Hardly. Their fans, like Radiohead’s or those of NIN, will just buy directly from the author’s website. Amazon has already launched a test platform called Digital Text, which enables anyone to upload their work, suggest a retail price, and pocket 35% of sales.

Lastly, and scariest for publishers I guess, is that inevitably someone will hack the Kindle (or other formats) — and the books will become shareable… and copiable and infinitely reproducible, just like MP3s. People laughed at the record companies, with their reputations as money squanderers and for their waste and extravagance — but music hasn’t suffered, and writing and magazines might not either, especially if both writers and publishers can learn from the record companies and not pretend that publishing is any different.

08.24.09

2009-08-24T17:50:00-04:00

Did my second audiobook reading of the Bicycle Diaries NY chapter today. My first attempt, last week, was marred by maybe a combination of nerves and a wonky lower lip, as the braces had just gone in and were scraping the inside of my mouth. (I smashed a guitar into my bottom teeth about a week before the tour ended.) There’s less of that slurring and slushing going on now, and perhaps I am more confident and relaxed as well. It went pretty well, though I’m no David Sedaris or Ira Glass. The plan, still in the testing stage, is to add sounds and some subtle background music to the reading, to make it more like an NPR radio show than a typical book on tape (audiobook). We’ll see if it works. I recorded a bunch of bike sounds, traffic, trains, squeaky doors, sidewalk pedestrians and a lot more to add to the mix.

Another part of the plan, if it works, is to make each chapter available as a podcast-type download for 99¢. Like a song… only MUCH longer. That way, for only a dollar you could see if you like it — it’s not a big risk. The recording won’t be finished by the time the US version of the book comes out — as Penguin (the publisher) would have liked — but I think in the end that may be OK. As with record releases, trickling things out might keep the story alive a little longer.