memyselfandhim

The NFL is withholding secret footage from the fans. But what is...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:22:33 -0500

The NFL is withholding secret footage from the fans. But what is the real football game anyway - the one we watch on the screen or the one played on the field? In my piece for TheAtlantic.com I explore how our real lives may actually be the records of them - photos, Facebook updates, blog posts - not the events they document.

iPood: Why You Shouldn't Use Your Child As A Billboard

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:15:00 -0500

My recent piece on the GoodMenProject.com has been getting some nice traction on fashion blogs and parenting blogs - strange bedfellows!. Here’s the intro:

Kid’s clothing shouldn’t make a statement, David Zweig writes, especially if it’s the parent who’re making it.

I recently learned of a company in Brooklyn, where I live and am raising a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and an eight-month-old son, that sells shirts and “onesies” with an image of either an iPhone or Blackberry with “Put It Down” written on its face. As a part-time stay-at-home-dad who has spent many an afternoon at the playground cringing at the multitude of parents and caregivers glued to their smart phones, while at best paying half-attention to their playing toddlers, I appreciate the sentiment of the shirt. And yet something about it rubs me the wrong way, and I’m not talking about the abrasion of a cotton-poly blend.

Continued at GoodMenProject

So long Hitch

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:58:39 -0500

Very saddened by the news that Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. 1949-2011

I’m glad, even toward the end, he made it clear to all the religious people who were hoping for a last minute conversion that he still did not believe in God.

Another reason to love Louis C.K.

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:30:00 -0500

At the start of genius comedian Louis C.K.’s new standup concert - available for $5 - he tells the crowd

Don’t text or twitter during the show. Just live your life. Don’t keep telling people what you’re doing … Also - it lights up your big, dumb face.

Another interesting note: during the opening credits as the camera glides down one of the aisles in the crowd we see person after person texting, emailing, whatever-ing, with their phones. C.K., who films and edits his TV series himself, is a camera buff, and arranged to have the show for sale off his website without using a large corporation (which involved lots of forethought about the technology needed for downloads etc), no doubt has a keen awareness of technology and its effects. It’s telling that he chose to show the people on their phones in the opening of the film; this wasn’t just some random bit of B-roll that was stuck in there.

Where you been?

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:10:00 -0500

In a word: working.

A note about my short hiatus from the blog: I’ve been devoting nearly all of my energy to working on my book about FDS, which has left little time for the blog or other activities. I expect to get back to regular posts shortly.

Be back soon!

Public Intellectuals and Big Idea Books

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:37:00 -0400

Nathan Jurgenson, over at Cyborgology, has an interesting post where he laments what he fears may be a lack of public intellectuals doing rigorous work and/or a lack of academics having the ability to publish Big Idea books about technology that compete in the commercial marketplace (of ideas). My response is here:

What the Public Wants

1) Commercial publishers attempt to publish what they believe the public wants to read. They are not perfect at this of course, but that’s their goal. Meme Weaver, in the recent Atlantic, sheds some light on Jurgenson’s questions. To its point, I don’t see this as an issue of Internet/tech popular intellectuals vs Internet/tech scholars, but one of “what is the general public interested in” reading about. Commercial publishers are looking for a Big Idea book, that, generally, as the Atlantic piece said, has “an enthusiastically stated thesis, usually taking the form of “This changes everything and will make you rich, happy, and beautiful.”’ When the Atlantic writer’s book moved away from that angle to a more nebulous intellectual journey, his book contract was terminated. In some ways it seems what publishers/(presumably the public) wants - a soundbite idea on how to make more money or be happier or more self-actualized or whatever - is at odds with what the academy teaches as the notion of intellectual thought, i.e. the opposite of a soundbite. So it’s no wonder we are in the situation Jurgenson is talking about. With that said, thankfully, there are plenty of examples that are the exceptions to this rule. Carr’s “The Shallows” or “Shop Class As Soul Craft,” a book about the spiritual and intellectual value of hands on labor, written by a former think tanker - are examples, to me at least, of big, interesting ideas, backed by rigorous thought, sold successfully as popular books. Would they work as academic texts, perhaps not, but that doesn’t mean they’re not intellectual.

Public Intellectuals With a Small p

2) While there were, and still are, “public intellectuals,” I’d argue they’ve always been public with a small “p.” Susan Sontag was HUGE, and her books are still read by those in the academy and the occasional nerd like myself not in the academy. But even someone like her, ultimately, was relatively invisible to the general public. Yes, some of her ideas perhaps percolated through indirectly to the mainstream, but it’s not like the average Joe was thumbing through On Photography while sitting on the toilet.

Public Intellectuals Aren’t Who We Think They Are

3) I suggest there are Public Intellectuals that academics could, and should, be proud of but they largely are not in the form Jurgenson likely is thinking of. I’d argue that Jonathan Franzen - by covering issues of technology, globalization, classism, environmentalism, and more - both with his fiction, and with some of his New Yorker pieces, is a public intellectual, even though he hasn’t written a Big Idea book. Perhaps some of the most intellectually rigorous, and publicly impactful thinkers are more in the arts than the world of business book peddlers. Jurgenson presumably agrees with this notion because he had artists included in the Theorizing the Web conference he chaired. At least in my own experience, I’m generally more intellectually inspired by sharp filmmakers and fictions writers than the latest Big Idea book. I’m not saying there aren’t some terrific Big Idea books that are rigorous and engaging at the same time (for a layperson) but, Jurgenson is right, more often than not they do seem to be subtly, or not, aimed at the business crowd. Which is shame, of course, that the framework within which the public is taught to think about big ideas is that their core must always be reduced to “how does this relate to me being more successful” in business or at obtaining a fictitious maximum happiness level.

The Burden of Too Much Knowledge

4) Last, a point about academics writing popular books. As a non-academic who has lectured at a number of academic conferences, and read (or attempted to read) a number of academic books, I’ve found that a large majority of the lectures I attended at these conferences, which were nearly all by professors or grad students, were boring for me as a layperson. And I’m a layperson who is very far on the end of the nerdy academic spectrum. Among several common problems with them, they almost always seemed weighted down by referencing the heroes of their respective fields - McLuhan, Ong, Ellul for the media folks, Foucault et al for the sociologists, etc - rather than coming up with Big Ideas on their own. In a way it’s perhaps the curse of too much knowledge. I’ve been told more than once by professors who have seen me lecture or have read about my work that the reason it seems to be creating the buzz it has in the academy, and outside the academy, is precisely because I’m not an academic. I’ve been able to distill some new ideas down to a level that regular people instantly understand, yet also are intellectually rigorous enough that academics find them compelling. As one communications professor said to me when I asked him why he and some of his colleagues were so supportive of my work, if I was in the academy, with years of training and research on all the giants, I’d likely not have been able to frame my ideas in the fresh way I have done. Anecdotally at least, from my time at many conferences, this certainly seems to be the case. To be clear, I’m not saying there aren’t academics with big, fresh, ideas, but by and large it seems most thinkers may need to be outside the ivory tower’s conventional framework of study, perhaps, to think of, or at least frame things in a perspective that is engaging and new enough to both have the respect of academics yet also connect with a larger audience.

This is a great story of the moment that’s made a splash...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:05:21 -0400

This is a great story of the moment that’s made a splash online, and then “graduated” to the inevitable Today Show appearance. The sensation started with a YouTube video of 29 year old Sarah Churman, who has been deaf her whole life, hearing her own voice for the first time after a sophisticated, surgically implanted hearing device was turned on.

There’s not to much to comment on the video, other than that it’s wonderful and heartwarming. However something jumped out at me when I watched her Today Show appearance. Can you find what it is?

It can’t be a mistake that Sarah’s right arm, sporting a sleeve of tattoos in the YouTube video, was obscured behind her husband’s back during the whole interview. Fascinating. What exactly were the Today Show producers afraid of? That if Sarah didn’t look wholesome enough that the story would somehow lose some of its appeal? And why would Sarah agree to this character alteration? I’m sorry, but I find it nearly implausible that her ink-coated arm just happened to be hidden the whole time.

My latest video - it further explains Fiction Depersonalization...

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:21:11 -0400

My latest video - it further explains Fiction Depersonalization Syndrome, and details its impact in the academic community and among the general public.

New Errol Morris Book on Photography

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:31:00 -0400

New Errol Morris Book on Photography:

I’m very excited to read the new Errol Morris book Believing is Seeing. It’s based on a series of posts Morris did for a New York Times blog. I have read a number of the posts, which were fascinating and exhaustive, and as a Times book reviewer noted, lie “just to the pleasurable side of tedium.” Morris is interested in quite simply (and broadly)

… the relationship between photographs and reality.

In his blog posts, and now the book, Morris dissects various photographs, most of which are iconic, trying to debunk common perceptions or myths about them. In the process I was reminded that our current disrespect, or even disgust, at “photoshopping” ostensibly documentary photos is perhaps unfairly singular; ALL photos are edited in some way or another, and this is true from the time of the very first photos back in the 1800s. When a photo is taken the choice about what to keep in the frame and what to keep out, when to shoot the photo, which photo of a series to publish or make public, cropping, lighting, developing, all have significant effects, in many cases just as influential (if not more so) than digital retouching, on the final photo we see. Photos are, of course, most definitely not reality. And their danger is that they often so convincingly seem to be.

More and more, we are living in a world of photographs and video. Most of the events we experience today are not “live” and in person but mediated through these images. (And even when we are experiencing events live, in person, we often are recording them at the same time anyway, which alters the experience.) Morris’s deep explorations into the complexities and distortions of photographs is an important primer to help train us to be more critical of the images that dominant our perceptions, indeed our experience of life today.

performance art in the age of YouTube

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:29:00 -0400

There’s a great article/discussion in the Times inspired by the recent Ocularpation: Wall Street, a street “protest” featuring naked people as a metaphor for the lack of transparency in our financial institutions. The act itself wasn’t particularly interesting, but it is a great launching point for broaching the broader context of performance art in the digital age. And for that matter, not just performance art, but the value of live experience versus “mediated” experience. In the piece James Westcott hit the nail on the head when he noted:

The ubiquity of digital spectacles and curiosities today is one reason performance art has had its thunder stolen. Another is more insidious — a new form of subjectivity prompted by platforms like Facebook: the constant need to Perform Yourself (which could be YouTube’s slogan, rather than “Broadcast Yourself”). It’s not surprising, then, that many people were blasé about the nudity on Wall Street.

Indeed, while our online selves can function as augmentations of our not-online selves, I’d argue they also function as separate entities entirely, crafted and updated as a result of a hyper-self-awareness that generally far exceeds our degree of self-awareness in our not-online lives.

I’m going to quote his next thoughts at length because, again, they are spot on:

Marina Abramovic’s incredibly popular three-month performance at the Museum of Modern Art last year — where people sat and looked her in the eye for as long as they could take it — seemed to mark a crucial transition from the physical to the virtual in performance art.

In the flesh, the pure presence and catharsis of agenda-less eye contact (causing many of the 1,400 sitters to break down in tears) became, online, an exercise in obsessivecataloging and celebrity-spotting. Whereas the performance itself opened up vertiginous depths of empathy, the online experience was addictive and alienating.

Through the alchemy of the Internet, the performance loses some of its luster. From gazing to gawking, total immersion to idle browsing, the level of engagement is no longer the same. But at least more people could engage with it than the few who are part of the art world.

There were three other commenters who all touched on the notion of the value of live events or art, where multiple senses are engaged in a way that the internet is not capable of doing.

I recently interviewed street artist Gaia (excerpts will be posted soon on this site) and he discussed many of these same issues in how they relate to street art. Namely, I prodded him to explain how the knowledge that he will be posting images of his art on the web immediately after he creates it on the street affects his creative process, and the experience for the viewer of his art online versus the viewer on the street.

As technologically mediated* experience becomes more and more the norm, rather than live direct experience, the myriad ways, both nuanced and blatant, that we are affected is a source of increasing fascination for me.

*Disclaimer for academics and semantics police: Yes, all experience is technically “mediated.” When I refer to mediated or unmediated experience I generally mean the difference between experience that is either direct between two or more people in the live vicinity of each other or direct between a person and the natural environment, versus experience that solely occurs through, or that is augmented/influenced by, (hi)tech electronic equipment such as smart phones that connect us with the Internet and others, take photos and video, etc., and even (lower)tech media like newspapers, magazines.

How Technology Fosters Instant Nostalgia Through Self-Documentation

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:07:58 -0400

Life As Document

Nathan Jurgenson at the Cyborgology blog has a wonderfully comprehensive and fascinating post on the rise in popularity of faux vintage photograph apps like Hipstamatic which instantly turn a regular iPhone photo into a retro-looking pic by altering their color, light and other elements. With this effect the photos can achieve a convincing style of a photo taken thirty or more years ago - perhaps like an old Polaroid found in a drawer or a Nan Goldin print in a gallery. [Note: I was led to this post because it was a precursor to Jurgenson’s post on Facebook and self-documentation, which I referenced here].

In the essay, Jurgenson touches on a number of areas of great interest to me, as they deeply relate to my research into FDS. Some of his suppositions nicely support the FDS hypothesis. Such as when he states, ”social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past.” And “social media users have become always aware of the present as a potential document to be consumed by others. Facebook fixates the present as always a future past.” As we experience life more and more as something to be documented, rather than something to be lived, we, ultimately, are forced to view ourselves, and indeed life itself, as a document. In turn, this documentary eye, out of necessity, distances or depersonalizes us from ourselves, forcing us to view ourselves from afar. As a passage from my novel Swimming Inside the Sun darkly put it:

For so long: I have felt the crushing disappointment of middling days; I’ve drifted away as if the only way to bear it was to watch my life from afar, frustrated and powerless, relegated to the role of mere observer of an insipid play.

* * *

Capturing Time

But the real juice of Jurgenson’s essay is his exploration into how these apps relate to the phenomenon that philosopher Fredric Jameson called a nostalgia for the present. Jurgenson writes:

The explosion of ubiquitous self-documentation possibilities, and the audience for our documents that social media promises, has positioned us to live life in the present with the constant awareness of how it will be perceived as having already happened. We come to see what we do as always a potential document, imploding the present with the past, and ultimately making us nostalgic for the here and now.

My knowledge of Jameson is cursory at best, but my sense is that when he talked about a nostalgia for the present he was saying we perceive our lives’ events (and even nostalgia itself) in a historical context (which roughly is the interpretation Jeffrey Herron discussed here), as we package our lives into eras like the “fifties” or the “eighties.” I don’t necessarily disagree with this notion, however, it’s not something I’ve thought about often. Instead, nostalgia for the present, to me, has always been about the personal, events and moments occurring on the island of my own life, not thought of in some larger cultural context.

Dating as far back as when I was a teenager, I’ve been plagued by a periodic sensation of being separated from the moment. This occurs especially during emotionally powerful moments (which often includes the mundane but poignant moments of everyday life). This feeling, which sometimes reaches a dissociative point of depersonalization, is one where rather than being in the moment, looking out from the first-person, I am detached, aware of myself and of the moment itself. Reflecting on our lives of course is natural, healthy, and indeed essential. But what I am describing is an involuntary sort of flash of reflection, a sense of reflecting on the moment while its occurring (as opposed to reflection by its standard retrospective-contemplative definition).

What I’ve come to realize over time is that this flash reflection, which is always shrouded in a cloud of panicked melancholy, is an attempt to capture time. The wrenching beauty of seeing my daughter smile, even one of a thousand smiles in a day, sometimes is a moment of such power that my mind instantly wants to preserve it forever. This preservation, with its gripping poignancy and import - for lack of a better analogy or semantic tools to explain - is quite like a vintage photograph, hovering right there in space, frozen, while, of course, time keeps rolling on. During these points in time, what I called Frozen Moments in Swimming Inside the Sun, the past, present, and future collapse into one.

I often feel a grip of sadness in moments of great joy because I’m unable to escape an awareness that they’re ending. Which of course prevents me from fully enjoying the experience. It’s a catch 22 - in order to fully enjoy something, in a way, you need to not be aware you’re enjoying it or how important it is, because once you become aware you are, to some degree, removed from the moment, alienated from the experience.

In fact, it sometimes seems I feel this way not just in moments, but existentially, a permanent low-grade bittersweet sensation. A smile that is also a wince. Everything wonderful must end, of course, including life itself. Instant nostalgia is cherishing life by mourning its inexorable end. After all, how can you cherish life without reflection? And how can you reflect without mourning the loss of what has passed? (Side note: not surprisingly, many of my favorite pieces of music, films and other works of art - at least abstractly - evoke this complex joyful wistfulness. One of my first, and still favorite examples of this is Harold and Maude.)

* * *

How Technology Fosters Instant Nostalgia Through Self-Documentation

Now we have the technological tools to harness these nostalgia-for-the-present feelings. For many years our technology has enabled us, in one sense or another, to preserve moments. Language, painting, and more recently, cameras all enable this. But in the past few years we’ve developed a nearly limitless ability for documentation, which in many ways is synonymous with preservation. The most obvious of these tools are digital cameras and video recorders, and of course smart phones which incorporate both of those technologies but also allow for myriad additional documenting tools, from Facebook updates to tweets to mapping apps, and on and on. Indeed, as I commented on before, there is an unstoppable movement of “self-tracking.” Smart phones are like little electronic pushers, always on, always at our side, as they prey on this desire.

We document to show others, to show ourselves or both. But it’s our documentation as an act of preservation of moments for ourselves that’s most meaningful, and perhaps troubling to me. As I wrote, ever since I was a teenager (and perhaps even before then), I have had these Frozen Moments, where my mind seemingly was trying to capture time. Yet now with an iPhone generally always on my person, not to mention a DSLR toted along on trips both far and near, this innate tendency (pathology?) to preserve moments in my mind is advanced by tools that take that image, that feeling, and make it tangible, or at least digitally viewable. Because of this I simultaneously love and loathe this technological augmentation of my mind’s intention. Being able to record in this way is both a burden and a gift. I get to easily create wonderful documents of times I want to preserve, (and enjoy the creativity of making those documents - the Sontagian “poet and scribe” that Jurgenson referenced). Yet taking photographs and making other documents only serves to amplify a tendency to separate from the moment that already is a largely unwelcome habit of my mind.

The Claude Glass and Facebook

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:30:03 -0400

There’s a great post by Nathan Jurgenson and discussion over at Cyborgology on the Claude Glass - a small tinted mirror, popular a few hundred years ago with painters as a framing and coloring tool - documentation of experience, and Facebook.

Check it out

Jane's Addiction - who is the real performer?

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 17:19:00 -0400

I recently learned that Jane’s Addiction are playing a free show at NYC’s Terminal 5 on July 25th. Why is the show free? 1) Because there is a corporate sponsor: electronics company LG. But also 2) because the fans will actually being working during the show. From the LG press release:

The technological force of LG is uniting with YouTube, the largest video-sharing site on the web, to create a one-of-a-kind concert experience that will push senses into another dimension. On July 25, LG Mobile Phones and YouTube will give Jane’s Addiction and tech fans the exclusive opportunity to watch and be a part of the World’s First 3D User-Generated Concert event. Adding a whole new dimension to the concert experience,attendees will use LG Thrill 4G devices to shoot their own 3D video of what is sure to be an electrifying performance. The 3D creations will then be collected and combined by LG into one 60-minute documentary - culminating in what will soon be known as the World’s First 3D User-Generated Concert. Consumers watch the concert live on YouTube (7/25) or at an AT&T store on the new LG Thrill 4G. Fans can tune back into the LG Thrill YouTube 3D channel on August 4th to view the premiere of the 3D documentary. Visit LGThrill4G.com for more information about the concert and the awe-inspiring glasses-free 3D LG Thrill 4G exclusively on AT&T.

There’s an interesting meta-ness here, where the fans will actually function 1) as employees of the band (and LG), filming a video for them, and 2) as knowing actors in said video. Yes, technically anything filmed is a document of something, but this in no way will result in a document simply of a band performing for its fans. Here, as much as the band, it’s the fans who are performing; their role is being “fans.” I’d argue it is nearly impossible for any fan, armed with a camera, and tasked to film a full concert they know will air as an official documentary on the web, to feel and behave unselfconsciously simply as a fan.

Have you ever noticed that any time during a concert when a lead singer announces something like “this show is being filmed for MTV!” that the crowd goes apeshit? It’s the second that people shift from being in the moment as fans to being actors playing fans, and apparently it’s inherent that no one wants to appear that they are at an event that’s not completely awesome. What’s interesting and new about this Jane’s show is that not only do the fans know they are being recorded, but they are also doing the recording, moving them yet another step further from being present, in the moment.

An aside - does LG honestly expect consumers to keep this all straight: 3D LG Thrill 4G … LG Thrill YouTube 3D channel. LG, 3D, 4G - the wording and acronyms on this project and for the products are just nonsense when read together.

Robert Montgomery on advertising

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:17:00 -0400

Robert Montgomery on advertising

Quantified Self - Taking Self Awareness to the Next Level

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:20:14 -0400

I just got tipped off about a conference that took place last month called the Quantified Self Conference. From the conference materials:

Quantified Self 2011 is a conference for users and tool makers interested in self-tracking systems. It will be a “working meeting” for the QS community

The “QS community”! I should have known that something like this existed. From the QS website:

Are you interested in self-tracking? Do you use a computer, mobile phone, electronic gadget, or pen and paper to record your work, sleep, exercise, diet, mood, or anything else? Would you like to share your methods and learn from what others are doing? If so, you are in the right place.

These people are obviously on the vanguard for this self-tracking stuff, but I suspect this is where the culture as a whole is headed as our tools for self-tracking - via smart phone apps, or whatever else - become ever more ubiquitous and easier to use.

(Obviously) what interests me most here is what are the psychological, neurological, and societal implications when one tracks every facet of his life from diet to moods to sleep to locations with such relentlessness and precision. The conference materials stated that they would “also explore the potential effects of self-tracking on ourselves and society.” I’m interested to hear what was discussed.

60 Minutes and False Equivalency

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 09:53:00 -0400

So I watched a DVRd episode of 60 Minutes last night. In a segment where Steve Kroft interviewed J. Craig Venter, the biologist who sequenced the human genome (among other accomplishments), Kroft discussed some of Venter’s current work. While talking with Venter about his project on developing alternative fuels, Kroft said this:

…So you’re trying to cut down on CO2 in the atmosphere, which people believe causes global warming…

Excuse me: which people believe! I’m fascinated whether that line was spoken off the cuff or if Kroft, either on his own, or via direction from his producers specifically added in the qualifier people believe. Why didn’t he just say “trying to cut down on CO2 in the atmosphere, which causes global warming”? By adding the qualifier, not to mention that he said people believe not even scientists believe, he gave a subtle but very important message to the viewers that casts doubt on, what is by any reasonable measure, a consensus in the scientific community.

Was 60 Minutes afraid to offend Big Oil advertisers? Was it journalistic knee-jerk false equivalency? Is Kroft a climate change skeptic? Or was it inadvertent?

Huxley vs Orwell via Postman

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:14:16 -0400

I just got turned on to this excellent cartoon by Stuart McMillen. It’s a comic strip retelling of/homage to Neil Postman’s work in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html

A Small Nod To Globalization Not Being As Bad As I Often Tend To...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:38:00 -0400

A Small Nod To Globalization Not Being As Bad As I Often Tend To Think It Is

I just got back a couple weeks ago from lecturing about FDS at the Society for Philosophy and Technology’s biennial conference (aka SPT2011) at the University of North Texas. While there, I met up with my pal Yoni, a philosophy grad student from Belgium. Out for beers one night in Denton (good college town btw!) somehow it came up that both of us are huge Neil Diamond fans, and Yoni was in fact going to see him perform the following week. After a few poorly (but enthusiastically) sung renditions of his classics we hit upon Sweet Caroline. When I got to the fan response “so good! so good! so good!” part, though, Yoni was silent and looked at me like I was crazy. To my surprise, apparently the “so good” chant is only done in America (or at least not sung in Belgium).

The first time I heard the sing-along chant was 1990. I was a sophomore in high school and visited my sister in college, where, at a party all the students shouted out “So Good!” with a glee only drunken 19-year-olds can muster. Ever since then I can’t hear the song without also, (if not singing “so good” myself, then certainly) hearing it in my head.

Thinking more about the chant, and its absence outside the states, I did some quick searching online and found that Sweet Caroline - and the “so good” chant - is a bit of a phenomenon at US sporting events, especially at Boston Red Socks games, where, according to wikipedia, it’s been played in the 8th inning during every game since 2002. The same entry lists a bunch of other teams, both college and professional, of football, hockey, and baseball that also apparently play Sweet Caroline as a tradition. Because I don’t follow sports (except for the NY Giants), I had no idea of the stadium phenomenon of Sweet Caroline. Alas, sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own country.

A particularly solid example of the “so good so good so good” chant, 40,000 people strong, complete with terrific stadium echo, is the above clip from Fenway Park, home of the Red Socks.

All this, albeit tangentially, reminds me of my friend Brian Gresko’s recent piece on going to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that used to be cutting edge, and now is as edgy as a butter knife. This change, in part, has to do with the standard progression of “transitioning” neighborhoods: artists first, then hipsters follow the artists, then the bankers and lawyers follow the hipsters, then the families move in and the priced-out artists move elsewhere (rinse, repeat). Brian wondered if NYC has now fully become lame, Disneyfied. To a degree he’s right, the globalization of brands, of chain stores taking over ever-increasing amounts of real estate from mom n pop shops, of people in France wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music, watching the same movies, as people in New York, Sau Paulo, and Tokyo, has indeed affected New York, but it’s a global phenomenon. As New York goes, so goes most of the world - or visa versa. An ironic counterpoint to this phenomenon worth mentioning, however, is that in the past few years there has been an explosion of Etsy-type artisanal shops and services in Brooklyn, from handmade pickles to high-end made-to-order furniture by reclaimed-wood-only carpenters.

My Neil Diamond story, though, is sort of my ideal kind of globalization: it involves the unifying aspects where people around the world can share in the same thing - where a guy from New York can have a moment of joyful singing camaraderie with a guy from Belgium while in a bar in Texas - yet it’s not so overwhelming as to eliminate the joy of little geographic/cultural differences like the America-only “so good” chant.

Funny post script: Yoni reported that when the “so good” sing along section of Sweet Caroline arrived during the show, Neil gestured to the audience but no one sang it, that is except for Yoni and his girlfriend. I’d like to think that perhaps they were sitting close enough for Neil to hear them.

Franzen = one of the best writers out there today

Mon, 30 May 2011 21:05:09 -0400

I don’t think I’ve ever done this before on the blog, but rather than write up commentary and reactions, I’m simply going to link to Jonathan Franzen’s NYTimes piece on how technology is the opposite of/enemy of/destroyer of love. It’s atom bomb level power and, at this time, I feel comfortable saying the piece speaks for itself.

God, I love Franzen. Just a couple weeks ago he destroyed me with his New Yorker feature on seeking isolation on an island ala Robinson Crusoe, with moving insights about his late friend, and hero of mine, David Foster Wallace.

The loss of the physical

Fri, 13 May 2011 18:05:00 -0400

There was a recent piece in the Times on the demise of cursive (or as I called it growing up - script) handwriting. Among various laments for a society now dominated by print handwriting, such as the higher likelihood of forgeries and the inability to be able to read old documents, one section of the article was noteworthy to me:

Sandy Schefkind, a pediatric occupational therapist in Bethesda, Md., and pediatric coordinator for the American Occupational Therapy Association, said that learning cursive helped students hone their fine motor skills.

“It’s the dexterity, the fluidity, the right amount of pressure to put with pen and pencil on paper,” Ms. Schefkind said, adding that for some students cursive is easier to learn than printing.

For some time I’ve morned - at least what I perceive to be - the decrease in the interest of younger people in physically playing musical instruments, giving way instead to the use of computers. While there is no doubt, considering the myriad computer plug-ins and programs, that there are more musically creative outlets for people today than ever before, something is lost when all of one’s creativity is removed from a physical act. Vigorously strumming a guitar or having one’s fingers fly over the strings of a violin, moving in an unconscious state via the miracle of muscle memory, you become one with your music in a way that cannot be replicated when it is solely an intangible act. It just wouldn’t be the same for me to press a button on a keyboard and sit back while I hear a guitar being strummed. I need to feel the vibrations of the wood against my chest, I need to feel the wires beneath my fingertips, I need to feel my arm churning downward. Something powerful happens when you tie the physical with the creative.

As we move further and further away from a physical environment toward more of an automated one, we are denying a basic component of what makes us human. True, we don’t need to do as many physical acts as we once did, and in many ways that is a good thing (I’m not inclined to rub two sticks together every time I need a fire to boil some water). But when the pendulum has swung too far into the realm of the mind or the automated, we lose the joy of physicality, not to mention the much-discussed ill health effects of inactivity.

While I wouldn’t necessarily include the act of writing in script as an essential joy, it’s still worth considering its loss from a sheer pleasure standpoint. My late aunt used to run a small calligraphy business doing wedding and bar-mitzvah invitations and the like. I remember being struck, as a child, when she told me how she simply enjoyed the act of writing, that she found it therapeutic (though I doubt she used that word with me at the time). Although I didn’t take any particular joy in writing as a kid, and her response initially seemed strange, I think on another level I did sort of “get” what she meant. But more than just joy, perhaps the physical act of writing affects us on an even a deeper, thought-processing level. Many “old school” novelists still write their manuscripts out by hand, a good portion of which are done in cursive, then type them out (or have someone else type them) into a word processing program. There is something about the physical flow of your hand on the paper, they often say, that affects how their ideas flow from their head. Here are two quotes from an essay that covers the topic in detail:

Graham Greene commented that ‘Some authors type their works, but I cannot do that. Writing is tied up with the hand, almost with a special nerve’ (Hammond, 1984).

Iris Murdoch insisted that: ‘The word processor is… a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness’ (Hammond, 1984). Elsewhere she asked how one could possibly write with ‘a machine between you and the page’. She preferred ‘the particular closeness’ of writing by hand (Hartill, 1989: 87)

Perhaps the philosophers say it best (more from that essay):

“In the early 1940s the philosopher Martin Heidegger expressed his horror at the proliferating use of the typewriter, seeing it as a threat to the special relationship between the word and the expressive movement of the hand: ‘The word no longer passes through the hand as it writes and acts authentically but through the mechanized pressure of the hand. The typewriter snatches script from the essential realm of the hand - and this means the hand is removed from the essential realm of the word. The word becomes something “typed”’

We should be very careful about our seemingly inexorable separation of physicality from creativity. And not only the separation from creativity, but from an essential joy of being an animal and using the tools - our muscles, bones and all the connective tissues - of our bodies. We may not need to get out of our chairs often, if at all, these days, but I always feel better after a walk than I do after sitting staring at a screen.