GOAL:
I like how Flickr automatically generates six different sized photos on upload while preserving the original.
Not wanting to be dependent on Flickr for this, I wanted to learn how to do this automagically with my computer. With a developing awareness of the power of Unix, I realized that a command line function was probably the way to go.
So I learned about ImageMagick.
INSTALL:
The recommended method for install is through MacPorts, wherein you simply type
ports install ImageMagick
in Terminal, but I’d tried some MacPorts stuff over the summer which hadn’t worked so I avoided this in lieu of downloading the package from the ImagaMagick host site.
On install however, I immediately ran into a CPU error. This was because the download currently on offer for OS X is complied for 64bit processors, which is fine if you’re using a fairly new machine. My 2006 MacBook is still running with the now obsolete 32 bit processor. Googling this issue led me to a posting on Stack Overflow, where someone with the same problem figured out how to compile the binaries using one of the Unix distributions.
I tried this, but at first I couldn’t get it to work. The issue, it turned out, was that I didn’t have an install of Snow Leopard’s Xcode Developer tools. I’d installed the Developer tools years ago, and so have had the Developer folder on my hard drive, but I also had two hard drive crashes and a couple of system restores in between. This meant that while the files were represented, some of them were out of date, and while I’d updated my system to Snow Leopard, I hadn’t matched the update to the Developer tools.
So, using the Snow Leopard install disk, I ran the install process and got my system up to spec. I then figured I should try MacPorts again, suspecting that my earlier issues had just been resolved via my install of the Dev tools. This turned out to be the case: I installed MacPorts, and on complete, went to Terminal and typed the formula. The list of dependencies began to scroll down the screen, and after about an hour (seriously, it took a while), I had ImageMagick installed, one appropriate for my 32bit system.
However, I couldn’t get ‘display’ to function, but I realized this wasn’t necessary for my ultimate purpose.
MAGICK:
Now that I had my system ready for processing, the next step was to determine the code string to process, which for a relative Unix newbie like me, wasn’t intuitive.
Some Googling helped with this, and the site Perturb.org gave a list, from which I tried this one. First, I cd‘d into the folder that contained the copies of the images I wanted to work on. Then, confirming my location either with the ls or the pwd command, I typed:
for i in `ls *.jpg`; do convert -resize 50% -quality 80 $i conv_$i; done
This didn’t do what I ultimately wanted, but it allowed me to confirm that ImageMagick would work, and begin to give me some clues as to what was going on.
With the help of this post on Cubiq.org, I got this thumbnail script to generate a 75×75 square (as per Flickr’s size):
for i in `ls *.jpg`; do convert -size 75x75 -thumbnail 75x75^ -gravity center -extent 75x75 $i th_$i; done
How this works:i in `ls *.jpg`; that is, make i a variable ($i) containing the listing (ls) of the folder, specifically, the jpgs (*.jpg) of that folder (excluding any other that might exist) and then convert them to -size 75×75 (reiterate a thumbnail of 75×75) with the -gravity of the image centered and output as a file named th_(name in variable $i)
This takes a file named 001.jpg and outputs th_001.jpg
In addition, I had a whole folder of .tif’s which I wanted to convert first to .jpg. Therefore, I used mogrify, which comes with a warning. As it operates on your files it will overwrite the originals if you don’t output them to a folder, as I did. Needless to say, it is always best practice to process copies of images, and never the original/onlycopy.
I mkdir a directory within the folder I cd’d into called jpg. Then, I typed:
mogrify -path jpg -format jpg *.tif
This command converted all the tif files (*.tif) and placed them in the “jpg” folder I’d created (via -path)
Transcribing to Human: use the mogrify command (-path jpg) and place in the jpg folder and change all the files to jpg (-format jpg) that are tiff (*.tiff)
I was now understood how this worked enough to modify it for my end use. I realized that ‘mogrify’ was a better command to use than the ‘convert’ and that I could make a directory as part of the initial conversion, by adding it to the string. I also looked into sharpening the thumbnails, as I was comparing the test runs against those generated by Flickr.
Here, you can see that the Flickr image is a little bit sharper.
I learned that the ‘unsharp’ command is incorrectly named because it is actually what we’d think of as the ‘sharpenning’ option. Thus, my new 75×75 thumbnail command read:
mkdir sq; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -size 75x75 -thumbnail 75x75^ -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -extent 75x75 -path sq $i sq_$i; done
Human: make a directory called `sq` and while the `i` variable is what you find when you do a `ls` that are jpgs, mogrify them to size 75×75 as a thumbnail with the gravity of the image on the centre, and then sharpen them, and make sure they are 75×75 and output them to the `sq` folder you just made, and save them as sq_(what-you-found-when-you-did-the-listing-of-the-folder-of-the-jpgs).
I was happy to see that `unsharp` produced a thumbnail that seemed visibly better than Flickr’s!
Thumbnails are a special case. For simple resizing, the script can also be pared down. I noticed that Flickr resizes according to set widths: 100, 240, 500, 640, 1024. The next issue I had to figure out was how to get ImageMagick to scale proportionally to a set width. I learned that if you give ImageMagick’s mogrify one size, it will assume it is the width and resize accordingly. Thus, to generate an image 100 pixels wide:
mkdir 100; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '100' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 100 $i sq_$i; done
From here, it’s just a matter of entering whatever size you want. As noted above, my script includes a mkdir folder called 100, but that isn’t required, it’s just good to have the output directed to a folder so that the files aren’t overwritten in the processing.
Finally, here are my current list of resizing abracadabra scripts.
mkdir sq; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -size 75x75 -thumbnail 75x75^ -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -extent 75x75 -path sq $i sq_$i; done
mkdir 100; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '100' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 100 $i sq_$i; done
mkdir 240; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '240' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 240 $i sq_$i; done
mkdir 500; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '500' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 500 $i sq_$i; done
mkdir 640; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '640' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 640 $i sq_$i; done
(The photo is of my father examining the body of his 1939 Oldsmobile in the driveway of our home in Etobicoke in the late 1970s).
In Neal Stephenson’s new novel Reamde, there is a passing reference (page 33) to an article that the main character once read about virtual currencies. Given that this character is a draft-dodger who lives in British Columbia, chances are pretty good that the article was this one published in The Walrus in the spring of 2004. (And which I linked to on my blog-project Goodreads at the time).
The article in turn references the work of Edward Castronova, whose paper on this subject can be found here.
(Joseph Wright, The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone (1771), depicting the discovery of phosphorus by Hennig Brand in 1669).
1. The Baroque Cycle
During the first week of the summer I discovered Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Browsing on Amazon, going through the ‘others-who-bought-what-you-have-bought-have-also-bought’ my eye was caught by the English cover of System of the World. In reading more, I learned that it was the third novel in the trilogy, which began with Quicksilver. I downloaded the sample chapter of Quicksilver to my Kindle.
Now, I’d seen these novels in used & remaindered bookstores for years, but they had never caught my interest, especially based on the blurbed summaries printed on the back. However, you could say that I’d reached the point where my background interests had finally intersected with a series of novels set in the 17th Century (listening to the Ideas series Origins of the Modern Public almost immediately prior to discovering the Cycle probably helped) and the sample chapter intrigued me. I dived in, taking two months to read all three books (as well as the ‘sequel’ Cryptonomicon).
Quicksilver begins with an account of the alchemist Enoch Root arriving in 1713 Boston to seek out one Daniel Waterhouse. This is noteworthy as one of the underlying themes of the Cycle is how the 18th Century Enlightenment had its roots in the foundation of the English Royal Society in the 17th Century, and how its letter-based communication network spanned Europe. The immediate predecessor to this activity was the Europe-spanning Esoteric Brotherhood of Alchemy, which given a scientific overlay in the 19th Century became Chemistry.
The character Enoch is depicted as visiting the Royal Society in 1670 to demonstrate the new substance phosphorous, which can be distilled from urine. This method of creating phosphorous is used at various plot points in the novels, and the substance itself features prominently in many scenes. So I was surprised when in browsing my RSS feeds Saturday to see the following article on io9.com.
2. Alchemy & Art
The Baroque Cycles‘s alchemy sub-plot reminded me of something I’d first heard in the late 1990s. In November 1998 CBC broadcast an Ideas episode which consisted of a recorded round-table discussion on art, featuring Ideas producer Max Allen, then Globe & Mail art critic Blake Gopnik, as well as Liz Magor and Diana Nemiroff. At one point (starts at 26:27min) Allen asks if their talk on gallery-based art might sound as strange to a far future audience as we would find a conversation on alchemy. This analogy between art & alchemy struck me as particularly apt, and I remember mentioning this point to a friend. My concern was that in pursuing art I was doing something wasteful, whereas his response was, “I wouldn’t mind doing ‘alchemy'”. His answer essentially recognized the aesthetic of doing something perhaps useless but also intriguing and fun in and of itself. This ‘use-based’ critique of arts is one happens all the time and it incredibly hard to avoid. My friend’s answer in turn, is also hard to avoid – that there are some things in life that are worth doing simply because it’s fun to do them (aka “the journey is the destination”).
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/audio/1998-11_CBC_IDEAS_youcallthatart.mp3 ] (Ideas from November 1998 • Lister Sinclair! • Download Mp3)
So, in reading The Cycle, and with this memory, I found it surprising when I read the following tweet:
This immediate association between art & alchemy in light of my reading and memories rose my eyebrows. Then, more recently, the following line occurred in another article about art:
“Through the alchemy of the Internet, the performance loses some of its luster.”
My suspicion is that this relationship between alchemy & the arts will become more and more prominent over the next few months (years?) and that maybe it’s because art & alchemy are similar to each other, as both being traditions with long histories that disappeared. Art, as it has been structured and known, is changing into something else, primarily through ‘the alchemy of the internet’. Given that we are so immersed in mediated images, it seems more and more impossible for a static artistic image or a mise en scene (‘installation’) to have much resonance, where resonance is proportional to its level of reproduction on the net (ie, today a famous image is blogged).
Under today’s conditions, a cultural product seems relevant if it goes viral. For the record, Liz Magor answered Max Allen’s question in 1998 (which presumed the future would consider 20th Century art & culture to be mass products like movies and television) by stating that assumes things have value simply because they are popular.
Of course, those who have known me for a long time will point out that I was once a part of the Instant Coffee collective, and that in August 2003 we put on a show called Alchemy & Mysticism. This was ‘Alchemy & Mysticism #2″ as #1 was the title of a collection of art videos shown in the Urban Disco Trailer earlier in June. The title was taken from the Taschen book, and chosen mostly for humour, as it had nothing to do with the content of either collection.
“He might have shielded himself from the cold and the wind by walking up the length of the Privy Gallery, but he’d had quite enough of Whitehall, so instead he went outside, crossed a couple of courts, and emerged at the front of the Banqueting House, directly beneath where Charles I had had his head lopped off, lo these many years ago. Cromwell’s men had kept him prisoner in St. James’s and then walked him across the Park for his decapitation. Four-year-old Daniel, sitting on Drake’s shoulders in the plaza, had watched every one of the Kings’s steps” – Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver (2003)
A young Daniel Waterhouse sits atop his father’s shoulders
~
The execution of Charles I occurred on Tuesday 30 January 1649, depicted as rather mild day (one of many inaccuracies) in the 1970 film Cromwell from whence these images are taken. Charles I, played by Alec Guinness is shown addressing the crowd in this scene, wearing a white shirt and a cape, delivering the lines recorded by historians, “I shall go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be”.
In reality, historians record that Charles wore two shirts (to prevent shivers being mistaken for fear) and this waistcoat, shown in the British Archives at the beginning of the BBC’s The Seven Ages of Britain – The Age of Revolution (viewable online from TVO.org).
In introducing the waistcoat, host David Dimbleby notes that it is made of silk, and points out the details of the stitching and the buttons.
Then he notes the brown stains on the front. These are the blood stains from that day three hundred and sixty two years ago.
One can see from these images that Charles I was a small man, reportedly 5’3″.
Monday, August 8th, 2011 @ 11:00 AM
BA1160 (Bahen Building)
University of Toronto
40 Saint George Street
“INFORMATION IS QUANTUM”
How physics has helped us understand what information is and what can be
done with it.
Biography:
Charles H. Bennett received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970 for molecular dynamics studies (computer simulation of molecular motion).
Following graduation, he worked at the Argonne Laboratory for two years. Since 1972, he has been at IBM where he has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information. He developed a practical system of quantum cryptography in collaboration with Gilles Brassard and John Smolin. As well, he is also known for discovering “quantum teleportation”. Other research interests include algorithmic information theory and the physics of computation. Bennett is known as one of the founding fathers of quantum information theory.
Bennett is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the 2008 Harvey Prize by Technion and the 2006 Rank Prize in opto-electronics.
For more information, please go to http://cqiqc.physics.utoronto.ca/ .
In October of last year (October 2010) the TTC showed off its new subway cars to the press for the first time, saying they would go into service “in the new year”.
By March 2011 the cars had not yet entered service. Then, an update: it was taking a longer than expected to adapt the cars to the system’s infrastructure, and that they would enter service in June.
May 2011 featured a repeat of October’s press-performance, when seemingly amnesiated editors essentially replayed the PR from six months prior.
Finally, July 21st 2011, the subway entered service. The TTC saw fit to Tweet the trains location throughout the day (an example )
We are informed that these new trains will replace the Yonge line’s T1 cars, which will be moved to the Bloor line, currently running H1 cars. The H1 cars, in turn, are going to Nigeria, for a subway system being built in Lagos. It is perhaps a low blow to say that this proves Toronto truly has had a third-world transit system.
“Dramatic growth in consumption has happened in the last thirty years: a period when the arts and the humanities have been unambitious in their efforts to guide and educate taste. The accumulated wisdom of humanity, concerning what is beautiful, interesting, fine or serious, was – to a large extent – left to one side at the precise time when the need for guidance was greatest, and when guidance was hardest to give, and so required maximum effort and confidence.
When one looks at celebrated figures of those worlds – such as Andy Warhol or today, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst – and asks what does their art say to people about consuming, the answer is very little. I do not want to attack those particular individuals; they seem, amoung other, to be creations of a profoundly damaged culture that tells itself it is being clever and sophisticated and up to date for the wrong reasons. The cultural laurels – and a species of authority that goes with them – have been awarded in unfortunate directions. Mockery, irony and archness are not what we need.
While the works of these artists have gained amazing commercial success, they suggest a loss of purpose in the arts. Loss, that is, of a really central and powerful claim upon the education of taste: upon the sense of what is beautiful, gracious or attractive.
We have suffered an astonishing corruption of consciousness practised upon us by a decadent cultural elite. Think of the language of contemporary praise: a building is admired because it is ‘interesting’ – like the average newspaper column. The gap between ‘interesting’ and ‘glorious’ or ‘adorable’ is vast. An artist is praised for being ‘provocative’ – like someone bleating into a mobile phone on a crowded train. We are miles from ‘profound’,’tender’, ‘magnificent’.
All of this has come about because of a misreading of history. It has been supposed that the point of high culture – of the greatest imaginative and creative effort – is to unseat some fantasized ruling class who had to be provoked and distressed into change. But that is not the task of art or intelligence. Their real task is to shape and direct our longings, to show us what is noble and important. And this is not a task that requires any kind of cagey, elusive obscurity. The way forward here is to be more demanding, truthful and – at first – courageous. We have to forget the shifting patterns of fashion. Something is good because it is good, not because it was created yesterday or five hundred years ago.”
– John Armstrong
$600.xx Chili Sept 1 1866
Received of James Goldw
Six hundred dollars to
apply one contract for the
building of his house in Chili
Henry B Kimble
$450.xx Chili Sept 8 1866
Received of James Goldw
four hundred and fifty dollars to
to apply on contract for the
building of his house in Chili
Henry B Kimble
$200.xx Chili Sept 15 1866
Received of James Goldw
two hundred Dollars
to apply one contract for
the building of his house
in Chili
Henry B Kimble
In order to fund the Civil War, in July 1862 Congress created the United States’ first income tax as well as the Internal Revenue Service. Taxes were also collected on documents through the use of stamps.
“Schedule A described the income tax and other taxes payable directly to the Office of Internal Revenue, including inheritance taxes; duties on carriages, yachts, and other luxury goods; and various duties on business activities. Schedule B described the taxes to be paid on documents, which required the use of adhesive stamps directly on these documents”. Revenue Stamps: Financing the Civil War (PDF)
This document, which I purcharsed for $3 at the Christie Antiques Show appears to show both levels of tax collecting: one on the contracts, and the other in the use of the 2 cent document stamps.
Chili appears to be an area outside of Rochester NY, and a search for Henry B Kimble of Rochester shows he may have been granted a patent in 1854 for a sash fastener.
Alex Livingston, Untitled Chromira Print on Dibond 2010 48in x 68in from the Leo Kaman website
[/caption]
“The sketchbook tradition has pretty much died out,” he says. “The sketchbook offered a lot of portability, as you generated ideas on the go. I now travel with my drawing tablet and my laptop.”
Goddard in speaking with Livingston for his show (currently on at Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto) explains that he’s currently using a Wacom tablet with his laptop, as opposed to paints and paper. I know myself, I looked into getting a Wacom tablet in 2009, but decided against it for the time being, as I still like using inks and brushes, and would prefer that tactility while image-making, as it’s just as easy to scan afterward as it is to create it directly through the computer.
What I wonder about though, is the measure of this shift. I came of age, and was inspired to be an artist, through the experience of 500 year old materials. Notebooks, manuscripts, paintings, and the older the better. I saw myself was working within that tradition, in effect creating things that would themselves be 500 years old one day. What then, is truly going on (what is the measure of this shift) when a professor at a prestigious art school says “the sketchbook tradition has pretty much died out”? If I were to ask, “will people in a century even understand paper?” is there an analogy which will help me understand what that experience will be like?
Since I was a child I’ve been fond of Jesus’ parable of feeding the spirit: that man cannot live by bread alone, but also requires the word of God. I think the reasons I’ve always appreciated this were because it was well explained to me by a teacher who had formerly been a priest, and it made sense to me in a manner that has remained true to my life as I’ve lived subsequently. That the spirit, or mind requires feeding seems self-evident.
This idea has been relevant to my interest in the arts, and I’ve also noticed over the years a personal preference for food metaphors. Food, after all, is a substance we ingest, we bring into ourselves, where it is transformed into something disgusting that comes out the other end of our bodies. This transformation is called digestion, and we understand through this process we remain alive through the derivation of nutrients, in effect becoming “what we eat”.
This physical digestion can mirror of that of the mind – we continually ingest, take into ourselves, ideas that enter our mind through conversation, reading, and general interaction. Our minds continually process the languages of our environment, be they symbolic, gestural, or spoken, and ‘digest’ them into some part of our worldview and subsequently some part of our sense of self.
Almost everyone alive is capable of feeding themselves in some way, even if they are not actually able to cook a meal. In that sense, we are all literate to the symbology of the gastronomic spectrum, all the way from food freshly killed in a hunt to the four-course meal of a fine restaurant. Along the spectrum are canned food we merely reheat, sandwiches, and fast food burgers. So-called special occasions require meals at the higher end of the spectrum, whereas quotidian meals after a long day can occur on the lower end.
Carr: Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that is absurdly overrated by everyone else.
Tzara: Because man cannot live by bread alone.
Carr: Yes, he can. It’s art he can’t live on.
-Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1975)
If the spectrum of food goes from the self-acquired meal to restaurants, on what spectrum does art lie? Why in effect, is my question being asked? Because Art is a strange and forever undefinable thing, precisely because it is a food of the mind, an intangible and a philosophically confused concept. As Wittgenstein sought to make clear a hundred years ago, some philosophical problems are merely problems of semantics, entanglements of concepts without a clear language. Art is such a thing: forever subject to pithy definitions which merely become mottoes for one of its clique camps. For the conceptualists art is something different than for the painters, and thus like God it is subject to much under its name, in a variety of churches under many flags.
Why is it we consider it normal for children to draw? And why do we find it usual that adults mostly do not draw? For that matter, why do we find it normal for children to play, and find it usual that most adults do not play, but those who do are honoured as actors? In keeping with my food theme, children do not eventually grow out of making food for themselves. Sure, there are people who ‘can’t cook’ but presumably this means they are reliant on heating up frozen dinners. Food making remains a part of our lives throughout, while art making is allowed to disappear.
But does it? If you can’t cook, that can be done for you – simply go to a restaurant or a soup kitchen. But art? One goes to a gallery, and hence a gallery is analogous to a restaurant. Or, like the ever-present unquestioned nature of food culture, we could say the dominance of created visual products we call tv shows and/or movies (even video games) are somehow reflective for our appetite for imagined products.
Galleries do not seem to think of themselves as restaurants for the spirit, offering menus of imagined products. However, if pressed, I think they would see the similarity between the haute cuisine chef and the international exhibiting artist.
Human beings took our animal need for palatable food … and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species … and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools … and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language … and turned it into King Lear.
None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction … that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.” – Greta Christina, Sex and the Off-Label Use of Our Bodies| (My source)
Creating anything is a human thing to do: we take basic foods and we make meals, and we take sticks and make symbols. Everyday we manipulate a set number of symbols in composing text messages and emails, and to do so is to be part of our human community. A teenager unable to text (i.e. write) in today’s world would be one who is cut off from their community, and thus damaged. Being human is to be both a meal maker and an art maker, but importantly, I am using the word “art” in a generic creative sense of the word to encompass everything learned and extensive of the imagination, such as writing quotidian messages, or the dominating created world of pop culture.
Along the food-spectrum analogy, most everyone is capable of making a sandwich. Culturally, the creativity of everyday is not very advanced. Once we get beyond sandwich making, the understanding of these cultural worlds diverges: the fine restaurant has a place in our lives that a fine gallery doesn’t.
“Food” as a word is easily understood as something encompassing a long spectrum of things that are ultimately put in the mouth. But Art, through its semantic confusion, is not easily reduced as something “put somewhere”. It does not have an obvious end point, but is to be described as “experienced” or “felt” or “seen”.
What interests me is why the analogy of restaurants so easily breaks down, and why Art remains perceived as something privileged and removed, whereas restaurants and food culture are so thoroughly embedded. Why do galleries exist dependent on grants, whereas the idea of supporting a restaurant by grants is absurd? The easy answer is the physical need for food makes food culture obvious, but we do not speak of art as psychological need which would make its cultural contribution obvious as well. Also, the another obvious answer is that pop culture provides the feeding of the psychological/imaginative appetite so thoroughly that only those with “finer palates” seek out the higher forms in prestigious galleries. This is analogous to the “culture war” within Food: buying organic and local vs. fast & processed.
In the Art culture, we have fast and highly processed food as well. And just as a diet consisting entirely of highly processed food is extremely unhealthy, it is probably equally mentally unhealthy to be a digester of corporatized pop culture exclusively. Unfortunately, like a Big Mac filming a Whopper, reality television has begun to exploit the end products of generations of television: these terrible, stupid people who are not (in the old sense of the term) “cultured” precisely because they are instead “pop cultured” and thus comfortable with confessing to video diaries and being idiots on camera.
“I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it. – David Brooks, Social Animal
To be alive is to participate in a food stream, and to be human is to participate in a knowledge stream. A human beings, we participate in a collectively created culture which subdivides into subcultures, two of which are food-related and art-related. Food culture is so healthy in its level of participation that people need to be careful around it, lest they become obese, while art culture is a muddied, confused and sclerotic thing, always being defended and dependent on social largess.
Clearly, the place of Art in our lives requires a rehabilitation—one which recognizes its place in a healthy and full life. Just as a diet consisting entirely of fast food is dangerous, so too is a mental life informed solely by corporatized products. However, this is not to be read as a defence of government grants, but simply to remind you that restaurants do not require support. If we include film, we may already have a healthy art-culture. If we consider art to be something solely related to galleries, we may ask why haute cuisine is not dependent on grants, or why the art experience away from commercialization insists on being free, when it is free food that one really requires.
Using Google’s new Ngram viewer to plot the popularity of the Renaissance artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello.
Overview 1450-2008
Overview of the 20th Century 1990-2008
What surprised me is the immense popularity of Raphael for most of the past five hundred years, which only really declined a century ago between 1900 and 1920. Michelangelo get a spike in popularity in the late 1950s for some reason, whereas Leonardo is enjoys a steady-state of interest.
Having been interested in Leonardo for twenty years, I would have thought there would have been more spikiness to his line: the discovery of his lost Madrid Codices seems to have caused a spike in popularity and publishing in the 1970s, mirrored by the past decade’s spike due to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
Of course, if I turn off the smoothing, the graph immediately gets a lot spikier. Here is the overview for the past five hundred years:
‘Leonardo da Vinci’ plotted over 1500-2008
Leonardo clearly enjoyed the majority of his fame in the 18th Century
And here is the 20th Century:
‘Leonardo da Vinci’ 1900-2008
Which shows that despite my intuition, Da Vinci’s popularity declined between 1960 and 1980, and there was no real spike in the past ten years.
I stopped using Firefox last year, when I began using Chrome (through the development version Chromium) in September 2009. As it underwent rapid development versions on the Mac, I updated frequently and I began to taking periodic version snapshots until January of this year, shortly before Chrome went official for Mac.
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto’s Graduate Geography and Planning Student Society and The Tendency Group present:
Talking Stats 1: Artists
Date: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 Time: 7pm Place: Music Room, Hart House, Universityof Toronto, 7 Hart House Circle
14 accomplished art workers sit before you and disclose every single terrifying detail of their economic life: what they make, what they spend, where they spend it, what they’ve saved, what they own, what they owe and what they anticipate inheriting. No detail will be spared. Then we’ll crunch some of the stats, throw around a few distributions, some pie charts and then we’ll talk.
Featuring the fully disclosed economies of:
Bill Burns, Timothy Comeau, Siya Chen, Heather Haynes, Sheila Heti, Amy Lam, John McCurley, Srimoyee Mitra, Amish Morrell, Daniel Nimmo, Darren O’Donnell, Ngozi Paul, Camille Turner and Carl Wilson.
There’s a lot of discussion about the purpose and value of art. Does it make the world a better place? Does it improve the economy? Is a good social investment? Is it a good economic investment? What is the value of artistic production for cities? Can art do anything more than make the city more attractive to tourists? Can artists improve the qualities of neighborhoods?
These are all great questions. None of which we plan to answer.
Lost in this cacophony are the naked economic facts of the life of the art worker. What exactly does it mean to your bank account to be an artist? Is the starving artist stereotype an accurate one? Who is really funding the arts?
Those are the questions we will begin to answer.
Talking Stats 1: Artists
The Music Room at Hart House, University of Toronto
7 Hart House Circle, Toronto
The Tendency Group is a flexible research-based collaboration directed by Darren O’Donnell, with Eva Verity, Marney Isaac and Yi Luong. For more information: darren@tendency.ca
things don’t just happen, they tend to happen
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
Hart House, University of Toronto
7 Hart House Circle
Toronto, ON M5S 3H3
CANADA
When I first read this I thought it was a nice way of pointing out the dangers of an aristocracy – the exact thing the 18th Century Enlightenment thinkers made their reputation attacking. At that time, the awfulness of society was seen in part to be the result of the establishment being ill-educated and having been merely born into their positions of power.
I read this as saying:
The best argument exemplifying of an elitist-aristocracy is ‘you shouldn’t have to know something in order to be in charge of it’
or perhaps
By their example, “in favour of this” they show the limitations of thinking that people shouldn’t need to know something in order to run it.
But then again, is it a defence of elitism? His Goldsbie actually saying:
“The best argument for an elitist society is the example of those people who think they can run things without knowing anything about it. We should have an educated elite who know what they are doing.”
It’s hard to imagine, given these parameters, a country from which Sierra would accept an award. And, with this in mind, even harder not to conclude that Spain virtually volunteered itself to go like a lamb to the slaughter. Conflating notions of artistic gesture and political protest, Sierra’s work has pretty much been sending Spain this same rejection letter since, like, 1999, in so many words. The artist has paid Chechen refugees minimum wage to remain hidden inside cardboard boxes in a gallery for long stretches (2000), Iraqi immigrants to stand docile while he sprays them with insulation foam (2004), prostitutes [whom he paid in heroin] for the privilege of publicly tattooing their backs (2000), and African immigrants to dye their hair blonde (2001). Sierra uses money to buy people and subject them to degradation and abuse at so low a price that the audience is forced to wonder if endemic government failure hasn’t flat-out subsidized the transaction, let alone created the conditions for its occurrence. Taking a page from the terrorist strategy book, Sierra makes a gratuitous show of ethical violence in order to mirror and expose its proliferation in what we might call “society.” And the show goes on because of, as Sierra says in his letter, “the freedom… art has given me… which I am not willing to resign.”
Why are conceptual artists painting again?
Because they think it’s a good idea.
November 1, 6:00 – 8:00
George Ignatieff Theatre
Trinity College, University of Toronto
15 Devonshire Place (between Bloor and Hoskin)
Admission is free
Presented in conjunction with Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980
September 10 to November 28, 2010
University of Toronto Galleries
Berlin-based critic Jan Verwoert has been examining the developments of art after Conceptualism. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, his lecture is concerned with the way in which the basic conditions of art practice have changed and what words and models might be used to open up the potentials at the heart of the developments in art after Conceptualism.
As he writes: “The dominant models no longer satisfy. It makes no sense to melodramatically invoke the “end of painting” (or any other medium-specific practice for that part) when the continuous emergence of fascinating work obviously proves apocalyptic endgame scenarios wrong. Yet, to pretend it were possible to go back to business as usual seems equally impossible because the radical expansion of artistic possibilities through the landslide changes of the 1960s leave medium-specific practices in the odd position of being one among many modes of artistic articulation, with no preset justification. How can we describe then what medium-specific practices like painting or sculpture can do today?
Likewise, it seems that we can still not quite convincingly describe to ourselves what Conceptual Art can be: An art of pure ideas? As if “pure” idea art were ever possible let alone desirable! An art of smart strategic moves and puns? We have advertising agencies for that. The social and political dimension of Conceptualism has been discussed, but often only in apodictic terms, not acknowledging the humour, the wit, the existential, emotional or erotic aspects, as well as the iconophile, not just iconoclast motives, that have always also been at play in the dialectics and politics of life-long conceptual practices.
Unfortunately, a certain understanding of conceptualism has had incredibly stifling effects on how people approach their practice, namely the idea that to have a concept in art means to know exactly why you do what you do – before you ever even do it. This assumption has effectively increased the pressure on artists to occupy the genius-like position of a strategist who would clearly know the rules of how to do the right thing, the legitimate thing. How could we invent a language that would describe the potentials of contemporary practice, acknowledge a sense of crisis and doubt, yet break the spell of the senseless paranoia over legitimation – and instead help to transform critical art practice into a truly gay science based on a shared sense of appreciation and irreverence?”
Jan Verwoert teaches art at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, works as a contributing editor to frieze magazine and writes for different publications. His book Bas Jan Ader – In Search of the Miraculous was published by Afterall/MIT Press in 2006. The collection of his essays Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want has just been published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute.
The lecture is presented in advance of the international conference Traffic: Conceptualism in Canada. Organized by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the conference is held in conjunction with the exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965 – 1980 which is on view at the University of Toronto Galleries until November 28.
Registration opens November 1, 2010.
The exhibition and conference are made possible through the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Hal Jackman Foundation.
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
Hart House, University of Toronto
7 Hart House Circle
Toronto, ON M5S 3H3
CANADA
The new cookies are fine, even though not as good as old standby. So is the bread. You’ll only have one more lot to send this year, that is if you want to.
Last week was much cooler again and there hasn’t been any more swimming since I wrote you. We are also mowing lawn here, though I don’t have to mow as much as I would if I were home.
I’m sorry to hear the old car is acting up, though apparently this wasn’t anything serious. When my license renewal blank comes I wish you would send it here (or if it doesn’t come, send the old stub and I’ll get a blank.) I can fill it out an have the license sent home again.
This week we took all day trip in Farm Management. We went through Geneva and saw the Agricultural Experiment Station, then north to Lake Ontario, stopping to see three farms on the way. It was the first time I had seen the lake and it is quite like the bay at home. Of course, you can’t see the other side, and it is not as blue as the bay.
Two of the farms are in the fruit belt along the lake, and are little more than big orchards. The cherries were in blossom and the apples were just ready to come out. The trees there don’t seem to be much hurt by the winter cold.
This weekend several hundred high school boys who expect to come to Cornell soon were up to visit the place. It is a new thing this year, called Cornell Day, and seemed to go off pretty well. Two boys stayed here in the house and seemed to enjoy themselves.
Did you see any of the dust cloud the papers were talking about over New York? It must have missed us. It is pretty dry even here, though.
Friday night George and I walked down to see George Arliss in “The House of Rothschild.” It was one the best I have seen him in.
Saturday night there was an electrical exhibition in the Electrical Engineering College. They had artificial lightning, power line connections and generators, teletype, telegraph, telephone, radio, and a lot of other exhibits, all very interesting. They advertised it by a loudspeaker hung out the window. You could hear it easily a quarter of a mile away, but it was very distinct also. There was also a track meet Saturday, in which we beat Penn. very easily, so that it wasn’t very interesting.
It’s warmer now – maybe there will be swimming this afternoon.
I’m not sure if this is a problem of social myopia (birds of a feather flocking together) but it seems I both keep hearing & reading that people want to vote for Joe Pantalone but feel that’s it’s a wasted vote. (I myself expressed as much in my last blog posting a week ago). Thus, everyone who’d like to vote for him is now of the mind to vote strategically. I write this because I’m now under the impression that maybe there’s a silent majority of people out there who favor him but who are being frightened into voting for his rivals.
It doesn’t help that the Globe and Mail “guardedly” endorses Smitherman while only mentioning Pantalone once in it’s 800word endorsement. The context is notable:
Mr. Fords […] is an instinctual person, lacking in analysis, and his plans have gaps and inconsistencies. His propensity to impetuous words and deeds could be embarrassing and possibly harmful to Toronto. Nonetheless, the surge in support for a man with these characteristics, in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city, amounts to an extraordinary indictment of the status quo. It is a phenomenon that all Toronto’s politicians must take seriously; Mr. Smitherman has already repositioned himself, shifting on the ideological spectrum from where he probably would like to be. Where Mr. Ford is unrealistic, Mr. Smitherman is vague. The risk in supporting Mr. Ford is what he might do as mayor, the risk in supporting Mr. Smitherman is what he might not do. The latter of the two has failed to articulate a vision or a strategy of his own, and he could easily end up as a second David Miller – what Joe Pantalone, the third candidate, openly promises to be.
I resent the idea that I need to fear either rival, and that I should vote for Smitherman for any reason not of my choosing. I resent the media casting this (and thus skewing the pole results) as a two-person race. I resent the blackmail that a vote for Pantalone is an indirect vote for someone who is “potentially embarrassing and harmful”.
I’m going to vote for Pantalone. If Ford wins, at least we’ll have a shake-up of the status quo. If Smitherman wins, well, at least he’s not Ford. If Pantalone wins, well, at least we might finally get bike lanes and continued marginal improvements in TTC outpaced by increased fares.
For those not in Toronto: In the latest Toronto mayoralty-election news, Rocco Rossi dropped out last night, October 13th, leaving it (as the papers would have it) a contest between Rob Ford and George Smitherman. Rob Ford is considered to be an oaf, and George Smitherman was once deputy-premier of the province. Neglected from this assessment is the presence of Joe Pantalone, who quipped in a recent debate, to Smitherman, “the mayoralty is not a consolation prize for failing to become premier”
Officially, there are 40 people running for Mayor with two officially withdrawn. With the exception of the above named, the remaining 35 are considered unserious novelty candidates. Joe Pantalone has been deputy mayor under departing David Miller, and is running on his legacy.
My Facebook feed is representatives of his fan base: numerous calls stating Toronto needs pants and the like. Pants pants pants. Along with William Gibson’s latest novel, ‘tis the season for pants.
Pantalone has become the traditional NDP third party candidate who won’t and can’t win. He’s polling (Oct 13 Globe & Mail) at 11%, which is traditional NDP territory. He’ll drain votes away from the anti-Ford Smitherman and Ford will be Mayor.
However, according to the same poll, Smitherman is up 1% against Ford at 31% to 30%. Pantalone supporters – this is a given – would never vote for Ford, thus if their vote went to Smitherman, he’d win by a hefty margin: 42% against 30%.
Needless to say, our democracy is a sham, sense these numbers don’t even cross over 50%.
It’s interesting how this vote is being framed by the media as a contest between Smitherman and Ford, continually neglecting Pantalone. By keeping that narrative alive, the illusion of a contest between S&F can be maintained. The media is itself a type of conservative, conserving the narratives it has on hand; their familiarity with Smitherman as an Ontario cabinet minister means he is given favorable attention despite his admitted past-addiction to “party drugs” (coke?) and his inept handling of the eHealth portfolio, in which $1,000,000,000 dollars went missing.
I’ve only voted Conservative once in my life, during my first Federal election in 1993. At that time, I was naive enough to vote C merely because I liked the fact that we had a female Prime Minister in Kim Campbell. She famously lost to Jean Chretien, and Chretien went on to govern for ten years. In those interim elections, I began to vote for the NDP, a trend which continued right up to the last election.
Given that I have never voted for the party or candidate who ends up winning, I’m considering using this juju against Rob Ford by voting for him. My vote for Ford would thus be an anti-Ford vote.
If I voted my conscience and for the candidate who mostly represents my views, I’d join my Facebook peers and vote for Joe Pantalone, thus guaranteeing he won’t win.
I don’t usually do the tourist pose, but in this case I indulged. Partially because before seeing this at the Met at the end of June, I’d been watching David Starkey’s Henry: Mind of a Tyrant on TVO (which is available on iTunes). Seeing the armour made the history and the man (especially his kingly size) tangible.>
Alberta’s culture minister says:
“I sit here as a government representative for film and television in the province of Alberta and I look at what we produce and if we’re honest with ourselves, why do I produce so much shit? Why do I fund so much crap?,”
and this is a response:
“I was at a loss when I heard the statement – a complete loss and quite surprised and quite taken aback for every producer and content maker in Canada, let alone Alberta,” said CBC Television General Manager Kirstine Stewart, who was in the audience. “Nobody can ever question the quality of what we do here in Canada, creatively or otherwise.”
I take issue with the way this was instinctively (that is, without forethought) phrased:
Nobody can ever question the quality of what we do here in Canada, creatively or otherwise.
I think there’s a genuine problem in Canada when culture is subject to such dictatorial sentiments. There is certainly a culture of complicity in place, where we are expected to fall in line or be subject to censorship. I think it’s fair to say that Freedom of Expression within this country has been perverted into a freedom of expression in support of the status quo, and within the ideological confines established by Management.
“I was at a loss …” yes of course you were, because someone says something controversial, and instead of laughing, or simply disagreeing, you have to dig in your heels and make Dear Leader statements.
What we do here in Canada is apparently fucking awesome, as the embedded movie trailers below show:
INTERNATIONAL LECTURE SERIES / Thomas Hirschhorn
May 19, 2010
Call the Harbourfront Centre Box Office at 416.973.4000 to purchase/reserve tickets.
Please note: reserved Members’ tickets will be released for resale if not picked up by the start of the lecture.
The celebrated Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn (born in 1957, Bern) discusses his recent Amsterdam-based project, The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival (2009). Since the 1980s, the Paris-based former graphic designer has evolved a radical sculpture and installation practice that makes monumental works with humble materials like cardboard and packing tape to engage viewers in conversation about philosophy and global politics. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, Spain (2006), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2007), Museo Tamayo, Mexico (2008), and the Gladstone Gallery, New York (2009). Hirschhorn has received the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2001) and the Joseph Beuys Prize (2004).
International Lecture Series Lead Donor
J. P. Bickell Foundation
Cultural Agency Supporter
Consulat Général de France à Toronto
Prices
FREE: Members
$12: Non-Members
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
7:00PM
Studio Theatre
York Quay Centre, 235 Queens Quay West
(Map)
Everything makes sense up until the 1960s. Essentially, artists were craftspeople throughout history. Michelangelo really was only a housepainter, employed to illustrate The Bible. Money made the work more ornate, but the Old Masters were craftsman employed to create images such as portraits and decorated ceilings.
In the 19th Century, industrialization invented oil paint in tubes. Suddenly artists could take trains out to the countryside to paint landscapes on the weekend. (Why they wanted to paint landscapes has to do with the-then-new Romantic sensibilities). Painting outdoors, they became more interested in capturing their impressions of what they saw, rather than spend a lot of time on finishing the work according to the standards of the day.
Claude Monet, Tulip Fields in Holland, 1886
While these artists were doing this, the ‘academic’ artists had moved on from illustrating the Bible and had begun illustrating the Classical mythology of Greece and Rome.
John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891
Because what the academics were doing was boring, the Impressionists gained popularity, due to their example of allowing an artist do to whatever they wanted. So by the time Picasso begins working, he’s all like fuck it, I’ll just draw some crazy shapes and give them eyes and call it a portrait.
Pablo Picasso Tete d’homme, 1912
Picasso distorts art history here, as the galleries get hip to what he’s doing, and realize they can sell his stuff for all sorts of reasons, including the radio-land sense of a new civilisation based on cheap energy, and so Picasso has a chateau-based life of daily doodling which sells for millions. The distortion he creates in the art market means that artists all over the Western world think to themselves, ‘if he can do it, I can do it’. Craftsman working in the 15th-19th Century traditions (late 19th Century academics and contemporary place like the Academy of Realist Art) get marginalized in favour of the gang after Picasso’s easy money and easy lifestyle.
Basically, by the 1920s, artists have full licence to do whatever they want. Picasso can call geometry a portrait, and in New York Duchamp can call a urinal a fountain. By the 1950s, artists are all like, fuck portraiture, use a camera for that, let’s just put colours together. Imagery is boring.
Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow 1956
Artists are now doing whatever crazy shit they want to do. A bed with paint splashed on it? Fuck it, why not.
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed 1955
By the time we reach the 1960s, there has been a full breakdown of the tradition of craftsmanship.
Also, by this point, the technologies of video & film have begun to appear, so by the 1970s, a first generation of tv babies have arrived and want to make their own tv shows, producing a lot of black & white and unwatchable television. Technology is cheap, and artists are no longer just craftspeople asked to make a statue for a garden or decorate a ceiling, they’re now in the business of ideas. Books, words on walls, videos of Buddhas staring at themselves: an explosion of cleverness and wit. The Picassoesque art market is able to absorb, promote, and sell all this stuff, to both rich people but also to Institutions.
Nam June Paik, TV Buddha 1974
We’ve now had half a century (1960-2010) of crazy-shit art. The aesthetic experience written about by 18th Century philosophers has been replaced by the WTF? impulse. Artists today are not seeking to generate emotions of the sublime or of disinterest, but rather evoking a sense of bewilderment in the viewer is seen as an achievement.
The decline of craftsmanship has been compensated for by the ego of the artist: like Duchamp, Picasso, the unwatchable video artists, the message is, yes, anyone can do this shit, but I did it. In that not all artists are insufferable egotists, a subtext to this strategy is the belief that the variety of human experience should mean that their ideas, presented through gallery or however, may be valuable to someone. The artist offers their work both as a self-promotional vehicle, but also as something that another may find useful. (Quite often, it is most commonly used as a conversation topic).
I could also refer here to Richard Rorty’s definition of genus as the useful obsession by others. Private obsessions we just call crazy, but when an individual’s ‘craziness’ opens new avenues for others, we consider that person brilliant (as in ‘they light the way for others’). The postmodern condition of this half century has been one in which people are free to make up their own truths. While it is a sign of mental health to be aware that not everyone thinks the same, when exploited it can be dangerous (ie truthiness). The crazy-shit art of the contemporary is reflecting the many truths competing for attention, and the multitude and anarchy of art-products and art-production today offers a variety of individual obsessions seeking to be useful by others.
02. Another brief history of art
The Roman portrait bust is representative of the craftsmanship of the era, used for public-relations purposes and to document the individuals of a time and place.
By the end of the Empire, the busts had declined in quality and become stylized.
A ‘barbaric’ millennium follows until the ‘regeneration’ (renaissance is a French word meaning ‘rebirth’) of both ancient art and learning begins to restore both the quality and craftsmanship, so that by the 19th Century, the academics were illustrating both the myths of Rome and Greece, and the daily street scenes of fifteen-hundred years prior.
Sir Lawrence Tadema, Sculptors in Ancient Rome 1877
The United States of America was founded in the late 18th Century as a restored Roman republic.
Horatio Greenough, George Washington as Zeus 1840
By the late 20th Century, The United States represented the completion of the project to restore Rome, and had become an Imperial power. However…
…its art had become stylized, and craftsmanship was in decline. The civilisation was exhausted. Artists were exhibiting glittered cum stains on newspapers.
My questions:
1. Wasn't the G8 made somewhat irrelevant last autumn when it was decided that the G20 would be more important?
2. Why is this our business? Like, a bunch of women in poor countries are going to care about what Canadians say and do. WTF. You'd think paternalistic programs would be something Conservatives avoid. And perhaps this is where they are coming from? I don't know. I do know that getting all upset at their ideology is a predictable distraction to the fact that this story has no substance. Why can't we have a discussion around the thesis: "Poor women are capable of taking care of themselves". If that statement is false, why? And why is it our (G8) problem as opposed to the governments of the countries where these people live?
Birth control won't be in G8 plan to protect mothers, Tories say
A guy named Joe
Blew his stack
He was an engineer
He had a thing against the IRS
He thought the tax rates were too dear
So he flew his plane into a building
After leaving a note online
Not on Facebook though,
He was not that much of his time
The internetz wrote about it
And called him a right-wing loon
Some said had he been Muslim
There’d be another war soon
But all in all it’s just a tale
Of an engineer, a website and a plane
A fool who set his house on fire
Before he flew off never to be seen again
I just did this diagram in less than 5 minutes using Google Docs. Had I done this in Illustrator, I would have taken a half-hour. I don’t know if that means I suck at Illustrator, or if Google Docs is AMAZING.
Pressed to answer, I would say, no, I’m not that bad at Illustrator – it’s only I would have to create every element in the diagram from scratch.
Google Docs provides a library of readymade elements, which cuts down on the time. Also, the library suggests they anticipate their app to be used to create flow charts such as this one, meaning everything I would need to make such an image was there, increasing efficiency. Props to Google for so thoroughly anticipating user needs.
Secondly, Google’s experience with user interfaces (like SketchUp) meant that intuitive actions like grouping meant that I could put together shapes and move them around without having to explicitly group them, which was a bonus.
So yes, Google Docs is AMAZING, but it helps if one knows what one’s doing to begin with.
(BTW, this diagram illustrates the syncing relationship between Google’s cloud services and an iPhone and MacBook).
It looks like Rush Limbaugh is moving ahead with his threat to leave New York City. He's (finally!) put his tacky Fifth Avenue apartment up for sale. The cost of ridding NYC of Rush once and for all? $13.95 million.
Limbaugh promised that he'd sell his Manhattan apartment last March after the Paterson administration proposed raising taxes on New York residents who make more than $500,000 a year. (That wasn't the first time he'd made the threat. On the eve of the 2008 presidential election, Limbaugh said he was "seriously considering selling it," since "it may now become stupid to own any property there.")
But now he has! The 20th-floor penthouse at 1049 Fifth Avenue, which Limbaugh purchased in 1994 under the name RH Trust (Rush's middle name is Hudson) wasofficially listed two weeks ago for $13.95 million. And although he's described the place on his radio show as "fashionable," it's doubtful that will be the word that comes to mind when you look at the photos below, which show off moldings of "hand painted gold leaf" and his "hand painted ceilings and walls" by "renowned artist" Richard Smith.
"You walk towards your fear, you embrace your fear, you don't try to hedge it. That a part of real living as human being, as a spiritual being is to embrace and encompass your fear, your love and not run away from anything because that's the life experience. And it's in that richness that we find the most beautiful art, the most beautiful music, we find the richness of what the human soul can offer and I see all that richness buried under such bullshit." – Michael C. Ruppert in Collapse (2009)
“Nathan the Wise, beneath an appearance of pleading for religious tolerance, depicts a secret, universal religion shared by a world-wide fraternity, a freemasonry, so to speak, of rational men, regardless of their overt cultural and political loyalties, and among Lessing’s last published works were some dialogues on the true nature of Freemasonry itself. Throughout Europe the last two decades before the French Revolution saw a marked growth in the activities of secret soceities devoted to ideals of equality and fraternity, perhaps in response to the restrictions in absolutist states on any general and public participation in political discussion and descision-making, and in Germany the Masonic movement proved particularly attractive to literary intellectuals. Wieland and Herder were both members of the Weimar lodge, named ‘Amalia’, of which the Prime Minister, von Fritsch, was Grand Master, and in 1780 Goethe also applied for membership. Did he expect to find in Masonry a secret company of noble individuals, a broader world than that of the Weimar court, but an alternative to the public mind from which he had turned away? If so, he was soon disapointed. He passed rapidly through the usual grades to become a Master Mason in 1782 and he joined the order within the order, the Illuminists, in February 1783, but within a few weeks he was writing:
They say you can best get to know a man when he is at play… and I too have found that in the little world of the brethren all is as it is in the great one … I was already saying this in the forecourt, and now I have reached the ark of the covenant I have nothing to add. To the wise all things are wise, to the fool foolish.
These were difficult times for German Masonry, as yet not fifty years old. In 1782 a General Assembly in Wilhelmsbad had failed to resolve the complicated internal quarrels of the movement, which was, in essence, divided between those, notably the Rosicrucians, to whom the mythology and ritual of the movement, and its claim to occult knowledge, were more important, and those, notably the Illuminati, who were more concerned with its ethical universalism and social egalitarianism. Goethe, as usual, was steering a middle course, seeing merits in both currents. But in 1784 the Bavarian government discovered, or believed it had discovered, that at the heart of the Illuminist movement lay a radical republican conspiracy, decreed the death penalty for recruiting to it, and warned other German rulers accordingly. In the campaign that followed, and the effectively obliterated German Masonry for twenty years, the Weimar lodge, which Carl August himself had joined in 1782, was one of the first to close. Goethe felt that his knowledge of human behaviour had been extended by his involvement with Freemasonry, and his experiences had an important effect on his later assessment of the causes of the French Revolution, but their immediate contribution to his literary achievment was slight – some forty-eight stanzas of a projected Rosicrucian epic, The Mysteries. Even these were writen, not for the brethren, but for his minimal public of the years 1784-6: Charlotte von Stein, the Herders, and Knebel. Unlike Wieland, or Countess Bernstorff’s secretary, Bode, or the actor-producer Schroder, Goethe does not at any time after his admission seem to have thought the lodge a uniquely important medium through which to communicate with or assist his fellow men. On the contrary, his Masonic comedy of 1790, The Grand Kophta (Der Gross-Cophta), suggests that his original expectations may have been considerably higher, and his disappointment correspondingly more intense, than his cool and tactful assessment of 1783, writen of course to a fellow Mason, might seem to imply.
In that play a young knight expresses the bitterest disilluison when what he has taken to be a brotherhood dedictaed to missionary altruism proves, or seems to prove, to be a cynical deception. What is to become now, he asks, of the unattached idealism of the disapointed friend of humanity? ‘Fortunate he, if it is still possible for him to find a wife or a friend, on whom he can bestow indvidually what was intended for the whole human race.’ These words, almost a prose paraphrase of the last verses of ‘To the Moon’, may be Goethe’s true epitaph on his brief venture into Freemasonry: certainly they tell us something of the nature, as well as the strength, of the emotions with which he turned to Frau von Stein.”
wow having have read so much, am just atricious about the new music industry. I mean people have different opinions and stuff, bt at the end o the day, whats written in the bible is coming to pass. i mean this is really nothin compared to the real deal. Devils on the loose,he knows his time isreally too short. I mean i was a big jay fan, not so much becoz he really said anythng positive in my life through his music, but because he sipmly was cool.he had swag for me then, and when you a big fan, u agree with almost everthiing he does or say to a verge of refusing to even see when things can become harmful. this stuff is so real. for a fact thres good(Jesus) and evil(lucifer). the big part is where do u belong in the picture when Jesus Christ returns? Or when u die? times runnin out man. thanking VC for the cautions(tyhough too,curious about ur religion and beliefs).People gotta wke up. some are too deep asleep. music is a very strong instrument through which human emotion bieng depicted in song and spirit (whether gud/evi) feed too ones soul is passed from,to. so we really really gutta watch what we listen too. music says alot. this guys are lureing everybody to satanic practices without concious alert, to possess peoples soul without u even knowing. However want to ask what VCs real motive behind the website,which am really greatful for, but why do you care? whats it to you if people are mislead?
1903 – The Wright Brothers finally solve the mystery of flight for human beings
Then we learned to fly in formation.
2006 – Twitter is founded.
Between 1903 and 2006 is a century during which apes aspired to become birds, a hybridization that goes back to our mythology.
If we take the name of Twitter literally, we see it has the communication of a flock, announcing their location, status, territory, thoughts, somewhat arbitrarily. Like sparrows in a tree, communicating to the networked host.
In other words, one of the great projects of Western humanity over the past one hundred years was to become birdlike, rather than apelike. For whatever reason.
22 January 2009 – "To the location of this new earthquake weapons test the United States is preparing for these reports further warn the entire Western coastal areas of the Americans are in danger and could ‘very well’ expect to see a catastrophic event within the fortnight."
Because 'a fortnight' isn't common parlance in North America (weez stoopid), I remind you that it means 'forteen nights' or, two weeks.
4 February 2009 – "Northern California Earthquake: Magnitude 6.0 Quake Rattles Coast
Residents of Northern California's Humboldt County were rocked by a magnitude-5.9 earthquake Thursday, but officials said there were no immediate reports of major injury or damage from the second large temblor to hit the area within a month.
The U.S. Geological Survey reported the quake struck at 12:20 p.m. about 35 miles northwest of the community of Petrolia and nearly 50 miles west of Eureka. The shaking was felt within a 150-mile radius, as far north as southern Oregon and as far south as Sonoma County, according to the USGS Web site."
Apple’s secrecy produced another big open secret: they were developing a tablet, and they made it official yesterday. Steve Jobs acknowledged the hype (which one presumes wasn’t supposed to exist at all) when he showed The Wall St Journal quote. However, the resulting massive buildup of hype produced an anticlimactic ‘meh, tell us something we didn’t already know’.
The device will only be available in two months, which in turn means this press conference was little more than a means of stemming the flow of leaks – yes, we’re working on a device, but no, it’s not ready yet, and yes, we’re building on what we’ve already done with the iPhone, but no, it doesn’t use facial recogniation software to control different accounts for family members, nor does it have a tactile interface.
In a sense (and this is written in fairness to the meh) what Steve Jobs did yesterday was travel back in time and present Shakespeare with a Bic rollerball: a rather useful technological achievement, but something that in the future we won’t be too wowed over. We aren’t that wowed over it now, and that is my point.
Because we’ve been exposed to tablets in film and television for over twenty years, part of the excitement prior to the announcement came from the fact that these things were finally real. In fact, the devices in the Star Trek shows between 1987-2005 were called ‘padds’ (an acronym) and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn the iPad was named in recognition of this. In Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels series (set between the 2040s and the 2170s) they were called ‘slates’ and ‘pads’ alternatively. They are high tech devices, but they are like 20th Century rollerball pens. They are meant to facilitate our use of our networked high technology, and be so ubiquitous in the future that they are taken for granted.
So when Steve Jobs says this is the best thing he’s ever done, and when Jonathan Ive is on video saying ‘it’s magical’, this is where they’re coming from. The iPad would have lived up to its hype and then some were this the year 2000, but no. The iPhone announcement was a big deal in 2007 because nothing operated like it at the time, and it hinted at where the technology was going. Three years later, they’ve managed to produce extra large versions with a ten hour battery life.
Other companies will also be producing electronic tablets, but one imagines that Apple’s will be superior in ease of use and aesthetics – and these reasons are why the hype was so great. Apple makes beautiful objects. (What most people skipped was that they are now making their own chips, which is a big deal).
Jobs ended his presentation by telling us that the company seeks to exist at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts.
This was a great reminder of the importance of the liberal arts, and the statement came with embedded snarkiness. Businesses like Microsoft, in the words of Jobs, ‘have no taste’. Most businesses, for that matter, put little stock in the value of the arts. Further, most politicians put little value in the arts, and those students who wish to study the liberal arts at a post-secondary level are told they are jeopardizing their future. We have a very arts-unfriendly society, and a resulting population of imaginatively im
poverished citizens. Citizens, in turn, whose imaginations are so blighted that they seem mystified by Apple’s success. They’re all like, ‘Apple, wow, how do they keep coming up with hit products?’ In producing attractive things, Apple has both ignored the academic post-modern attacks on the idea of beauty, and wowed the business world by becoming a fifty-billion dollar company.
While Jobs was introducing the iPad, Margaret Atwood was at the annual Davos conference to accept another award, and planed to deliver a speech, which was cut for time. As introduced by Jane Taber at The Globe and Mail: “Margaret Atwood was poised to tell the world’s business and political elite today that politicians have ‘done their best to finish’ off art.”
I am thankful that Apple’s example exists to counter the tasteless lack of imagination of our ruling elites.
From here, Apple now has to bring us electronic data sheets, as represented in the new series Caprica. The iPad is a twenty-five year old idea for which the technology has finally been developed. The Caprica data sheets appear to be where we go from here.
Last week I uploaded the newest version of my website, and promptly ran into a problem I didn't understand. Had I been able to find this solution through the searches I initiated, I would have saved myself both some time and some undeserved annoyance with my webhost.
My site uses .htaccess redirects to make the url's clean and predictable, as well as transferable from previous versions. In the past, the redirects were done using the following:
That is 'home' is an alias for the full url that follows.
This didn't work with my new host; rather, inputing 'timothycomeau.com/home' rewrote the url as the full url I was trying to hide (http://timothycomeau.com/?page=home). With the help of my host's tech support, I was told that the use of the full url was the problem. Rather, I needed to write my RewriteRules this way:
RewriteRule ^home/$ /?page=home.
When I did this, the url's behaved as I expected and wanted them too.
Vancouver, not known for a place of a lot of snow, was awarded the 2010 Olympics in 2003, probabby for places like Whistler, which are known to be ski resorts. Seven years and global-warming denial later, there’s concern there might not be enough snow. Meanwhile, protesting the Olympics is forbidden, and the Prime Minister shuts down Parliament using them as an excuse.
The Olympics seem to be a diaster in the making. What was supposed to be Canada’s pride will instead be its embrassement. Remember the last Canadian winter olympics, Calgary ’88? The Jamacian bob-sled team? Vancouver seems a little Jamacian bob-sled at this point. The whole thing will be one day summed up with, ‘what were they thinking?’
~
A massive Earthquake destroyed Haiti. That’s not hyperbole. A country has been blank-slated. One thinks of Kobe, and Iran, the Tsunami, other places which suffered devasting earthquakes in recent years. Yet those places had an infrastructure that could absorb the devastation. Haiti, it was well known, was already a sociological diaster before this. The tsunami this earthquake has unleashed is that of North American white guilt. Pat Robertson says something dumb (as usual) and people get all self-righteous about it, which is kind of beside the point considering 100,000 people have died. That number is too large to make sense of.
I’m not sure if Haiti has just become the defining event of the decade (ala a day in September 2001), or just another tradgedy that will be off the radar in six months. It is especially reminiscent of the Tsunami, coming three weeks after its fifth aniversary. For televsisual North America, it’s another go on the tradgedy-o-round, and people for whom budgets are already tight due to the economic situation (brought on by overpaid, ignorant fools) are now expected to donate out of survivor’s guilt.
~
Jay Leno, an overpaid throwback to the 20th Century (television and a car collection?) is given back his late night television show because the only people watching tv are those who were already adult in the late 20th Century. Conan O’Brien, who makes the Internet Generation laugh, is shafted in the process. I just hope this means Conan goes to HBO or something and can start using swears in his humor.
~
Some girl from Los Angeles who’s name means Monday in German had plastic surgery, which is too bad because she was quite attractive. Now she’s just generic. Why do hot girls always seek to erase the very unique qualities that make them hot? That, of course, is a rhetorical question, because we all know the answer is they’re spoiled idiots.
Actually, to answer that rhetoric: I always feel like the answer is better schooling, actually. I imagine a soceity where education means enabling talent and predisposition, teaching the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of human history (that includes things like mathematics, meditation, exercise …). The goal of education should be to stretch the minds and imaginations of children as far as they can be stretched, to borrow the phrasing of someone I read once.
Instead we have a dehumanizing education system which enables and encourages mediocrity. So potentially beautiful people are ruined, their superficiality becoming something they cling to, and develop their identities around their physique instead of growing mentally (and changing thus). Through surgery they change their appearance, thereby supposedly changing their personality. Everyone an Easter Egg, an empty shell, and everyone changing the decoration, every few years.
Jan 13, 2009 — Remember Katrina and Rita? Those hurricanes that prompted a government response which made most of us ashamed to be American? I am certain that the global response to a devastation far worse, as a result of the Port Au Prince quake, will make Bush's Follies look like a well-oiled machine. Not only is the situation on the ground worse; the governments that might send massive aid are financial and economic basket cases. With the death toll already circling 200,000, and almost all critical infrastructure destroyed, the effort needed would have broken most governments before the collapse. It would take a Marshall Plan. So fuggedboudit. The UN can't help much either. No one can. There will be so many stories of courage, heroism, sacrifice and love to arise from this tragedy. At some point I can just see good souls all over the Gulf with private boats trying to do what they can. Take some fresh water and medical supplies in. Maybe pull a few out before anarchy and disease consume everything. It reminds me of a line Jeff Bridges once spoke: "You human beings are at your best when things are worst." — That is exactly what must change in us.
We will see lots of footage of aid flights and stories about how other nations are rushing to assist. But it will not be possible to hide the fact for long that Haiti is becoming — or has become — a mass grave. Haiti is a stark, cold, and unforgiving metaphor for what we all face… all to soon. We need to listen to and acknowledge the suffering of the Haitian people so that someone might acknowledge ours when the time comes. What happens in Haiti needs to be watched cosely and learned from by those with the stomach for it. The journalist in me wants to be there, right in it.
Our message is spreading quickly. Every day I receive maybe 10 to 15 friend requests on Facebook from all over the world from people who have just seen "Collapse". Almost all say something like, "I thought I was the only one who felt this way." — almost all are in their twenties. I spend as much time as I can with many to share a few words and bond across a cyberspace that now hums with a lonely echo. An awakening is taking place. Collapse has been invited to the Berlin International Film Festival and I've heard that it is going to be mentioned in one of the largest U.S. weekly news mags this week. Collapse has announced many new theatrical openings around the country and finally in some foreign cities. The awakening has started before the panic that will come… if not over Haiti then over what's coming this year. The faster we reach people, the less damage will be caused by the panic. It is my prayer that the panic can be averted, even if loss of life cannot. There is still time.
MCR
As Leonardo Maugeri, a senior executive at Italian oil major ENI (E), puts it: “There will be enough oil for at least 100 years.” Many analysts and industry executives have little doubt that there’s plenty of oil in the ground. “Only about 32% of the oil [in reserves] is produced,” says Val Brock, Shell’s head of business development for enhanced oil recovery. Shell estimates 300 billion barrels and maybe more might be squeezed out of existing fields, much of it once thought beyond retrieval. Peter Jackson, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ London-based senior director for oil industry activity, has reviewed data from the world’s biggest fields. His conclusion: 60% of their reserves remain available. […] The price spike of 2008 may lead to similar results. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, an environmental group, notes that the U.S. car fleet shrank by 4 million in 2009, thanks to scrapping and reduced sales. He expects that shrinkage to continue, reducing the U.S. fleet by 25 million cars by 2020. He also sees a cultural change occurring in which more people, especially the young, don’t see owning a car as a necessity. “We are now looking at something new, a shift in the way people think about automobiles,” he says. “That means less oil use.”
U.S. oil consumption dropped by 9% over the last two years. The recession certainly hurt demand, but many analysts think oil use in the West has peaked and will not rebound to previous levels. The Energy Dept. sees the consumption of oil-based fuel in the U.S. flattening out in the coming decades. “Are people going to use energy differently in the next [growth] phase?” asks Goran Trapp, head of global oil trading at Morgan Stanley in London. “If so, the people forecasting [strong] demand increases are going to be surprised.”
// Contrast this with a report by Terry Macalister, from 9 November 2009:
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. […] But as far back as 2004 there have been people making similar warnings. Colin Campbell, a former executive with Total of France told a conference: “If the real [oil reserve] figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets … in the end that would suit no one.”
I mean, I read the dust-jacket blurb today and understood it instantly, which is kind of bad for a 688 page book. Nevertheless, I feel like it's probably a must-read, and it would be nice if this was what everyone was talking about at the beginning of this decade, rather than all that world-is-flat and we're-all-going-to-die-for-xx-reason shit we've subjected to for the past ten years.
To quote myself, from December 2008, during the first prorogation, with added emphasis today. With The Economist weighing in, (ici et ici) it's clear that our international reputation has begun to be damaged.
There's also a joke which seems apt, considering the circumstances. "Did you hear about the Canadians who won gold medals at the Olympics? They had them bronzed."
The reason the Conservatives are currently dominant despite the weakness of their official numbers is because they don’t give a fuck about anyone’s feelings, and one can hope that this works out to our collective advantage when they draw the knives for Harper’s back. If not, as Adam Radwanski pointed out, we’re in even bigger trouble than we thought, writing: “If Conservatives are not at least seriously discussing the replacement of Stephen Harper before Parliament returns on Jan 26, he truly has succeeded in creating a cult of personality’. The last thing we need is a Maurice Duplessis holding this country back from the wonder of the 21st Century, as that dictator of Quebec did in the 1950s. However once he died the resulting Quiet Revolution rushed the province from the 19th into the 20th Century within a decade, and tried to follow-through by upgrading itself into a nation-state.
If Harper manages to enforce a nightmare of feel-good 20C Reagan-Thatcher bullshit on us while the US resurrects itself from its social catastrophe, and Europe continues to set an example for what a mostly enlightened society could be, the end result will probably be a dramatic national révolution tranquille in twenty years, by which time the rest of the world will be used to thinking of us as just another one of those third world countries of squandered potential ruled by an idiot. The talent of this country will continue to apply for US-work visas to escape the ignorance of this place. Eventually, Canada could come to resemble the southern United States, too ignorant and stupid to understand the hell we exemplify to others.
I'm guessing that johnnyblog is a Conservative operative. A series of comments on Rick Mercer's piece reprinted in the Globe & Mail, which appeared originally on his blog.
This is how the Conservatives operate … try to dominate and set the agenda of the conversation by belittling the opposing view through being the loudest assholes in the room. Out of politeness we keep our mouth shut and let them bluster like fools when we should be telling them to fuck right off, or openly mocking them.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper will prorogue Parliament Wednesday for a two-month break.
The House of Commons and the Senate will come back in March, after the Vancouver Olympics, for a Speech from the Throne and a budget. The move will have the effect of stalling all bills currently in Parliament, including crime bills that the government had said were being delayed by the opposition.
A post-Olympic return would also shut down government committees, which would stop MPs from pursuing the Afghan detainee controversy until Parliament returned.
Question: In what other democracy is it permissible for the government of the day to hide from the legislature for months at a time? To ignore explicit parliamentary votes demanding the production of documents? To stonewall independent inquiries? Perhaps the rules allow it elsewhere, but is it the practice? Does convention not still forbid it? Is it not viewed in other countries as dictatorial behaviour, and therefore, you know … not done?
So, rather than submit himself to the inquiries of elected parliamentarians, the King will dismiss Parliament, in the grand tradition of kings past. The question is: what will Parliament do now? If historical precedent is any guide, it should meet anyway. Let those MPs who wish to do the people’s business convene on the usual timetable, and let those with other loyalties disport themselves as they may.
If MPs are barred at the doors to Parliament — and wouldn’t that be an interesting scene — let them meet somewhere else. A tennis court would do nicely.
"Gambetta and Hertog write about a particular mindset among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise. They might be more passionate about bringing order to their society, and see the rigid, religious law put forward in radical Islam as the best way of achieving those goals. In online postings, Abdulmutallab expressed concern over the conflict between his secular lifestyle and more extreme religious views. "How should one put the balance right?" he wrote."
"Expect to hear a lot about the fact that America's Transportation Security Administration is currently leaderless. Talking Points Memo says that's because Sen. Jim DeMint, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, has blocked the confirmation of a prospective head for the agency. Mr DeMint says he's blocking the confirmation because the nominee won't say whether or not he will support TSA screeners' attempts to form a union. In any case, Democrats plan to force a vote on the issue when members of Congress return to Washington next month."
"For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste. Consider the 1996 'Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act' (a more Orwellian title would be hard to conceive), the Clinton-era legislation that sought to gut welfare provision here in the US. The terms of this act should put us in mind of another act, passed in England nearly two centuries ago: the New Poor Law of 1834. The provisions of the New Poor Law are familiar to us, thanks to Charles Dickens's depiction of its workings in Oliver Twist. When Noah Claypole famously sneers at little Oliver, calling him 'Work'us' ('Workhouse'), he is implying, for 1838, precisely what we convey today when we speak disparagingly of 'welfare queens.' The New Poor Law was an outrage, forcing the indigent and the unemployed to choose between work at any wage, however low, and the humiliation of the workhouse. Here and in most other forms of nineteenth-century public assistance (still thought of and described as "charity"), the level of aid and support was calibrated so as to be less appealing than the worst available alternative. This system drew on classical economic theories that denied the very possibility of unemployment in an efficient market: if wages fell low enough and there was no attractive alternative to work, everyone would find a job. For the next 150 years, reformers strove to replace such demeaning practices. In due course, the New Poor Law and its foreign analogues were succeeded by the public provision of assistance as a matter of right. Workless citizens were no longer deemed any the less deserving for that; they were not penalized for their condition nor were implicit aspersions cast upon their good standing as members of society. More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-twentieth century established the profound impropriety of defining civic status as a function of economic participation. In the contemporary United States, at a time of growing unemployment, a jobless man or woman is not a full member of the community. In order to receive even the exiguous welfare payments available, they must first have sought and, where applicable, accepted employment at whatever wage is on offer, however low the pay and distasteful the work. Only then are they entitled to the consideration and assistance of their fellow citizens. […] Conversely, it is not humiliating to be on the receiving end of a right. If you are entitled to unemployment payments, pension, disability, municipal housing, or any other publicly furnished assistance as of right—without anyone investigating to determine whether you have sunk low enough to 'deserve' help—then you will not be embarrassed to accept it. However, such universal rights and entitlements are expensive. But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to 'quantify' the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify 'humiliation'? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society? Unclear. But unless we ask such questions, how can we hope to devise answers? […] The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments."
"Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials — badges of compliance for corporate employers — in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt. […] Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable. Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, 'often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults.' An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance — for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the 'disease' goes away. When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a 'passive-aggressive revolution' by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything — this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution. Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the 'Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy'. Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves — and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
“In a world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty, why is there still empathy, sympathy and kindness? There must be some evolutionary advantage, otherwise those traits would have long since vanished. And yet we are so often squeamish when faced with acts of kindness, as if they were soft-headed embarrassments and signs of weakness. Or worse: mere narcissism and self-interest masquerading as something else.”
WTF? What has been written here is psychopathic. The implication being that it is advantageous to be ‘selfish & cruel’, especially ‘genetically speaking’ – which is another way of saying the best way to reproduce is through rape. The author (Kenneth Kidd) seems oblivious to the fact that humans are social creatures, and that we appreciate those who show us kindness. I mean, reproduction does mostly occur between people who like each other at the time, does it not? I’ll grant his position is merely one of argument, and that he’s not actually as psychopathic as all this is. However ….
He uses the cat (quoted below), and the quoted above, as a build up to stating that humans are social creatures. But he doesn’t take that as a given, rather, he quotes sources. In other words, ‘research suggests’ that humans are social creatures, but not movie nights, dating, pub rounds with friends, etc.
There’s no reason at all for the traits of kindness and empathy to have vanished, and every reason for them to have coexisted. What should make us squeamish is that such thoughts could be expressed at all in such a manner. It takes for granted that our society is cruel, as if this is a norm, rather than the aberration. A society of ‘overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty’ is a failed society, and it used to be termed barbaric.
Nowadays we tend to look more kindly on barbarism, obviously.
Further on in the article, he states:
“Are we naturally kind or selfish egoists at heart?
Much flows from how you answer that question, how, on balance, you view human nature.
Consider, for instance, the Christian tale of the Good Samaritan who helps out an injured Israelite, someone he doesn’t know, even though Samaritans and Israelites are long-standing enemies.
This is arguably the pre-eminent tale of Christian kindness. It seems to imply that empathy, compassion and caritas, or brotherly love, are natural human dispositions. But then, as Phillips and Taylor note, St. Augustine happened along with a profoundly different view. Rather than being native to humans, caritas was deemed to be divine, bestowed by God.
Without God, there could be no kindness or other virtue, because we’d lost the possibility of being naturally good with the expulsion from Eden.”
This to me seems entirely idiotic. (An aside dear reader: I hope you and I see eye to eye, and that you are as dumbfounded as I am. If not, I am left to explain, as I am, why this is shite. But I also feel the need to explain regardless, so that there’s some documentation in future databases that not all hearts had been so eclipsed in our time).
It is true that the Romans were cruel; and that there was much cruelty in the past. This suggests the so called ‘genetic’ line of thought which equates optimal reproduction with rape. It was an accomplishment of Christianity (which may have its roots in Buddhism) and a legacy which we used to take for granted (before we once again became blasé about torture) that Western society became more self-consciously gentle, in its abandonment of slavery, torture, and tyrannical government.
Christian civilization, remembering the torture of the forums, wrote their history to make the Romans cruel and inhumane. However, Christ’s story of a stranger helping anoher did not need academic analysis to be made clear to its first hearers; it was in a challenge to hardened hearts, one that Palestinian supporters aim toward Israelis today – treat everyone as you would like to be treated and expand your notion of family to include all, as we are all children of God. Though the Samaritan and Israeli were traditionally enemies, they transcended their tribalism to be brothers of a species. This was clear two thousand years ago and was written down for that reason: It was a call for early Christians to recognize one another as members of a family of God.
The soul hungers to be treated with respect and kindness, and as such this is quenching a thirst that has gotten used to the dryness of stone hearts. Augustine, a repentant sinner, found his source of kindness in the Church, and he did not know what we know about the history of humanity: that it did not begin 4000 years ago in a garden. Augustine layered that story with a lot of metaphoric meaning, but he also was incredulous to the idea that salvation could happen without God because he himself had been a great sinner and could not understand his transformation into an asexual hermit without projecting that into this myth. Which is to say that Augustine universalized his biography and considered his early years of sinfulness to be an example of normal human life without God.
With that clear, let’s leave Augustine out of 21st Century discussions shall we?
Kidd’s rhetorical question appropriately answered would tell us that humans are complicated, not simple, and that we have the capacity to be both kind and cruel. That we are naturally both kind and egotists, but that we are taught to exagerate our egotism. O
ur education system – our society – encourages the later; it rewards us when we are cruel. This talk of ‘squeamishness’ is an example of how it discourages kindness. We could have a society of beautiful gentle people, but we’d have to treat our children better and forgo all this bullshit with regard to grades, sports and celebrity, and really come down hard on them when they mock fat & ugly people. An example of the season: we might stop purposefully decieving them about Santa Claus, only to chalk up their later disapointment in learning the truth as a rite of passage.
Instead we have a society that values ignorance and hatred, that glorifies militaristic discipline as honourable, assigns undue virtue to the symmetrical, and that sorts its citizens into “winners” and “losers”.
The examples Kidd uses to argue for kindness as an achievement of civilization (rather than a repression) come from the rise of the militaristic nation state: after Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (the need to police the encouraged cruelty of a cruel society) he writes “Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith — were all fighting to restore kindness and compassion as something natural to the species.” Notice that he used the word fighting to describe their work.
To summarize my point here: people are both kind and cruel: crueler with strangers than they are with family. Throughout the West’s recorded history, there was a tendency toward authoritarian governance which encouraged a dog-eat-dog model. Christianity was revolutionary in that it encouraged the kinder side of human nature (until it too became authoritarian). The Western model of the nation-state is militaristic, further encouraging the unkind, and now we’ve had four hundred years of that nonsense, so that it seems “natural” that the unkind is the norm, whereas the empathic is the un-evolutionary aberration. In a “world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty” there’s not enough discouragement of this behaviour in favor of more gentle minds.
“[Oscar the cat] makes regular rounds, entering each room to smell and look over the patients. If all is more or less well, the white-breasted tabby moves on to the next room. If he instead snuggles up to a patient, purring and nuzzling, the nurses immediately start calling relatives. Oscar won’t leave until the patient has breathed his or her last.
Now, the intriguing question is not so much how Oscar can make such accurate prognoses, but why he lingers, holds this vigil. Is Oscar comforting himself or the patient? If he were upset, sensing a bad situation, wouldn’t Oscar be better off elsewhere, getting petted? And if he’s not upset, why is Oscar so generous, receiving nothing in return? Oscar not only appears to feel empathy, but to act on it, to show kindness.”
It doesn’t surprise me at all that a cat would behave in the way described. What I find surprising is that one feels the need to explain it at all, and to seek a selfish explanation for it at that.
Apple's concept video projecting how computers might be in twenty years: our time. To illustrate a professor at work, they imagined he was studying the greenhouse effect.
I also love this video for the way it documents the late '80s idea of academics: old dark wood and smarmy arrogance.
Having done temp work for three years, I can tell you that jobs are usually only about learning a set of actions. That is, they teach you the role and the routine, and if you stay long enough, eventually you might become conscious of what exactly it is you’re doing. Permanent staff with positions of authority have that consciousness – they understand what they are doing, but for many others it’s very much about following the routine.
In this manner, work is separated from achievement, and form is separated from content. The form is what you’re taught in your first day or week. The content is optional. In fact you may actually be discouraged from asking why you are doing such-and-such, that is, seeking out the content of your actions.
John Ralston Saul, writing in his 2008 book A Fair Country states
Increasingly our elites attempt to slip into the vacuum behind other people’s actions. Worse still, they attempt to imitate the surface appearance, not the reality, or other people’s actions. (p226)
This echoes his dissection of the separation of form from content in 1994’s Doubters Companion (‘White Bread’):
White Bread Post-modern urban individuals, who spend their days in offices, have taken to insisting that she or he is primarily a physical being equipped with the muscles of a work-horse and the clothes of a cowboy. The rejection of white bread in favor of loaves compacted with the sort of coarse, scarcely ground grains once consumed solely by the poor follows quite naturally.
White bread is the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its ideological conclusion: essential goods originally limited by their use in daily life have been continually refined until all utility has been removed. Utility is vulgar. In this particular case, nutrition and fibre were the principal enemies of progress. With the disappearance of utility what remains is form, the highest quality of high civilizations.
And whenever form presides, it replaces ordinary content with logic and artifice. The North American loaf may be tasteless but remains eternally fresh thanks to the efficient use of chemicals. The French baguette turns into solidified sawdust within two hours of being baked, which creates the social excitement of having to eat it the moment it comes out of the oven. The Italians have introduced an intriguing mixture of tastes – hands towels on the inside and cardboard in the crust. The Spanish managed to give the impression of having replaced natural fibre with baked sand. There are dozens of other variations. The Greek. The Dutch. Even the world of international hotels has developed its own white roll.
In each case, to refine flour beyond utility is to become refined. This phenomenon is by no means limited to bread or even food. Our society is filled with success stories of high culture, from men’s ties to women’s shoes.
In his entry on Property Development, the last two definitions contain the same theme:
6. The managers who run the large deposit banks have a taste for big buildings. They have wasted large amounts of capital by constructing remarkable headquarter buildings and imitative towers in every financial centre around the world. The only function of these palaces is to warehouse a non-productive managerial class.
7.Every society needs housing and work space. A civilization mindful of its future makes sure that everyone has a bit of property. An evolved civilization attempt to ensure that both private and public buildings are of the highest possible quality. Architecture at this level is an ethical expression of the society at large. The sign today we are merely involved in speculation is that our buildings relate less and less to any primary use or need.
Inasmuch that postmodernism began as an architectural concept, I find Fredric Jameson’s suggestion (in his 1992 Postmodernism architecture chapter) that the architecture of the period seemed to be designed to be photographed relevant. Along with film, this enabled the conceptualization of form away from content. In short, we all began to perceive ourselves as actors within the movie of our lives. So Shakespeare’s ‘all the world’s a stage’ became for us an article of secular faith.
And from this follows the idea that we enact roles, and thus only need to be taught how to act the role. How to act the role of consumer, office worker, smoker, drinker, seducer … all lessons learned from the role-modeling provided by actors enacting roles with fashionable haircuts and fashionable clothes in movies and television. So, after almost sixty years of television, we all know how to embody stereotypes if we so chose. This is most remarkable in terms of music – the folksy crooner who dresses according to what Bob Dylan wore in the 1960s, the punk dressing according to late 1970s photographs, and of course the vast plaid marketing campaign that was Grunge.
Today’s Huffington Post links to a Nypost article on “the creepy painting” of Michael Jackson in Michelangelo’s David pose, surrounded by cherubs. We are told that it was commissioned in 1999 from the artist David Nordahl.
This painting was glimpsed in the 2003 documentary by Martin Bashir, and from which I took the screencaps to compose the piece (below) I had in Zsa Zsa Gallery’sThe Michael Jackson Show show in Toronto, and which closed on Michael Jackson’s 45th birthday.
As I stated in that peice, he had delusions of godlihood. I do not know if the Nordahl work has a title, but I’d imagine it acquiring the name ‘The Apotheosis of Michael Jackson’, and considering the default longevity of oil and canvas, it may become a type of Mona Lisa image of the 26th Century – something most people are familar with, but it will be few who will have actually looked up the surviving electronic documents to see the videos.
CNBC has a slide show of work from his collection. This dates from last March, when Jackson was planning an auction to gain some cash for his troubled finances. As I’ve known about the apotheosis painting for almost seven years (Bashir’s documentary aired in January of that year) it doesn’t surprise me that Jackson’s taste was so bad. What I was surprised by were the other paintings wherein he’s a king, or a knight. I find this one (also by David Nordahl) most alarming:
And this robotic head reminds me of the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
I found the slide show through a search for “David Nordahl”. The thumbnail for the following made me think he was a Mormon artist responsible for the type of images of white-Jesus amidst tanned-white-people Indians as seen in their texts. On clicking I see that instead it’s a very Socialist Realism depiction of Jackson that wouldn’t stand out from a collection of Maoist images from the Cultural Revolution. I would like to think that Nordahl is savy enough to have put Jackson in a red shirt for this reason – consider this painting “The Nordahl Code”. Herein lies coded images depicting truths about his interaction with this disturbed man, but I’ll leave that to the thriller novelists of the future.
Frank Herbert, in his last novel Chapterhouse Dune, wrote of a Van Gogh painting which had survived the millenia and was a reminder to that cohort of humanity of an element of wildness in the human imagination. It is an eloquent passage about the importance and lasting effects of artwork. Jackson in turn stands as a testament to the WTF? element in the human, but this message speaks most clearly to us, the present living who shared the world with the living figure, but a century from now, these paintings, stripped of the context that we take for granted, will be a mess of mixed messages. By this I mean that we know that Jackson’s thing for being depicted as a king comes from his marketing as ‘the king of pop’. And that the associated art is tasteless and ignorant.
Jackson as a knight, or as a king … a schoolgirl of 2110 will have no reason to think that the man depicted there was not those things. Also, these works are a reminder that while painting we call ‘contemporary’ has become a blotchy mess of shapes, colour and tube turds, there remains this underground of figurative realism that ‘tasteless’ celebrities hire for their own personal propaganda. The tradition of Queen Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Napoleon (ancient figures from a pre-photographic world shaping their image for the present and future generations) continues for the celebrity-royalty of today. The truly wealthy and powerful (billionaires) just support the museums and keep the industrial scale works they purchase in secret storage somewhere.
What is fortunate is that Jackson’s megalomania was somewhat harmlessly channeled into a career as a song & dance man. In the history of celebrity, Jackson is perhaps unique in the use of the cult of personality, and someone attached to his organization must have studied its long history, from Rome through to Stalinist Russia. Had he been a political figure, it seems certain he would have been the worst kind of monster, a Caligula with a harem of boys. Consider how this video depicts (part of the 1997 History campaign) some kind of Roman Emperor Soviet Russia fantasy:
Michael Jackson was not a healthy man in any sense of the word. Those of us who take art seriously can see in it just how ill he was, and we can also recognize the depth of ignorance amidst his fans. That people have gotten tatoos ‘in memoriam’, that people leave glowing comments on his YouTube archive, is just another example and evidence of a failed education system. The art will echo down the centuries as a reminder that in the late 20th Century, Western soceity was totally fucked up.
Science-fiction has been the avant garde of industrial design since the 1939 World’s Fair, if not earlier. It has been a medium to market strange ideas (aliens from outer space, our minds being computer generated delusions), to forewarn of us of potential dangers (the computers take over, the robots nuke us), but through the pragmatics of using experimental design ideas to build unfamiliar worlds, it serves as both a promotional vehicle and fertilizer of new markets. Science fiction envisioned how computers might be used, which in turn taught us how we might be able to use them, which in turn inspired engineers to make them that way, which led to us using them the way we do. A video-phone in late 20th Century science-fiction television and movies becomes early 21st Century Skype.
While the idea of a ‘videophone’ is both old-fashioned and going nowhere as a device, ‘Skyping’ is alive and well. We are living with ‘videophone’ technology but it is just is not being mediated by landline telephones that sit on our desks; instead it is being mediated by our computers. Further, the ubiquity of cellphones means that there’s currently no market for ‘video phone booths’ as depicted in 1968’s 2001:A Space Odyssey when Dr. Haywood calls his daughter from the space station.
Or the scene in Blade Runner, when Deckard called Rachel at the bar. This scene defines the concept of the ‘videophone’ that I grew up with. In the context of 1982, this is a video-phone call.
In 1989’s Back to the Future II, Marty gets an AT&T mediated video-call from his colleague Needles (played by Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s bassist Flea) on his flat-screen television. Interestingly, the flat screen tv seems the only thing that came true from that projection twenty years ago. (Since 1989, we have not developed flying cars nor a highway system for them, nor are we using fusion reactors for our vehicles, and hoverboards still aren’t happening. Nor do we have holographic cinema billboards.)
Back to the Future II was set in 2015, and imagined the fax machine would have much more prominence that it attained, replaced by computers and heldhelds with their killer-app, email. Blade Runner was set it a post-ecocidal (if not post-apocalyptic) Los Angeles of 2019, where no one had cellphones and CRT televisions printed out Polaroids of their screen-capture.
One thing of note is that all video-phone scenes filmed in the 20th Century included ‘end credits’:
2001
Blade Runner
Back to the Future
(AT&T of course is the network that runs the (20th Century futuristic) iPhone in the United States.)
With regard to video-phones, it is not inconceivable to me now that by 2019, (that is, within ten years) you could have novelty Skype booths set up in bar, and for a few coins (“$1.25”) or a credit card swipe, make video-calls to girls you just met and invite them out for a drink. Deckard’s phone call may not being as unrealistic as it still seems.
In the meantime, we are already carrying video-phones in our pocket, allowing us such activities as described in this song by Beyonce:
"The teens are destined to be the decade in which we'll finally stop wearing jeans. It'll be a slow sputtering process, but why wait? Ban the jean from your wardrobe starting January 1st by this simple rule: each time you find yourself reaching for jeans, reach for hose instead". – Momus
This resonated for me since it's been a couple of years now that I've seen girls forgoing pants in favor of tights only. And given how tight skinny-jeans are, they could be replaced by leggings without being that noticeable.
From the 20-26 November issue of The Guardian Weekly:
UN meets homeless victims of American property dream | Chris McGreal "Deanne Weakly was among the first to the microphone. The 51-year-old estate agent told how a couple of years ago she was pulling in $80,000 (£48,000) a year from commissions selling homes in LA's booming property market. When the bottom fell out of the business with the foreclosure crisis, she lost her own house and ended up living on the streets in a city with more homeless than any other in America. She was sexually assaulted, harassed by the police and in despair. She turned to the city and California state governments for help. "No one wanted to listen. They blame you for being homeless in the first place," she said. […] Rolnik had waited more than a year to tour cities across the US to prepare a report for the UN's human rights council on America's deepening housing crisis following the subprime mortgage debacle. UN special rapporteurs are more often found investigating human rights in Sudan and Burundi or abuses of the Israeli occupation than exposing the underbelly of the American dream. George Bush's administration blocked her visit, finding itself in the company of Cuba, Burma and North Korea in blocking a special rapporteur. [emp. mine] "I was asking for almost a year before I as allowed in," Rolnik said. When Barack Obama came to power she was welcomed to range across America talking to those who have lived on the streets for years and the newly homeless forced out by the foreclosure crisis. Rolnik, a Brazilian urban planner and architect, said administration officials were genuinely interested in what she might find, if not embracing of her raison d'etre that everyone is entitled to a decent home. […] A Spanish-speaking veteran of the Korean war steps up. He is the angriest of the lot. He is not a communist, he says, but in Cuba nobody goes homeless. He fought for America and now he is left to live on the streets.
Furore over Prix Goncourt winner shows French could use more egalite | Lizzy Davies [Marie Ndiaye moved to Berlin in 2007 "largely because of Sarkozy"…] "…she said that France under the current president was languishing in a 'hateful' atmosphere of tough security and 'vulgarity'. 'I find this France monstrous,' she told culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles. […] Is the president, who was elected after a campaign in which he urged people to 'love or leave' the country, guilty of pursuing an agenda that is “monstrous” to perceived “outsiders”? Or is Ndiaye merely, as Sarkozy’s supporters claim, conforming to a “Pavlovian” form of opposition that has become the norm among leftwing French intellectuals? Ever since his days as interior minister, Sarkozy has made his name through an uncompromising stance on immigration and integration. He provoked uproar in 2005 by referring to youths in the neglected, multiracial suburbs as “scum”, and has zealously imposed a strategy of expulsion quotas. It is this side of present day France – its sans papiers, or undocumented workers, its forced returns to war-torn Afghanistan, its reluctance to tackle the discrimination endemic in society – that is the basis of many people’s dislike of Sarkozy.
Can Niner generation do the right thing now? | Matthew Ryder "Those impressionable twentysomethings are today's influential fortysomethings and they carry the legacy with them. No Logo author Naomi Klein credits those years as the period that turned her student interests towards global issues. Current UK politicians, such as David Miliband and David Cameron, fresh out of university, opted not for the yuppie jobs that the 80s had offered, preferring to enter the loftier world of political research. Across the Atlantic, Sergey Brin claims that it was a trip to the dissolving Soviet Union that "awakened his childhood fear of authority" and influenced the culture of the famously informal company he started eight years later – Google. And it was at this time that a half-Kenyan African-American made history by becoming an editor of Harvard Law Reviewand decided to write a book. That summer, he took Michelle Robinson on their first date to see a quintessentially Niner movie – Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Last year, Jeff Gordinier published X Saves the World. According to him, the great achievement of the post baby-boomer generation was that it "stopped the world from sucking". Maybe so. But if Niners are really going to make the difference that they believed they would, they will have to do more. And they will be challenged on the very things that once made them different. This is already happening with regard to violence and conflict. At the key moment of their development, Niners witnessed dramatic political change occurring without bloodshed. Television pictures had become a more effective revolutionary tool than an AK-47. That influenced the Niner outlook in a way that was a genuine break from the past. Previously, baby-boomers from George Bush to Osama bin Laden seemed to believe that you had to fight for what you wanted – and kill or be killed if necessary. But Niners questioned the need to pay that price."
Yesterday at the bookstore I browsed through Avatar: An activist survival guide, and saw some screencaps depicting the future Earth. The idea is that by that time, Earth had become used up and was decaying. There's a pic of an overflowing dumpster to convey this.
So, when I go see Avatar next month, I'l be there not only for the 3-D & hovering mountains, but to glimpse the mid-22nd Century.
Let’s address your famous “Blood in the streets” comment to The Globe and Mail last February. Still feel that way?
I wasn’t saying there would be blood in the streets of Toronto, remember. My first point was that the crisis would likely destabilize about a dozen relatively weak states and that this ‘axis of upheaval’ would become more violent. That’s happening already – just look at the escalation of violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the signs of a deterioration of security in Iraq, not to mention Somalia.
The other point I had in mind was that, after previous big financial crises, insecure governments have been tempted to rattle sabres for the sake of promoting their own domestic legitimacy. My prime suspect here is Russia, which of all the big powers stands to gain the most from geopolitical instability, since [for example] a major attack on Iranian nuclear installations would double the price of oil and greatly enrich the denizens of the Kremlin. The probability of such a war is currently being underestimated by many people.
Context: By the late 22nd Century (2170s) the 21st Century is of course a well understood historical epoch. Cassia Mujamadar, in an interview with the Thinker Alice, is required to narrate this history.
I cautiously threaded my way through a brief history, conscious of Alice’s immense memory, and my necessarily simple-appraisal of a complex subject.
By the end of the 20th Century, international corporations had as much influence in Earth’s affairs as governments. Earth was undergoing its first dataflow revolution; information had become as important as raw materials and manufacturing potential. By mid-21, nanotechnology factories were inexpensive; nano recyclers could provide raw materials from garbage; data and design reigned supreme.
The fiction of separate nations and government control was maintained, but increasingly, political decisions were made on the basis of economic benefit, not national pride. Wars declined, the labour market fluctuated widely as developing countries joined in – exacerbated by nano and other forms of automation – and through most of the dataflow world a class of therapied, superfit workers arose, highly skilled and self-confident professionals who demanded an equal say with corporate boards.
In the early teens of twenty-one, new
techniques of effective psychological therapy began to transform Earth culture and politics. Therapied individuals, as a new mental rather than economic class, behaved differently. Beyond the expected reduction in extreme and destructive behaviors, the therapied proved more facile and adaptable, effectively more intelligent and therefore more skeptical. They evaluated political, philosophical, and religious claims according to their own standards of evidence. They were not “true believers.” Nevertheless, they worked with others – even the untherapied – easily and efficiently. The slogan of those who advocated therapy was, “A sane society is a polite society”.
With the economic unification of most nations by 2070, pressure on the untherapied to remove the kinks and dysfunctions of nature and nurture became almost unbearable. Those with inadequate psychological profiles found full employment more and more elusive.
By the end of twenty-one, the underclass of untherapied made up about half of he human race, yet created less than a tenth of the world economic product.
Nations, cultures, political groups, had to accommodate the therapied to survive. The changes were drastic, even cruel for some, but far less cruel than previous tides in history. As Alice reminded me, the result was not the death of political or religious organization, as some had anticipated – it was a rebirth of sorts. New, higher standards, philosophies, and religions developed.
As individuals changed, so did group behaviour change. At the same time, in a feedback relationship, the character of world commerce changed. At first, nations and major corporations tried to keep their old, separate privileges and independence. But by the last decades of twenty-one, international corporations, owned and directed by therapied labour and closely allied managers, controlled the world economy beneath a veneer of national democratic governments. Out of tradition – the accumulated mass of cultural wishful thinking – certain masques were maintained; but clear-seeing individuals and groups had no difficulty recognizing the obvious.
The worker-owned corporations recognized common economic spheres. Trade and taxation were regulated across borders, currencies standardized, credit nets extended worldwide. Economics became politics. The new reality was formalized in the supra-national alliances.
GEWA – the Greater East-West Alliance – encompassed North America, most of Asia and Southeast Asia, India, and Pakistan. The Greater Southern Hemisphere Alliance, or GSHA – pronounced Jee-shah -absorbed Australia, South America, New Zealand, and most of Africa. Eurocon grew out of the European Economic Community, with the addition of the Baltic and Balkan States, Russia, and the Turkic Union.
Non-aligned countries were found mostly in the Middle East and North Africa, in nations that had slipped past both the industrial and dataflow revolutions.
By the beginning of the 22nd Century, many Earth governments forbade the untherapied to work in sensitive jobs, unless they qualified as high naturals – people who did not require therapy to meet the new standards. And the definition of a sensitive job became more and more inclusive.
There were only rudimentary Lunar and Martian settlements then, with stringent requirements for settlers; no places for misfits to hide. The romance of settling Mars proved so attractive that organizers could be extremely selective, rejecting even the therapied in favour of high naturals. They made up the bulk of settlers.
All settlements in the young Triple accepted therapy; most rejected mandatory therapy, the new tyranny of Earth. […]
I wondered what it had been like to live in a world of kinks and mental dust. I asked Alice how she visualized such a world.
“Very interesting, and far more dangerous,” she answered. “In a way there was a greater variety in human nature. Unfortunately, much of the variety was ineffective or destructive”.
“Have you been therapied?” I asked.
She laughed. “Many times. It is a routine function of a thinker to undergo analysis and therapy. Have you?” […] [p.121-124]
***
Alice described in words and graphic projection an Earth rapidly approaching 90% agreement in spot plebiscites – the integration of most individual goals. Dataflow would give individuals equal access to key information. Humans would be redefined as units within a greater thinking organism, the individuals being at once integrated -reaching agreement rapidly on solutions to common problems – but autonomous, accepting diversity of opinion and outlook.
I wanted to ask, What diversity? Everybody agrees! but Alice clearly had higher, mathematical definitions for which these words were mere approximations. The freedom to disagree would be strongly defended, on the grounds that even an integrated and informed society could make mistakes. However, rational people were more likely to choose direct and unclut
tered pathways to solutions. My Martian outlook cried out in protest. “Sounds like beehive political oppression,” I said.
“Perhaps, but remember, we are modeling a dataflow culture. Diversity and autonomy within political unity”.
“Smaller governments respond to individuals more efficiently. If everybody is unified, and you disagree with the status quo, but can’t escape to another system of government – is that really freedom?”
“In the world-wide culture of Earth, dataflow allows even large governments to respond quickly to the wishes of individuals. Communication between tiers of the organization is nearly instantaneous, and constant”.
I said that seemed a bit optimistic.
“Still, plebiscites are rapid. Dataflow encourages humans to be informed and to discuss problems. Augmented by their own enhancements, which will soon be as powerful as thinkers, every tier of the human organization acts as a massive processor for evaluating and determining world policy. Dataflow links individuals in parallel, so to speak. Eventually, human groups and thinkers could be so integrated as to be indistinguishable.
“At that point, such a society exceeds my modeling ability,” Alice concluded.
“Group mind,” I said sardonically. “I don’t want to be there when that happens.”
“It would be intriguing,” Alice said. “There would always remain the choice to simulate isolation as an individual.” [p.125-126]
***
2173-76 As we climbed through the cylinder, from the observation deck to the forward boom control walkway, Orianna told me about Earth fashions in clothes. “I’ve been out of it fro two years of course, ” she said, “But I like to think I’m still tuned. And I keep up with the vids”.
“So what are they wearing?” I asked.
“Formal and frilly. Greens and lace. Masks are out this year, except for floaters – projected masks with personal icons. Everybody’s off pattern projection, though. I liked pattern projection. You could wear almost nothing and still be discreet.”
“I can redo my wardrobe. I’ve brought enough raw cloth”.
Orianna made a face. “This year, expect fixed outfits, not nano-shaped. Old fabric is best. Tattered is wonderful. We’ll dig through the recycle shops. The shredbare look is very pos. Nano fake is beyond deviance.”
“Do I have to be in fashion?”
“Abso not! It’s drive to ignore. I switch from loner to slave every few months when I’m at home”.
“Terries will expect a red rabbit to be trop retro, no?”
Orianna smiled in friendly pity. “With that speech, you’re fulfilled already. Just listen to me, and you’ll slim the current.”
[…] “You still say ‘trop shink’ on Mars. That’s asbo neg, mid twenty-one. Sounds like Chaucer to Terries. If you don’t drive multilingual, and you’d better not try unless you wear an enhancement, best to speak straight-up early twenty-two. Everyone understands early twenty-two, unless you’re glued to French or German, or Dutch. They ridge on anything about twenty years old fro drive standard. Chinese love about eight kinds of Europidgin, but hit them in patrie, and they revert to twentyPutonghua. Russian – ”
“I’ll stick with English.”
“Still safe,” she said. [p. 155-156]
***
My Earth studies and conversations with Alice had left me with the impression of a flawless society, cool and efficient. But what I head in conversation with Orianna seemed to contradict this. There were great disagreements between Terries; nations within GEWA and its southern equivalent, GSHA, arguing endlessly, clashing morality systems as populations from one country traded places with others – a popular activity in late [21]70s. Some populations – Islam Fatimites, Green Idaho Christians, Mormons, Wahabi Saudis, and others – maintained stances that would be conservative even on Mars, clinging stubbornly to their cultural identities in the face of Earth-wide criticism.
Paleo-Christians in Green Idaho, practically a nation unto itself within the United States, had declared the rights of women to be less than those of men. Women fought to have their legal powers and rights reduced, despite opposition from all other states. On the reverse, in Fatamite Morocco and Egypt, men sought to glorify the image of women, whom they regarded as Chalices of Mohammad. In Greater Albion, formerly the United Kingdom, adult transforms who had regressed in apparent age to children were forbidden to hold political office, creating a furor I could hardly begin to untangle. And in Florida, defying regulations, some humans transformed themselves into shapes similar to marin mammals … And to pay for it, organized Sex in the Sea exhibits for tourists.
In language, the greatest craze of the [21]60s and [21]70s was invented language. Mixing old tongues, inventing new, mixing music and words electronically so that one could not tell where tones left off and phonemes began, creating visual languages that wrapped speakers in projected, complex symbols, all seemed designed to separate and not bring together. Yet enhancements were available that were tuned to the New Lingua Nets or NLN. Installing the NLN enhancements through nano surgery, one could understand virtually any language, natural or invented, and even think in their vernacular.
The visual languages seemed especially drive in the [21]70s. In GEWA alone, seventy visual languages had been created. The most popular was used by more than four and a half billion people.
I saw the picture on the cover of this morning’s National Post and recognized it as the so-called Leonardo drawing, since this was first reported last year.
The ‘news’ today is that the fingerprint ‘proves’ it is by Leonardo. I’ve studied and copied Leonardo drawings for half of my life, and I’m inclined to agree.
For that matter, I once saw a sculpted terra-cotta angel-head at the ROM and I thought that was probably by Leonardo too.
Hank Paulson (written by Craig Warner): “The West is fucked. We fucked it up. Oh, not just you and me [addressing John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley]. All of us. The West. It’s done, it’s over. You wanna call it a game? This is the game. You want your great-grandchildren speaking Chinese? The dollar is going to go. We had Rome, than Europe, than this. Us. This thing with cars and stereos and hoola hoops, and we screwed it all up. We ran through it all, this stuff. And we’ve come out on the other side where it’s …? I don’t know. Where is this place? Oh yeah. We have this one weekend, where maybe we can come up with something to hold it all together a little while longer.”
Ken Lewis, speaking with John Thain (wrtn by Craig Warner): “You see those pictures? They’re what I call real art. They would form the kind of exhibitions Bank of America might once have bankrolled. But now we find ourselves funding modern art as well. Art that can insult everything you and I have worked our whole lives to make sacred. Some of it to me looks like a road accident or a human being turned inside out. But those that matter, culturally I mean, like to stand back, arms folded, brows furrowed in just the right way, assessing the disturbed minds of psychopaths and getting from this a grim kind of satisfaction I freely admit remains unavailable to my own sensibilities. [Referring to the painting] The Judas Kiss. Exquisite isn’t it? But time has moved on Mr. Thain. The brand has to move on. The world is different now. We are currently financing an exhibition of paintings by Francis Bacon at the Tate Museum in London. Starts today. Do you know what his paintings look like?”
Thain: “I leave that sort of thing to my wife.”
Lewis: “Our name, Bank of America, is on that exhibition. History is happening Mr. Thain. Right here, this weekend. No one is going to blame you for keeping up with it.”
James Cromwell (l) plays Hank Paulson (r)
John Thain (l) played by Ben Daniels (r)
John Thain (l) and Ken Lewis (James Bolam) share a drink in fake life
John Thain (l) and Ken Lewis (r) shake hands in real life
Found in the notebook of ten years ago, dated 21 September 1999. Very much a draft, it was nonetheless written with potential publication in mind. I’ve reproduced some the draft-editing with the cross outs.
I recently watched an NFB film during the Atlantic Film Festival held in Halifax last September. And because it was the NFB, they had a two minute long (five minutes?) montage/ad showing various clips from their archives, to pat themselves on the back with the motto, ‘the images of our lives: NFB/ONF 1939-1999. Sixty years … etc. It reminded me of that the NFB is one of the few cultural products that Canada produces which is more obviously cultural. We are the country that claims to have a culture around shopping merchandise outlets (Eatons, The Bay) and a bunch of grown men chasing a rubber disk around on an artificially frozen slab of ice. (are Canadian examples of Can culture. This is not something to be proud of. It is just pathetic). My point is that what Canada claims to call its culture is really the experience of games and corporations. Anthropologically, there is a case for this, but it’s convoluted.
Now the Americans have a culture, there is no denying that. They have important painters and writers and musicians. And they have their Hollywood which claims to produce a cultural product (but in reality seem to produces 2 hour long for commercials they are commercials for the actors and the directors and the toy companies and in the at the turn of the century, the digital effects magicians).
Of course, the technically minded will remind us that the century doesn’t start until 2001, which illustrates why the technically minded’s reason and logic have never been too popular, because they ignore psychological realities. You have to reason it out, it’s not obvious, that the century starts in 2001. And the really stupid will say the same about the millennium, but it’s obvious that millennium are periods of a thousand years. I learned that three zeroes males a thousand. We didn’t call 999 two years before the millennium. Nineteen will change to twenty, ninety-nine will change to a thousand. One thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine will become two thousand. Roman numerals will be succinctly MM. And that doesn’t stand for Much Music – mille mille, a thousand thousand.
The NFB montage reminded me that film has been the dominant art form of this century. I would rather watch a movie based on a book than read the book, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Purists might think I’m lazy, that I’m some aesthetic chump, but why should I be embarrassed or ashamed to prefer a succint version of literature that I can enjoy visually?
Film images are so important to our turn of the century culture the NFB, Canada that they belong to everybody. Sure it says the NFB, it says Canada but it belongs to the world.
[This written as a callout]: Canada is an important source of important films that contribute to the world’s culture.
[Then this gets personal/reflective]: It occurred to me and then slipped from my grasp. What art was all about. It’s endlessly annoying to hear how art has been categorized, fit into a conceptual framework so that when an educated, supposedly sophisticated art person can give an answer when challenged by the question of certain exhibitions or curious crowd/patrons.
To me, the ability to give an answer to the question of what is art is means you in some ways missed the mark. I don’t think art is about questions and answers. I don’t think art is about meanings. I’ve come to appreciate that is which is [sic] dumbfounding, that which is wordless. An experience that is felt and not explained. It is a zen like think for me.
So, it is the information age / the space age / the computer age / etc etc. The multitude of names for a period in which we are living, exemplifies one of the stupidities of our post modern age times. “Agh, its too much! Too much …” etc etc. I suppose that type of condition, much cliched now, is the appeal of a dumbfounding art. Perhaps there are many of you that wish to understand, to grasp, who have believed that to know s the goal. But why? A painting is just another picture, a sculpture is just another lump to navigate around. I doubt that there have been such a large number of talentless hacks, that we, as audience members, and the witless appreciative hacks.
To make something that is different, to put something which engages the mind and the senses.
The importance of artistic things in our lives is numerous – the importance of being dressed, the TV shows we must watch, the song we must dance too.
The broad view is the existential one, that we will all die, and so who cares about anything. But death is not a reality for the majority of us. Most of us will not die tomorrow. And while we are young we are infused with the impossibility of death. We can afford to be bored. Art for us can be meaningless. Our young women can afford to listen to Celine Dion and Mariah Carey.
Art appears to be the biggest side show of all. Here in colonial North America, haunted by a past that as Canadians we are ignorant of, and haunted by the American history and the American culture, culture is a terrible thing, something to avoid by going shopping at Eaton’s, or by watching a hockey game. Psychological Realities
If art has value it is in teaching the dominance of psychological reality over the land of logic and reason. I certainly am not advocating stupidity, but to be conscious and balanced historically what has been called “a well rounded person”. We must balance the basic stupidity of reason with the knowledge of experience. Art is one of the best, if not the best and the if not the only appropriate medium/vehicle for the communication of experience.
I like my art to be fantastic and fanciful. Full of make believe. Fairy tales. I don’t like my art to be political and the pretentious. I don’t like people who judge and make enemies based on style. [The following is dated 22 September. Here I anticipate some of what I’ve encountered studying Christopher Alexander’s ideas about ‘centres’ and ‘wholeness’]
? Art is a manifestation of being. Art objects exist, but they are object or concepts that are dependent on other objects and concepts. They are structured from pre-existing structures. Art are a posteriori objects/concepts.
? Art objects contain souls. That is, there is within them an element that excites the subtleties sense of the subtle. Art objects, because they are fabricated from pre-existing structures, like life forms, carry within them elements of the auras of meaning from their ancestors. A collage is just not a coll glue and fragments, it’s a little bit of this magazine and this it’s sources.
[More personal/reflective]
What is the need to vocalize, to write this down? If I want an art that is free from conceptual frameworks and labels, why do I find myself penning an essay on art? Won’t the readers use this to formulate new soundbites on art?
An attempt to understand using the tools of understanding: that is an effect on language. The constructed object is a creature of being more eloquent and noble than a drop of sweat of a pile of excrement.
The sufferings today caused by a lack of dignity. To create if to dignify o
bjects and surfaces.
Human dreams in concrete form Wonders of the imagination Achievements of the imagination The Image nation
2001 – "That's the whole idea, you know. 150 years from today is not very far. [Yesterday on the set,] we were talking about what companies are going to be around. We were on location, and LeVar Burton's directing this week. He had on this Eddie Bauer get-up from head to toe, and we were talking, 'You know what? Eddie Bauer will be around in 150 years.' You can get your mind around 150 years from today. And there's some things you can say: 'Oh, no! Definitely will not be here in 150 years.'" – Scott Bakula, August 2001
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious By SARA CORBETT This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
Mad Men debuted in 2007, and corresponds to a fin-de-decade zeitgeist which may in turn provoke the next decade (2010-2020) to look more Modernist. Will Mad Men inspire people to begin dressing in similar ways? Already in the summer of 2009, Banana Republic had partnered with the show to sell similar fashion.
Correspondingly, when the Drake Hotel opened in Toronto in 2003, they adopted a Modernist design format (to reflect the owner’s idea that the Hotel should be a bohemian place that would inspire present day Beatniks), but by 2008, the Hotel was being depicted as if it existed on a lonely New York St during the 1950s and 60s.
Battlestar Galactica ran from 2003-2009, and depicted an essentially contemporary society (albeit one without spaceships and jump-drives). A spin-off series, Caprica, has been developed (it’s pilot premiered on DVD in 2009, the series itself in 2010), but set fifty years prior to the ‘contemporary’ Galactica series, uses costume design and other aspects to depict a retro-society; thus in effect matching the actual zeitgeist of the 2010s: a neomodernist highly technological society: Mad Men with Blackberries.
(A interesting note: one of the first reviews of the Caprica DVD pilot stated, “I love the possibilities of retro/futuristic style and wish it had been more consistently applied across costumes and set dec. What they achieved is pretty generic, mid-twenty first century Canadian.” )
Generic mid-21st Century Canadian
Subsequently, in twenty years, when both Caprica and Mad Men are downloadable retro shows from the 2010s, will people understand the contrivance of Caprica‘s Modernism, or see it only as reflection of the times in which it was created? In other words, by 2019, will our fashion and everything-design make it seem like we’re living in Caprican society? Does the popularity of Mad Men reflect a yearning for an elegance and style lost during the Postmodern period? Will we see a return to that, and in so doing become Mad Men with Blackberries & iPhones?
I started this Posterous account over the summer, in abandonment of both my Goodreads project and the blog on my website. I was trying something new. I also understand that Posterous has the ability to multi-post, so eventually I’ll set it up to sync with my /blog. However, over the summer I was working on a new site design, and while that’s pending I’m in no rush to set up that functionality yet.
As for Goodreads, that project is pretty much over. I plan on leaving it alone, and maintaining its archive. I just need to do some digital reorganizing. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to think of a new domain name, because I want to move on from GR into something else. I anticipate moving a lot of the GR content to this new thing, whenever that comes together.
“The historical role of modernism, in the sense of a phenomenon arising with the domain of art, resides in its ability to jolt us out of tradition […] Art today needs to reinvent itself, and on a planetary scale. And this new modernism, for the first time, will have resulted from global dialogue. Postmodernism, thanks to the post-colonial criticism of Western pretensions to determine the world’s direction and the speed of its development, has allowed the historical counters to be reset to zero; today temporalities intersect and weave a complex network stripped of a centre. Numerous contemporary artistic practices indicate, however, that we are on the verge of leap, out of the postmodern period and the (essentialist) multicultural model from which it is indivisible, a leap that would give rise to a synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism. Let us call this synthesis altermodernism'”.-Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodernism catalogue essay.
Looking at the Andy Warhol ‘Giant’ book last night at Dan’s (Phaidon press, Dan’s friend’s book) impressed by the layout, comprehensiveness. The images, ticket stubs, newspapers, and really great photographs. Especially liked the picture of Warhol shopping (buying Campbell’s soup etc). I’ve never bought into the hype of Warhol, but I don’t doubt his relevance. Part of the problem of his legacy is how much popular culture adopted the forms he made permissible. It’s hard to look at the 1980s portraits made from Polaroids and rendered as silkscreens and not think of a cheap Photoshop filter. There are some who judge the quality of an artist by the level of subsequent adoption – Jackson Pollock, for example, made a drip-painted look for a table top something decorators could take seriously. Similarly, Apple encodes the ‘Ken Burns’ effect into it’s image software.
What was also apparent in the Warhol books is how much it was a documented party-scene. New York’s hipsters, looking like the hipsters of today (who are emulating their model) are preserved in their beautiful baby-fat youth for the rest of time. Thirty years later now their hair is grey, their bodies thick, their stamina not what it was then, and such is the way of things. But in New York moment in historical time, they were partying under the paternal patronage of Uncle Andy who took their photos and made pictures of them.
I was also struck by the absence of politics. There was the Warhol silkscreen of Nixon, ‘vote McGovern’ and it’s comprehensible if you know something of American politics of the early 1970s. But we are now living in the 21st Century, and it is a cultural artefact – highlighting the transience of American Presidencies. Nixon from here on and for the rest of time will merely be a collection of images (videos & photos) recorded audio tracks (the Tapes) and documents. In a hundred years, internet-conspiracy theorists will probably claim that he was a fictional character developed in 2002, just as they claim that 9/11 was an inside job and that the Moon landings never happened.
Of history, we should always remember the thousand years of memory outweighs the minutes of its creation; that is to say, murdering Julius Caesar probably took all of five minutes, but it has been remembered for over two thousand years. Such things exist in a much grander context than their initial inception. And they become the possession of a greater population of people than those who lived through them. (A greater number of people have been alive in the past two thousand years than the population of Rome in 44BC who lived through the actual event).
How we access and understand the context comes through the artefacts. Shakespeare’s imagining of Caesar’s death is renewed it’s memory in our civilization. The Frost/Nixon film last year renewed the memory of Nixon’s presidency. And today of course is a day of the renewal of memories of the terrorist attacks of eight years ago.
We may understand the history of Nixon, and of supermarkets, and of canned food. But how a particular human being reacted to them is what is documented in the art: Warhol got his peers to ask questions about and consider the packaging of popular culture. His works was also there as a reference during the development of machines that could render an image in millions of pixels and have each and every pixel subject to manipulation.
I was also looking at the book a day after Obama’s presentation to Congress on the importance of American Health Care Reform. Undoubtedly, Americans will eventually correct the imbalances of their health care system. Twenty years from now, no one will care. But on the coffee table of somebody’s home will be a book of some artist’s work that we presently have either never heard of, or just had a beer with at an opening. It is culture than always transcends the pettiness of politics. Politicians like to think their laws and policies are contracts and set in stone, and are some form of realized Platonic entity. They’re nothing of the sort. They can be repealed and amended. Politics is a game of making our lives easier to live. But once we have an easy life, the needs of our imagination become paramount, which is why cultural history wins.
Of the book, this seems the ultimate legacy. We may see Warhol paintings in any museum in any city on Earth. But very few of us will actually be able to go through the Warhol archives and see the collection of stuff accumulated in his lifetime. The book then functions as a curated display of celebrity relics, and allows us to conceptualize the totality of the oeuvre. The message, “This is the accomplishment of one man’s life in historical time”.
That Warhol and the New York rockstars photographed by him led cultural lives is a given. And it created a model for a society which would put a phone in everybody’s pocket, and a camera in each phone. Party blogs are responding to the idea that documentation is what one does, incase anyone becomes famous later. But not only do you trap someone’s pre-fame, you also believe that this is how one lives a cultural life – by dressing like they did thirty years ago, photographing everything, and ultimately perhaps publishing your youth in a book when your body is thick and your hair is gray. Good times, good times.
“Paying for things is our way of compensating all the people who have been inconvenienced by our consumption. (Next time you buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, imagine yourself saying to the barista, ‘I’m sorry that you had to serve me coffee when you could have been doing other things. And please communicate my apologies to the others as well: the owner, the landlord, the shipping company, the Columbian peasants. Here’s $1.75 for all the trouble. Please divide it among yourselves.’)” – Joseph Heath, Filthy Lucre (2009) p. 160
From the Wikipedia article on ‘The Holocene Calendar‘: Cesare Emilian’s proposal published in Nature in 1993:
Calendar reform
SIR – Jews reckon time from the biblical creation of the world (set at 3761 BC); the Romans from the founding of Rome; and the Moslems since the Hegira (AD 622). In AD 526, the Emperor Justinian introduced the current system of reckoning time from the birth of Christ, set at 753 AUC (ab urbe condita, “since the founding of Rome”) by the monk Dionysius Exiguus.
In the BC/AD system that Justinian introduced, the numbering of years is ordinal, not cardinal; there is no year zero; and the numbers increase in opposite directions (whereas time flows in the same direction). As a result, time intervals across the BC/AD boundary cannot be calculated algebraically – the time interval between 1.5 BC and AD 1.5 is one year, not three years. As well as being inconvenient to those who deal with history and ancient human events, the BC/AD way of reckoning years singles out an event – the birth of Christ – that has no significance to many civilizations.
I propose that the beginning of calendrical time could be set at the beginning of the current Julian cycle (12.00 noon Greenwhich mean time, 4713 BC), established in 1582 by Joseph Scaliger and still used by astronomers. A constant – 4,713 years – would then have to be added to the AD dates and the BC dates would have to be subtracted from 4714 (the Scaliger year equivalent to AD 1). (To simplify the arithmetic, a round unit such as 10,000 years could be added to the AD dates instead).
Setting the birth of Christ at 25 December of the year 10,000 from the beginning of what could be appropriately called the “human era”, would make the year AD 1 into the year 10,001 and the year 1 BC into the year 10,000. All BC dates would thus be subtracted from 10,001.
Setting the beginning of the human era at 10,000 BC would date the first year of Scaliger’s Julian period at the year 5288; the beginning of the Egyptian calendar (4241 BC) at the year 5760; the foundings of Rome at 9248; the birth of Christ at 10,000, the fall of the Roman Empire at 10,476, the French Revolution at 11,789 and the present year (1993) at 11,993. I suggest that the new calendar is adopted in the year 2000 (new year 12,000).
Cesare Emiliani Department of Geological Sciences,
University of Miami,
Coral Gables,
Florida 33124, USA
