Relevant History

Is shamelessness the new virtue?

There's a great catflight going on between Matt Taibbi (who has turned into a mad cross between Upton Sinclair, Michael Lewis, and Lenny Bruce) and Claudia Deutsch about Goldman Sachs' plan to pay big bonuses to its people again. Matt rips apart a post titled "Congratulations, Goldman-- And I Wish You Many, Many More."

The defense of Goldman seems to boil down to, yes they have all sorts of connections, and yes they got tons of money from the government, but but they're honest about it.

It makes me wonder: At one time, back in the day, we thought that the Internet and other information technologies would create transparency, make it harder to hide corruption, and thus force powerful people to behave better.

But we've essentially run an experiment for a decade testing this hypothesis, and it seems to me that it hasn't worked out that way.

Instead of forcing corruption underground, the Internet has forced shamelessness aboveground-- and indeed, has turned it into a virtue. So the Goldman execs may be dickheads, money-grubbing asses, and willing to sell their grandmothers if the price is right, but they don't pretend to be anything else. So they're welcome to their bonuses.

Hitler finds out his subtitles are wrong

The whole re-subtitled Downfall thing reaches its logical endpoint here:

Sometimes Amazon does too good a job of recommending things

This came up the other day. I'm pretty sure that aside from my actually owning all of them, these three items have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

In case you can't see, the items are Radiohead's Amnesiac; Alan Furst's novel Dark Star; and the classic children's book Goodnight Moon.

After I stopped being slightly alarmed (can I really be that predictable?), I was pretty impressed.

Demolishing the future

The New York Times has a piece (Future Vision Banished to the Past") about the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, a "rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence."

Nakagin Capsule Tower, from the New York Times

The building, built in 1972, is now in lousy shape (what a surprise for an architecturally distinctive building employing innovative construction technology), but the author argues that

the building’s demolition would be a bitter loss. The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.

Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan’s transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.

Like lots of twentieth-century architectural movements, the Metabolists were at least as influential for their ideas as their actual buildings. (I remember studying them along with Archigram and Team X in David Brownlee's Art History 481B-- probably the most important class I took in college, given how often I use what I learned in it.) A lot of the more outlandish ideas from this period were never meant to be built-- drawings of walking cities were stimulating reflections on the nature of building in an impermanent world, but totally impractical-- but they made other, more prolific architects think differently about their work and the issues it raises.

Nakagin Capsule Tower, photo by dod: via flickr

In a way, I wonder if there's a useful comparison to be drawn between movements like these, or projects that remain forever on the drawing board but get talked about, and futurists and their work. Most of us don't build things, or write software, or craft strategies; the scenarios we write are intended to be provocations or stimulations (a hedge against them being wrong, which to one degree or another they inevitably are), and at best we have an indirect but positive influence on other people.

Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.

Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath....

Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.

Nakagin Capsule Tower capsule, photo by pict_u_re via flickr

In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.

It's amazing how much work and expense goes into making the first example of something modular and standardized.

Of course, the great irony of building and construction standardization is that it hasn't produced a revolution in architecture. If anything, it's made it easier to throw up thousands of neo-Spanish colonial (or American colonial, or frontier, or postmodern-via-Miami Vice) houses in California's Central Valley, outside Phoenix, or in the suburban rings around Atlanta. Kurokawa was right that modularity and flexibility would suit "the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society;" but when married to the reality of real estate development, and the unreality of the mortgage market in the 2000s, the result was kind of architecture very different from what the Metabolists imagined-- a useful reminder for futurists that what we think of as "exogenous" factors often have a bigger impact on the futures we're trying to understand than the factors we do pay attention to.

Satisfying your Bollywood condom dance number needs

You know you want it....

In Boing Boing again

This time for a time lapse video of Hush's installation at the Carmichael Gallery (owned by the son of a friend):

Thanks, Pesco!

Milton Glaser on relationships

From Milton Glaser's 2001 "Ten Things I Have Learned," via Boing Boing and various other links:

[T]here is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

The entire piece is pretty interesting. It gives me a bit of insight into why some people really like him.

Surprisingly interesting

In the Guardian:

The birthday present

When her husband [Brad] turned 40, Charla Muller couldn't decide what to give him, so she offered him guaranteed sex every night for a whole year. Could they manage it? And what would be the effect on their marriage?

It looks like it should be kind of a fluffy article, but there's actually some interesting stuff in it, largely because of the apparent ordinariness of the author.

Wasn't Brad's initial reaction right - 365 days of scheduled sex is surely a turn off? What about spontaneity? "I felt the opposite. I felt the pressure came off. He no longer thought 'Tonight is a big deal, the only night we'll have sex this month is now, it's got to be really special.' And for me, before nightly sex, I used to guiltily wonder when I was going to have the time or desire. With sex every night it meant that I had to find the time, and that when it happened it was no longer necessarily a big deal." What about the desire? "The idea was that it would come." In fact, Muller writes in her book, 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy, "Regular sex was allowing for feelings of health and wellness that sparked a desire to have more sex. Sex is a great stress-reliever too. A nice relaxing romp with Brad was a wonderful distraction from feeling like the world would crumble if I wasn't out there battling dragons 24/7. I could relax, feel those endorphins pinging around my body and forget about my bad day. And perhaps best of all, our intimate moments were making me feel younger."...

Muller concludes with some advice for married couples: "However often you are doing it, double it. And six months from now, double it again. It's proof that you're here, alive and very together".

Ken Burns interviewed by Michael Krasny

Interesting to see what Michael Krasny looks like, after years of hearing him on the radio. Also onstage is Dayton Duncan, Burns' longtime collaborator.

Ken Burns at the Palace of Fine Arts

Burns and his long-time collaborator Dayton Duncan, an historian and writer.

Bell Brothers at Cafe Zoë

A local band appearing at my favorite cafe.

My friends are media geniuses

First I made it onto BoingBoing. Then Jess' Sad Guys on Trading Floors got nominated for a Webby. Then, I discovered that Princeton professor, Renaissance historian, fellow ex-American Scholar board member, and all-around nice guy Anthony Grafton has finally done something he can be proud of: his son Sam-- who I don't think is named after the character in Shane-- had a hilarious letter read on The Bugle, my favorite podcast of all time. (Bugle 70, near the end. It's the letter about penis-shaped helicopters. I've never heard John and Andy laugh so much at a letter.) Clearly our eventual collective dominance of all media is inevitable.

Hospital coffee, Palo Alto style

At the Palo Alto Clinic's surgical center.

Suck on it, Strunk and White!

Edinburgh professor Geoffrey Pullum launches an attack on "50 years of stupid grammar advice:"

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won't be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it....

[B]oth authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less.... [D]espite the "Style" in the title, much in the book relates to grammar, and the advice on that topic does real damage. It is atrocious.

Most notably, their treatment of the passive voice is a disaster:

[T]he bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses....

The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip. It is typical of Elements. The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules.

It goes downhill from there. Well worth reading in its entirety.

Passed Out Wookies

Jess just pointed me to Passed Out Wookies. These two from the Hall of Fame are extra special. Yet more proof that, as I've been arguing, experiments in collective intelligence show that the Hive Mind is really interested in only two things: cats and dogs doing cute things, and humans doing really stupid things.

Boing Boing love

I've got a thank-you on Boing Boing, in a post about protest art made with real but worthless Zimbabwean currency. I blogged this a couple days ago.

Another casualty of academic budget cuts: casual sports

Amid the serious stuff that the Chronicle of Higher Education reports about hiring freezes, mandatory pay cuts, and other reductions affecting universities these days, is this:

Michael K. McBeath, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, likes to burn some energy in the middle of the day.

So do his colleagues. For years, roughly two dozen faculty and staff members hit the gym for a game of basketball around noon, three times a week.

Now their roster has been cut in half — by anxiety.

As budget cuts have prompted the university to announce that it will shutter more than 40 academic programs, cut 200 faculty-associate positions, and force both faculty and staff members to take unpaid furloughs, far fewer people show up at the gym these days.

Mr. McBeath said many are just too worried about job security to risk an hour of lost work or a supervisor's raised eyebrow over a game of basketball.

This may not sound like a thing, but the decline of informal institutions like these-- weekly departmental get-togethers, faculty-student softball games, and the like-- are troubling.

Skippy 1, Groundhog 0

I love local news.

A hungry groundhog couldn't see its shadow -- or much of anything else -- after it got its head stuck in a peanut butter jar in Allentown yesterday afternoon.

Unable to see through the label-covered jar, the creature struggled to remove it from its head. Observers trapped the animal under a 55-gallon drum outside a Dunkin' Donuts at Airport Road and Lloyd Street and called emergency crews.

But a volunteer wearing protective gloves was able to move the squirming groundhog to a nearby garden and then remove the jar from its head around 1 p.m.

Thanks, Jess!

Brilliant protest sign

This is great: a protest sign made of worthless currency.

And we think the economy here is bad because it's hard to get financing for the spare 56" plasma screen TV. Zimbabwe has been dealing with inflation so bad, even its $100 trillion dollar note is worthless (and at one point it ran out of money to pay for the license to... print more money. It also then ran out of paper. Comedy gold!).

That's some serious inflation. Suck on it, Weimar Germany! You bunch of wimps. (Interestingly, the same firm that supplied currency-quality paper stock to Zimbabwe until mid-2008 also supplied the Weimar government.)

[via Britannica Blog]

Why there's a 33 on bottles of Rolling Rock beer

Finally, an answer to the eternal question: what does the "33" on the side of Rolling Rock bottles mean?

[h/t: Thanks, Jess!]

My daughter, after ten years in Silicon Valley

This evening we went to dinner at California Pizza Kitchen, in downtown Palo Alto. While we were waiting for our friends to arrive, Elizabeth went behind a tree.

"Look!" she said. "I'm in stealth mode!"

Idle Words on Kundera and dating

Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Wrong Tomorrow (our motto: time vs. pundits), may be my new favorite writer. Here he is on Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being:

One of the terrors of dating is Milan Kundera, and specifically, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the sexually-transmitted book that this Czech-born author has inflicted on a generation of American youth.

I fully recognize the important role of the dating book, that is, the carefully selected work you lend a prospective lover sometime in the golden honeymoon period between your second cup of coffee together and the first time you spend a night in the same bed without touching. In that short window of time, your partner is still a delicious mystery to you, an enigmatic and discerning being, and to her you are a dark continent of adventure and excitement, waiting to be explored. And so you lend her books that are funny, playful, and good subway reading, but also complex enough to hint at your Hidden Depths. Something unusual is a plus, as are lots of sexy bits, to serve as a reminder of the animal fires that burn within. And since you don't yet know one another too well, you try to choose a shotgun of a book that fires a wide pattern, thematically speaking. Like an early physicist studying the atom, you will hurl little bits of culture at your new love and collect valuable data about her inner life by observing the way they bounce off.

Given these requirements, it's not surprising that many people have gravitated towards The Unbearable Lightness of Being.... The problem, though, is that The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a really bad book. Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book.

The idea of new people being like atoms at the Cavendish, to be understood through indirect and oblique probes (Ernest Rutherford was widely acknowledged as the sexiest of the early 20th century's experimental physicists); the Dave Matthews comparison; the assault on a book so well-regarded that Daniel Day-Lewis was in the movie. Gold.

Actually, Wrong Tomorrow would be a great motto for a futurist: "Right Today, Wrong Tomorrow."

Old stuff online

For complicated reasons I won't go into, I was recently reminded of two of my favorite online cartoons from the now lamentably-defunct yet immortal Suck:

• Vodka on Ice: Robert Downey Jr.'s literary adventures, and Hollywood goes Galt.
• Gear and Clothing in Las Vegas: If Hunter Thompson wrote about fashion.

If you haven't read them, check them out.

On modeling

The Guardian has a very interesting essay by figure modeller Yvonne Eller about her work:

But what kind of person becomes a figure model? Must there be some underlying exhibitionism in desperate need of expression? Ian Leake is a fine art photographer, who uses an increasingly rare process of platinum printing to create simple nude compositions that "celebrate beauty". He believes there are three main reasons to become a figure model: "For some models it's a rite of passage into adulthood and control of their lives; others do it for the money; and a few do it because they love creating art."

Often, and certainly in my case, it is all three. Working with passionate, creative artists can be very exciting. [Figure model Ivory] Flame agrees: "There is one photographer I know who is so ardent about every line, cove and crevice in the body. The way he compares them to things is hilarious … he will get so enthusiastic about the light hitting my big toe. He's really fun. And an artist I worked with recently was so inspired by the light and textures captured on my skin. It is so energizing to be part of that vision that is created. It's such a joy working with people like that."...

So what do artists look for in a life model? The ability to hold a pose, clearly. Flexibility, perhaps. But there is far, far more to the role. Photographer Allan Jenkins says: "It's not about size zero, that's for sure. It's about shapes, angles, light, shadows, style and movement. It's the model's ability to create a rapport with the photographer - to be able to take direction well, the ability to feel comfortable in front of the lens, act like a muse ... be inspired and inspire."

Modelling is a collaborative process. It's not about being a blank canvas for an artist to manipulate into art; it's not passive. It's about bringing something to the table. The Figure Model's Guild declares modelling to be "an art form in itself".

I tease [artist Robbie] Wraith by occasionally asking, "Does it look like me yet?" a few minutes into a new sketch or painting. It inevitably does - to an astonishing degree and in a matter of seconds - but Wraith wouldn't say so. He once told me that he wasn't really painting me at all. He was painting his reaction to me - a mixture of himself and myself.

Kids and their crazy Google Earth hacks

Ah, youth:

Teenager Rory McInnes painted a giant phallus on the roof of his parents' West Berkshire mansion, apparently after watching a programme about Google Earth....

It is not the first time the stunt has been tried. In 2006 the Sun reported that "pranksters drew a willy on the roof of a top school" in Teesside that went ­unnoticed until it appeared on Google Earth.

Similarly for the benefit of Google Earth, pupils drew a 6m penis in weedkiller on school playing fields in Southampton in 2007.

Dad's reply when contacted by a newspaper: "It's an April Fool's joke, right? There's no way there's a 60ft phallus on top of my house."

Weekend at Hidden Villa

This weekend my son and I spent two night at Hidden Villa. It was a trip organized by the parent of a classmate of my son's, and it was us and about half a dozen other families. Hidden Villa was founded by the same people who started Peninsula School (the Duvenecks were amazingly entrepreneurial-- they also were involved in the creation of the Pacific Arts League, and they've immortalized by having a Palo Alto neighborhood named after them), so it has something of a special resonance with Peninsula families.

Hidden Villa is still a working farm, and there are a couple farm stands just to the left of the entrance. There's a pretty large organic garden, chickens (the eggs are excellent, I'm told), and a number of cows, goats and sheep.

via flickr

While the kids were all excited about going camping at Hidden Villa-- they'd all been there on field trips at least once-- we were actually staying at the hostel, which consists of several heated cabins near a terrific lodge. (Basically, any time you get ready for a weekend by going to Costco rather than REI, you can tell it's not going to be real camping.) The lodge is a wonderful building, large and spacious, not particularly luxurious, but incredibly comfortable to be in.

via flickr

And it's one of those spaces that, because of where it's situated, manages to feel wonderfully luxurious. I especially liked the screened-in porch, which for some ancient reason I'm drawn to.

via flickr

We did a potluck dinner the first night, then various of us took charge of the remaining meals. We didn't have a complicated schedule for cleanup, but somehow it all worked out: I think when you're a group of parents of small kids, cleaning up is kind of automatic. The idea of either leaving the dishes for tomorrow, or not doing anything while other people were working, were both kind of unthinkable.

Besides, the lodge has a fabulous kitchen. Propane rather than gas for the stove, which means it heats up more slowly than normal, but otherwise it was a fantastic workspace.

via flickr

Saturday morning we went for a hike, which led (after a refreshing uphill climb) to a stream that the kids found very diverting. It also reminded me that for kids, the most important thing you can bring to keep them happy and uncomplaining isn't lots of water, or good shoes, but other kids. If you're with your parents, everything quickly becomes a drag; if you're with classmates, it's all cool.

via flickr

After the hike and lunch, we went on a tour of the farm. Needless to say, the kids loved the chance to interact with the animals-- pet the goats and sheep, feed the chickens, that sort of thing.

via flickr

I realized at a certain point that, in addition to the obvious appeal of a beautiful natural location, there were two things I really liked about the weekend, and it got me thinking.

The first was the very unforced combination of quiet and company. I was with a dozen other adults and a lot of kids, but I never had the feeling that it was a strain: everyone got along very well, but things were unstructured enough-- and there were always enough parents around who could keep an eye on the kids, who paid us essentially no mind whatsoever and formed their own self-regulating tribe-- to allow you to wander off on your own. I enjoyed spending time with them because they're really nice people, but also because I didn't have the sense that anyone had to be entertained.

The kids were also really easy to deal with. They're generally a very well-behaved bunch, but you put them together, and they essentially seal themselves off from adults, lose any real interest in any of us adults, and take care of themselves until dinner. In the evening, they'd play games, or cluster around whatever parents were reading (everyone, and I mean every single child, brought a couple Bone books, so it was a virtual Bone-reading marathon all weekend). Very different from how things can be at home: my kids are pretty independent, but I felt like I spent less time interacting with ten kids there than I do with my own at home.

It was an interesting experience, and it made me wonder: why in the world don't we do this all the time? If kids are easier to deal with in larger numbers (a counterintuitive proposition, but maybe not that inaccurate), why do we insist on (or default to) taking care of them ourselves? Maybe the cohousing movement is onto something....

via flickr

The second thing that made me really think was the realization that part of what I liked about the weekend was that it offered some of the same rewards of traveling: it offered a chance to strip away life to a few essentials, and to live with a degree of thoughtfulness and enforced simplicity-- but without the frantic, focused edge than I have to maintain when I'm on the road. At one point, when I was sitting in the lodge and playing Go (the parents include a number of really serious Go players, and I got my ass kicked all weekend), it struck me that for these two days at least, I had effectively traded dealing with stuff for interacting with people. It was a good deal.

A few months ago I went through a phase of throwing out old stuff, and as I've lost weight I've been shedding clothes that are too large for me. But I now wonder: could I get rid of another 95% of what I own, keep a core of essential stuff, and have a better life? Do I need all those books from graduate school? Am I really any more likely to finish Barbara Stafford's Body Criticism than I am to get through the rest of Normal Cantor's the Civilization of the Middle Ages? Of course not. So why am I keeping them? Things like travel and this past weekend suggest that it would be possible for me to radically reduce the number of objects I have in my life, and not really miss them.

via flickr

I'm not about to renounce all worldly goods, and I don't want to sound like a cross between Thoreau and Wigan Ludgate (the hacker-turned-recluse in William Gibson's Count Zero). But would I be happier with a much smaller, thoughtfully designed, and ruthlessly efficient personal infrastructure?

Could one live like that all the time? Out of the equivalent of a couple, say, a couple large suitcases? At what point does owning less make you richer? Can you, in essence, trade things for more friends? I'm not sure, but it's worth trying to figure out. Like I said, a monastic renunciation of worldly goods isn't in my future; but maybe a lighter life would be more worth living.

Keep Calm and Carry On redux

After yesterday's excitement it was fitting to see this piece in the Guardian about one of my favorite posters:

[I]n the spring of 1939, it was an anonymous civil servant who was entrusted with finding the slogan for a propaganda poster intended to comfort and inspire the populace should, heaven forbid, the massed armies of Nazi Germany ever cross the Channel....

The first [poster], designed to stiffen public resolve ahead of likely gas attacks and bombing raids, was printed in a run of more than a million and read: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory. The second, identically styled, stated: Freedom Is In Peril....The third... was for the real crisis: invasion. A few may have made their way on to select officials' walls, but the vast majority of the British public never got to see it. This poster enjoined: Keep Calm And Carry On.

And suddenly these days, it's everywhere, from homes to pubs to government offices. The Lord Chamberlain's Office at Buckingham Palace, the prime minister's strategy unit at No 10, the Serious Fraud Office, the US embassy in Belgium, the vice chancellor of Cambridge University, the Emergency Planning Office at Nottingham council and the officers' mess in Basra have all ordered posters. Even David Beckham has the T-shirt, we are told.

It really is a terrific piece of work. Whoever came up with the slogan was (at least for five seconds of his or her life) a genius.

via Keep Calm Gallery

At the Foto Nova 19 opening

A friend is exhibiting at this show. Interesting time!

You how how people say "There are no dumb questions?"

Don't believe them.

Jess IMed me this link.

I have no idea what Bigger Than Cheeses is. And I should know by now that talking to Jess gets me into trouble.

Is this real?

Via Socializing Finance. I can't tell if it's real, or an elaborate parody:

Dear Wall Street,

Life may be tough, and your industry might be crumbling, but what you need to realize is that the implications of this crisis for the rest of New York society are even more intense. You Bankers are the core of our ecosystem, the top of the food chain. And when there are less lions hunting, the natural balance is destroyed and next thing you know advertising guys are picking up tens at 1Oak buying drinks from the bar. Pathetic. Without you, there's chaos, and hot women don't know where to turn. In the next year there will be too many hot girls that were supposed to marry bankers making the life-long decision to settle with consultants, accountants, and lawyers? Its unnatural and unfair.

OMFG OMFG OMFG.

Well, so long as Silicon Valley venture capitalists are okay, all will be well.

My son, samurai in training

This year my son started taking fencing lessons. So far he really enjoys it. After a few weeks working on footwork, parries, and attacks, they're now finally fencing each other.

He's the one in the blue shorts. Anyone who knows how I dress will not be in the least surprised

I realized this morning that fencing is pretty much the perfect sport for a 7 year-old boy. It teaches grace and quick thinking, which are good. But it also has lots of equipment, which makes it even more interesting. Finally, of course, there's the whole point (as it were) of fencing, which is to hit other people. The first day, the instructor asked if anyone knew what you did in fencing. My son raised his hand and said, "It's poking people with swords!"

En garde!

I think I'm going to insist he learn archery, riding, and flower arranging. Then he'll be a samurai.

Attack! Or possibly parry!

William Deresiewicz on brains, technology and solitude

I've been reading a lot of stuff on the edges of neuroscience-- it's hard to avoid these days-- and this William Deresiewicz essay in the Chronicle Review pointed out something I'd never realized: a link between our current fascination with models of the mind that emphasize the social nature of cognition, our use of technologies that eliminate the possibility of ever really being alone and recognizing the value of solitude.

[Today's youth] have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.

But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that "our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context"; neuroscientists, that we have "permeable minds" that function in part through a process of "deep imitation"; psychologists, that "we are organized by our attachments"; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by "the power of social networks." The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory).

Fascinated by frauds

I recently chanced upon an old New Yorker article on Joyce Hatto, a pianist whose husband-- the owner of an obscure classical music label-- apparently released a huge number of CDs recorded by others under her name:

He [Hatto's husband] had not merely pinched or polished a few, mostly marginal, recordings. With his collection of more than a hundred Joyce Hatto CDs, Barry had created the most diversely prolific and gifted pianist to emerge in decades, with a corresponding narrative that aroused the esteem and good will of music lovers around the world. Since early in his checkered career, he had deftly manipulated musical identities. What he confected on his wife’s behalf, in her twilight, was vastly more audacious than anything he had pulled off during his “super-bargain” years. The alchemy that transformed Joyce Hatto into “Joyce Hatto” was, in its twisted way, a tour de force, a dazzling work of art, literally the performance of a lifetime.

The New Yorker might have a weakness for these kinds of stories-- people who write fake Holocaust memoirs, con men who run cross-country at Princeton, etc.-- but I think we're fascinated by these kinds of elaborate, life-long frauds, if only because they're extreme examples of a process of reinvention that many of us go through Their motives are also usually pretty complicated: these aren't simple cons or self-delusions, much less straightforward cases of mental imbalance. Just as monsters helped define the boundaries of humanity in the Renaissance and early modern period, these elaborate lived fictions help define (or undermine) our understanding of identity.

Or maybe we just like cons.

Design and the downturn

Michael Cannell's piece "Design Loves a Depression" has some interesting suggestions about the future of design: that the flourishing of expensive, celebrity designers will come to an end, allowing the field to get serious about solving real problems and being more constructive by having to work within constraints.

[D]uring the Great Depression... an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.

“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,” said Kristina Wilson, author of “Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression” and an assistant professor of art history at Clark University. “It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.”...

Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II....

There is a reason she and others are optimistic: however dark the economic picture, it will most likely cause designers to shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy. Designers are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems, and if President-elect Barack Obama delivers anything like a W.P.A, we could be “standing on the brink of one of the most productive periods of design ever,” said Reed Kroloff, director of Cranbrook Academy of Art....

One way or another, design will focus less on styling consumer objects with laser-cut patterns and colored resin and more on the intelligent reworking of current conditions. Expect to hear a lot more about open-source design, and cradle-to-cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.

This reminds me somewhat of the argument made by Brian Arthur and others (most notably Arthur, I think) that tech bubbles don't create what's really valuable: they create a lot of potentially valuable wreckage and infrastructure that the next round of innovators use to do really serious stuff.

Underwater sculpture

Jason de Caires Taylor's underwater sculptures are eerie and entrancing. Check out the gallery.

Denver Museum of Art

At the new wing of the DMA. It's a new wing, technically, but it so completely overshadows the old building, it's almost sad.

This should be interesting.

Fox Theatre

Waiting for Act 2 to start.

Intermission

Hanging out on the balcony between acts.

I can't see!

Two heads are harder to see around than one.

But I'll be asleep soon anyway, if previous years are any guide.

Nutcracker Madness

We're at the traditional afternoon performance of The Nutcracker. It's a never-ending sea of red velvet, dresses with big bows in the back, white tights, and French braids. (Daniel and I are on the obligatory blue Oxford shirts.)

This is the fifth year we've gone to the show, but the first time that Elizabeth hasn't been in it. She enjoyed ballet, and loved being in the show, but we all agreed that the level of commitment required at her age was more than we could handle. Fortunately she hasn't expressed reservations about the choice.

Though she's not wearing velvet or a French braid. Maybe she was never THAT into it, really.

Zunegate

Oh, no: Obama was spotted listening to a Zune.

Internet commenters went ballistic. "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO," cried one user at the popular blog Engadget. "I want my vote back!"

Jorn Utzon

At a post-hike party this afternoon, I was talking to a friend about the Sydney Opera House, which I visited during a layover in Sydney in early 2007. Even now, visiting the Opera House seems like one of the high points of my life.

via flickr

Now, I read in the Guardian that Jorn Utzon, the Opera House's architect, has died.

For some reason, this detail in the Telegraph about Utzon's creative process stands out for me:

Utzon rarely used a sketchbook, but would draw on anything that was available. He drew the initial plan for an art museum at Silkeborg, in Denmark, with poured salt on a restaurant table in Sydney, which he then photographed with a borrowed camera. Based on Buddhist caves he had visited near the Gobi Desert, the museum was never built.

Another friend recalled Utzon using a charred stick on a pavement to sketch the cross-section of a cave-room he had seen in China, which was to form the basis for his design for a new house; sadly the sketch was washed away by a thunderstorm that same night.

It also reports this anecdote:

He also told the audience [in London in 1978] of a letter he had received from a woman who was put off the idea of throwing herself into Sydney Harbour by the sight of the opera house, deciding that if Utzon could go through the agony of getting it built without wanting to kill himself, then she too could cope with life.

Thomas Keneally had a great piece on the Opera House last year. It waxed rhapsodic about the design, the amazing location, and the structure's long and complicated history, and is well worth reading. The conclusion:

But it is as a focus for citizens and visitors, as well as the home of art practitioners, that the Opera House works. It is the great communal house of Sydney. In this way, it is more than a mere monument. Inside and out, it is Sydney's agora. The excessive and often excluding awe induced by many European opera houses is missing in it. Children run on its concrete skirts under a blue sky (well, often it is blue), and do not need to be hushed. A building children can feel ownership of is more than a mere opera house.

They say that in the medieval period the great cathedrals - Chartres, say - operated both as a place of wonders and a market not just for bishops and priests but for the entertainment, instruction and delight of ordinary folk, peasants and craftsmen. That is the role the secular cathedral of the Opera House plays in Sydney.

Grace Cathedral

Near the IFTF conference. Really a terrific space.

Witold Rybczynsk on the California Academy of Sciences

Witold Rybczynski's Slate photo essay on the California Academy of Science (a building I love) is great. One highlight:

Art museums are usually considered the ultimate architectural commissions, but after seeing the Academy, I'm not so sure. In an art gallery, a conscientious architect such as Piano must continually restrain himself, lest his architecture overpower the art on the walls. In a natural science museum, there is no such problem—you can't outshine a school of piranhas or an albino alligator. In that sense, the architect is freer. At LACMA I felt that Piano was sometimes gritting his teeth, while here he seems to have been enjoying himself. Another difference between the two buildings: live fish, birds, and reptiles are a lot more fun to look at than Damien Hirst's creepy formaldehyde menagerie.

He's also dead right about the Piazza being the least impressive part of the museum.

Great sign

Kip Fulbeck at Castilleja

Tonight after dinner my wife convinced me to go see Kip Fulbeck speak at Castilleja School. Castilleja has a pretty outrageously good speaker series (seeing Tom "The World is Flat" Friedman there was an especially memorable experience), and Fulbeck didn't disappoint. Like me, Fulbeck is part Asian (Chinese in his case, Korean in mine), part European, and he was born when anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books. Some of his work explores the role of race and ethnicity in the construction of identity.

A lot of what he talked about was the Hapa Project:

Once a derogatory label derived from the Hawaiian word for “half,” Hapa has since been embraced as a term of pride by many whose mixed racial heritage includes Asian or Pacific Island descent. Kip Fulbeck began The Hapa Project as a forum for Hapas to answer the question “What are you?” in their own words and be pictured in simple head-on portraits. Traveling throughout the country, he photographed over 1200 people from all walks of life – from babies to adults, construction workers to rock stars, gangbangers to pro surfers, schoolteachers to porn stars, engineers to comic book artists.

For me, one of the most interesting things about the project was just how varied people's explanations of themselves tend to be: the sample pages give you a sense of this. (Also, 10% of the people in the book listed "Norwegian" in their ancestry. This is a weird statistical blip.)

What's striking to me about this is that in my lifetime we've already gone from what I think of as the Old Math of race, which recognized only whole numbers-- you had to be one thing or the other, but not both; and to be half of something and half of something else was to be something less than a full person-- to a New Math that's comfortable with fractions and fuzzy numbers. I think, however, there's another shift brewing: we may be moving from a world in which we check multiple boxes or quantify our backgrounds, to one in which telling stories is the native way of explaining who we are.

After all, we live in a world in which the relationship between ethnicity and geography is pretty mixed up. I have two friends whose parents are Norwegian and Jewish, but the details of their biographies (growing up in Minnesota versus New York, for starters) are quite different. And that's a relatively easy case. Someone with, say, Chinese and African ancestry might be a fifth-generation Trinidadian; have one parent who went to work as an engineer in Ghana during the heady revolutionary days of the 1960s, or leave Africa to study in China; or have parents from Vancouver and L.A. You just don't know these days.

Numbers can't quite capture that complexity, nor can parsing the percentages ever more finely bring a better description of who you are. You need to capture that motion, the multiple travels and relocations and dislocations that end up with you. Math doesn't capture that; stories can.

The scariest night of the year

From the Examiner:

Halloween costumes have gotten out of hand. Gather any group of parents and you'll quickly hear about how the choices of costumes have gone from witch and princess to sexy witch and pouty porn princess.

Thank goodness my daughter wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder this year. My son's a garbage can-- really, a garbage can with the bottom cut out so he can walk. He first wanted to be a garbage can on wheels, and have me push him around the neighborhood, but that idea died a quick death.

children, parenting

Reflections on tinkering

I spent a really stimulating day yesterday at the Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge conference, listening and talking to people like Dale Dougherty (founder of Make Magazine, the Maker Faire, etc.), Mitch Resnik (MIT Media Lab), Rick Prelinger (the Prelinger Library and online film collection), Anne Balsamo, and others. We're meeting for part of today, but I wanted to start reflecting on yesterday's discussion; and in particular, I want to get at the question of what tinkering is. Is it a unified body of practices? Is it a distinct set of skills? is it an historical moment? Is it just a trendy name? This is something we spent a fair amount of time discussing, either formally or informally, and the answer is: It's all of those. I also thinking there are a couple other important things that define tinkering.

What is Tinkering?

You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch Resnick, for example, talks about how traditional technology-related planning is top-down, linear, structured, abstract, and rules-based, while tinkering is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, concrete, and object-oriented. (Resnick is very big on creating toys that invite tinkering.)

Anne Balsamo and Perry Hoberman have looked at a wide variety of tinkering activities, ranging from circuit bending to paper prototyping to open source to blogging. They argue that these varied activities are unified by a common set of principles or practices. (The following are just highlights.)

• Tinkerers improvise, iterate, and improve constantly.
• Tinkerers use materials at hand, combining heterogeneous parts and components (e.g., raw and finished materials, handmade and industrial objects, customized and personalized consumer products) in ways that push beyond the boundaries of their original contexts. As a result, tinkered objects tend to be collages, appropriations, and montages. Tinkering is bricolage.
• Tinkerers are also social animals. Their success depends in part on being able to tap into porous and ad-hoc communities. For most of what they do the manual is useless; other tinkerers are the only ones who are likely to have the information you need.

Tinkering isn't so much a specific set of technical skills: there tends to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. You pick up just enough knowledge about electronics, textiles, metals, programming, or paper-folding to figure out how to do what you want. It certainly respects skill, but skills are a means, not an end: mastery isn't the point, as it is for professionals. Competence and completion are.

Is Tinkering Shallow or Deep?

One of the things I talked with several people (Mike Kuniavsky in particular) about was how historically specific tinkering is. The deeper question is, is this just a flash in the pan, a trendy name without any substance underneath? The answer we came up with is that this is like a musical style, both the product of specific historical forces, and an expression of something deeper and more fundamental. (Think of jazz: you can talk about how it emerges in the early 20th century out of blues, ragtime, and other previous musical forms, reflects particular sociological and historical trends, and is guided by certain assumptions about beauty and what music is; but at the same time, it definitely expresses a deeper impulse to create music.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

• The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology-- explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here's my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
• Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
• The EULA rebellion. The fact that you're forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you're just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
• Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are "consumers"-- passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don't just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn't a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
• Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
• The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you're making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined-- and redefined-- by users.)
• From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn't discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity-- as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning-- just didn't exist: it's what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that "working with your hands" defined you as lower class: "My son won't work with his hands" was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

No doubt there are other sources you could point to-- microentrepreneurship or the growth of "jobbies," the presence of an infrastructure that supports the sharing and tracking of unique handmade things (from eBay to ThingLink).

Does Tinkering Matter?

That's a pretty varied list. And it suggests that tinkering is more than a local, Valley, geek leisure thing.

First, tinkering is a powerful form of learning. Even if it doesn't stress mastery of skills, tinkering does emphasize learning how to use your hands, learning how to use materials, and to engage with the physical world rather than the world of software or Second Life-- though tinkering does share a sensibility toward the world that lots of kids demonstrate to programs and virtual worlds: you just get in there, hit buttons, and see what happens.

This really matters because you can be creative with stuff in ways you can't with bits, and that the more you understand the possibilities and limitations or materials-- or more abstractly, if you learn how to develop that knowledge-- the smarter you become. In this respect, it dovetails with "a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering" that Gregg Zachary wrote about a few weeks ago: "a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands." (I write about this at greater length on End of Cyberspace.)

Second, tinkering is forward-looking. It's partly about how we'll use and interact with technologies in the future. As much as any loose movement can be described this way, tinkering is a set of anticipatory practices, aimed at developing a sensibility about the future. It's a way to develop skills that are going to matter in the Conceptual Age, in the ubiquitous computing world. As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop-- not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others-- will be huge. (I talk about this some in an article in Samsung's DigitAll Magazine.)

Finally, tinkering is an expression of the nature of our engagement with technology. If you buy the argument of Andy Clark that we are natural-born cyborgs, you can see tinkering as a form of co-evolution with technology, or a kind of symbiotic activity.

[Update 5/29/2009: I just published a new piece on tinkering and the future in Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. Check it out!]

The Longevity Revolution

[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005]

The aging of the Baby Boom generation is a perfect example of what Peter Schwartz calls an "inevitable surprise." For years futurists have been talking about it for years, warning that it would be an event of tremendous importance. But most companies haven't taken it very seriously: like the new millennium, it always seemed distant, even as it got closer.

This lapse is made more peculiar by the fact that it's so easy to see. If you were born between 1946 and 1964, you're a boomer. You're part of the story, and there are 80 million of you in the United States. But few people think of themselves as getting older but not old, not crossing into that social Hell of polyester clothes and retirement homes—to say nothing of boredom, inactivity, poor health, and looming mortality. Most of us would say, that's not going to be me. I've spent my whole life being active, and I'm damned if I'm going to just shuffle offstage now.

Here's the thing: we won't have to. Instead of giving in to old age, boomers are going to dramatically change what aging is. They're going to use their money and political clout to alter our perceptions of age, the way elders live, and their place in society, the economy, and politics. Boomers will have as great an effect on our notions of aging as they had on youth in the 1960s. Indeed, so big are these changes that historian Theodore Roszak speaks of a "longevity revolution" as important as the Industrial Revolution.

Ghosts of commerce

The last trace of a Mercedes dealership, High and Hamilton, Palo Alto.