On The Lot

The new show On The Lot is as tacky as Hollywood, right down to the inept host and cynically manipulative drama of the elimination segment. The show reverses the “contest” reality defaults: the judges are self-deprecating. The contestants are given a hopeless task — to make films so short that only the most simply conceived and executed have any real chance of appeal. It is interesting that Spielberg is Executive Producer because On The Lot is filled with contempt for the medium, which at its best tells engrossing stories. As is usual with reality shows, the final dirge is written by the audience, which votes with no rhyme, no reason, killing any reason to watch. The show should be called “Commercial Boot Camp”.

Science Times

In this book review Harvard professor Steven Pinker deconstructs Natalie Angier. Angier has been one of those writers at the Times that has destroyed the great pleasure I used to feel when reading Science Times, the Tuesday roundup of good-news from the life of the mind. Issue after issue deteriorated until I finally gave up. Don't know why it happened, maybe a change in editors, but Angier is emblematic of the problem. (Angier won the Pulitzer, living proof that awards don't tell you much.) Even the Science Times podcast has become a bore.

Delicately, Pinker says, “[Angier's] approach doesn’t always serve a widespread understanding of science.”

… all too often in Angier’s writing, the similarity is sound-deep: the more you ponder the allusion, the worse you understand the phenomenon. For example, in explaining the atomic nucleus, she writes, “Many of the more familiar elements have pretty much the same number of protons and neutrons in their hub: carbon the egg carton, with six of one, half dozen of the other; nitrogen like a 1960s cocktail, Seven and Seven; oxygen an aria of paired octaves of protons and neutrons.” This is showing off at the expense of communication. Spatial arrangements (like eggs in a carton), mixed ingredients (like those of a cocktail) and harmonically related frequencies (like those of an octave) are all potentially relevant to the structure of matter (and indeed are relevant to closely related topics in physics and chemistry), so Angier forces readers to pause and determine that these images should be ignored here. Not only do readers have to work to clear away the verbal overgrowth, but a substantial proportion of them will be misled and will take the flourishes literally. (Trust me: I’ve graded exams.)

Feminist Angier writes like an old-time “woman's magazine journalist”. The narcissism inherent in Angier's high display does a greater harm in that she is trying to encourage involvement in the mysteries of the world manifested in scientific knowledge — in our time threatened by a fearfulness about science some derive from religiosity.

At first I admired Pinker for being so critical of Angier, someone who could be reviewing his next book or blowing off his opinion in an article related to his field. But at the end of the article Pinker disappointingly suffers a complete collapse of nerve: “[Angier's book] is an excellent introduction (or refresher) to the beautiful basics of science, and I hope it is widely read. It could make the country smarter.”

Pinker ought to re-read his own review.

The Book of Infinity

The internet manifests the range of human frailty and nobility — take your pick. Here is a noble venture. The Encyclopedia of Life aims to say something about every organism on the planet. Every beast and plant and squiggly thing, all to be described — the mystery of creation noted on the net; A Wikipedia of sorts, but more scrupulously compiled by experts. (I still love Wikipedia though.)

Santayana said that we are in a race between education and catastrophe.

Jacques Chirac

An emblem of the negative aspects of the French character, preening and lecturing the US and the rest of the world while Brown Shirts wandered the streets of France, Chirac's departure will yield no tears.

Chirac's legacy:

One of consistent scorn for the Anglo-American world in general and the English language in particular, of suspicion of Central Europe and profound disinterest in the wave of democratic transformation that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s, of preference for the Arab and African dictators who had been, and remained, clients of France. In his later years, Chirac constantly searched, in almost all international conflicts, for novel ways of opposing the United States. All along, he did his best to protect France from the rapidly changing global economy.

Drawings

I've always loved the suggestive dislocations of studies — drawing as thinking. Look at this searching drawing by Eugène Delacroix. Check out the “Research and composition” notes.

Tom Wolfe

This article titled “Dandy with a taste for literary spats” is written by Trevor Butterworth — a dandy name right out of WC Fields. The article examines the long-lived, lively career of Tom Wolfe.

Wolfe addresses the default slam on Bush — that he is an idiot:

“It was … said that we had a very stupid president. You should have been here when Eisenhower was president; he was not very good in a press conference because he would start a sentence with a relative clause and by the time he started adding more relative clauses and appositions, he never got to the subject or the predicate. So he was called really stupid. How can this guy run the country? But, you see, all he did was win World War II! There must have been something there!

“Very few people remember the way Reagan was portrayed as an idiot,” he adds, citing a comment by Henry Kissinger that, after 20 minutes in Reagan’s company, one found oneself asking: “How on Earth can the fate of the free world be in the hands of this man?” And yet for all that, says Wolfe, Reagan kept making the right decisions.

“Bush is portrayed as a moron. I’ve only conversed with him a couple of times – not for very long – but I found he was more literate on literature than the editor of the New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers. I’ve talked to both of them, and he makes Bob Silvers look like a slug.”

Apparently the battle between Wolfe and the NYRB has been going on for a long time. “In the 1960s Wolfe mocked the Review as the 'chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic', after it published a cover picture showing how to make a Molotov cocktail.”

At one time the NYRB was the premier intellectual journal of the Western World. Wonderful articles, each issue offering an insight into the most arcane of academic specialties, written beautifully by experts in the field. The NYRB has deteriorated markedly; it is the self-same ideological toxicity Wolfe identifies that has done it; many fine minds poisoned by simple-minded advocacy. An all too familiar syndrome these days.

Sarkozy

Sarkozy's election is seen as a turning point in Europe. An outsider and conservative, he wants France to beam down to Earth. Sarkozy's putative pro-American, pro-Israeli stance is heartening. Fear at the loss of privilege seems the knee-jerk reaction of many in a country that has a multitude of problems — they sure need something.

With the would-be candidates on the Left in the US running further Left and the Right running to Reagan — a man from another time — you wonder where all this will lead? Centrism seems as quaint as the dinosaurs now.

Here's Roger L. Simon's take on NYT coverage of the event. Roger observes that the French media was uniformly against Sarkozy — making Sarkozy's victory all the more significant.

Roger says the French “…may be waking up to the defense of their invention - The Enlightenment - no matter what their Foucault-besotted chattering classes wish.” Let's hope so.

Tom Waits on Conan

Tom Waits should be bottled as an antidote for something or other — Pop Culture Fizzy-Brain Syndrome maybe. Waits was on Conan last night. His performance, a bluesy rock, folk/jazz amalgam, had a shamanistic excitement; any other performer doing what Waits does would come across as posturing. But Waits drags reality around in an old bag, without even trying — Waits comes through unabated.

Tom Waits is the real deal.

HDTV

The Washington Post is aggregating HD content for a new iTunes feed.

I watched the most recent, a campaign moment lasting five minutes. This is the first time I've really focused on an HDTV news broadcast and all I have to say is: it is disturbing. Traditional fuzzy news-footage, now in memory and soon to be history, seems like a dreamscape, compared to this hi-def procession of unrelentingly detailed images. Sharper than a DVD movie — a real life segment without the benefits of lighting and makeup — the politico spectacle in this WaPo feed is hyper-real.

Like the new HDR blends in Photoshop, where both shadow and highlight are drenched in detail, you wonder if this is a boon or an oppressive imposition. Shadows provide visual space for dreaming, lending depth, a vicinity for imagination to inhabit and add its contextual coherence. The images in HDTV are so sharp they distract from all but the images — even the shadows offer no space. This is probably just a newness effect and later it will become familiar — fodder for zoning out just like good ol' regular TV. Still, these are oppressive times and HDTV really fits.

Einstein

John Horgan, formerly an editor @ Scientific American, suggested awhile back that we are witnessing the “end of science”. It was the title given his book by his publisher (he didn't like it) which suggested that all the big theories in science have been established and all that was left was filling in the blanks. He never suggested this was a trivial enterprise; in a radio debate I heard at the time of publication he was criticized for what seemed to some scientists a preposterous idea.

Horgan held his own. Very smart and clear, he presented a reasonable defense, though I doubt the proposition myself; who knows if dark energy or dark matter truly will fit the Procrustean bed of current frameworks? Who knows if the jaw-dropping voids between galactic superclusters will cause Einstein's relativity to spring leaks?

In this article, a true pleasure to read, once again for its clarity and crackling intelligence, Horgan considers two recent books about Einstein.

Einstein navigated the tumult of the 20th century with extraordinary grace. He weighed in on all the divisive isms of his time — communism, fascism, McCarthyism, capitalism, anti-Semitism, Zionism, racism — and, for the most part, history has confirmed his Solomonic choices. How many of his contemporaries have fared so well? How many modern opinion leaders will?

…he believed that humanity would achieve peace only if nations surrendered their sovereignty to a global body that adjudicated conflicts. Does anyone have a better idea?

…He advocated sex education, and he defended the right of women to have abortions, of homosexuals to live in peace, of blacks to receive equal treatment with whites. He backed up his words with actions. In 1937, when the Nassau Inn, in Princeton, refused to give a room to the black singer Marian Anderson, Einstein put her up at his home.

I remember a cartoon in which some beings in a future visitation from another galaxy come upon Earth, upon which is emblazoned, “Einstein Lived Here.”

Richard Sonnenfeldt

On Charlie Rose, the story of a man's journey, a witness to history, told with such quiet clarity, has a human resonance one seldom encounters in the media.

Richard Sonnenfeldt, chief interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, reminding us that the leaders of Iran and Korea are comparable to the leaders of pre-World War ll Germany:

“Once you believe a leader is really evil you shouldn't wait to stop him…”

Sonnenfeldt said that Germany was shocked that nothing was done when it invaded the Rhineland; the far greater military powers of the time — France and England — could have stopped the disaster to come.