Making Life Simpler

As has long been noted computers promised to make life simpler but they have moved crab-wise to be a parallel universe with their own complexity. Looking for a 11n Airport Express base station takes you into the land of WiFi networking — an entirely separate world. You have to figure out if your phone is broadcasting 2.4 or 5.8 — so it won't degrade your signal. You have to figure out how to take advantage of the greater speed on older machines. If you don't remember the specs of a device, you have to figure out where the information lies.

Jason Snell at MacWorld just recommended a great program — his enthusiasm got me interested: Launchbar. It is a variant of Butler or the popular Quicksilver. Less geeky than QS, it has enormous power to access files and launch, search for stuff and spin dry clothes. At least I think the latter was in the included feature list.

But to learn Launchbar requires a learning curve. So recently, Launchbar, and programs I use all the time, Lightroom, Photoshop, Indesign — all have been updated with fantastic new features. Each is a world unto itself, like Wifi. If you don't work with the programs everyday there is a refresh delay as you try and remember all the time saving stuff you had on autopilot. It's fantastic, but it isn't simpler.

Filippenko's Universe

I've been re-viewing the Filippenko lectures on astronomy at Berkeley. Alex Filippenko's team identified the phenomenon that is now called Dark Energy. He is an observational astronomer. It is rare for someone who is really doing it with his hands, as it were, to also be so fine a teacher. Partly I'm watching again because the subject is so thrilling; partly because he is a brilliant teacher.

I watched the last few lectures of the series first. You could say I watched the end to see the beginning: the last lectures are about the very beginnings of all things -- the birth of the universe. Awesome and intriguing, unknown in many aspects, and so it will probably remain, what we do know is stirring, challenging the best of our imaginations.

I was surprised Filippenko gave so much credence to string theory and multiverse conceptions because they seem to me little more than well-crafted mathematical models that are untestable and therefore not science. But he's the scientist, so maybe there is something there...

Filippenko described himself as a nerdy kid and implied he was an outsider. Now he is a great teacher, a well-known scientist and has captive classes which accept his eccentricity -- no ridicule now for the once outsider. At the end of the series he gets misty, offering a rousing affirmation of the wonder of the universe and also providing well-meant advice about seeking your dream -- not solely focusing on acquisition and money. The students responded with extended applause for this warm, bright man. Filippenko said in parting that he loves his students but I wondered if it was more that he loved his life. He is a happy guy.

Global Warming, What Is It Good For?

[ via Denis Dutton ]

This excerpt from a book by renowned scientist Freeman Dyson is bracing in its clarity and depth. It is about the delusional thinking surrounding global warming. The man is 82 and has the vitality, originality and involvement you associate with engaged youth. Going against the memes is never easy, but Dyson, in the excerpt, does so with a gentle ease.

One example, a profound distinction Dyson identifies in the current discussions about climate change:

The biosphere is the most complicated of all the things we humans have to deal with. The science of planetary ecology is still young and undeveloped. It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values. The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.

The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.

It doesn't take much to extrapolate the "naturalists" into their true selves on the extremist Left. (The paleo-Right, the Pat Buchanan cabal, is equivalent on other issues.) Varying groups on the self-defined progressive Left see as the central problem in the world the actions of the United States and use "Bush" as a proxy for this argument. They don't want the US to touch the "ecology" of the world but to let things play themselves out without US intercession. The hypocrisy is constantly bobbing to the surface. When these same groups speak about Darfur they say "the world is doing nothing." Do they mean Japan, Belgium, France? Although the press buys the claims of these extremist groups -- which are anti-Western culture, anti-US, anti-Israel and in general anti-US allies -- as belonging to the activist Left, in fact these naturalists, as Dyson calls them, are reactionary ideologues.

Sometimes it feels as though some insane viral spirit is running loose, catalyzed by the internet into a giant spreading fog, adhering to any superficially appealing idea, which it then obscures, in the process spawning its opposite with which to then do battle; yet another Manichean struggle of half-understanding in public debates already rife with polarization -- where the noise cancels the thinking. Blessedly, Dyson is immune to the siren call of extremist ideology, honorably considering the alternatives and their claims.

Music

First the required Seinfeld reference. You remember the show where Elaine was dating a guy who would go into a fugue state when Desperado was played on the radio? He completely dissociated — it was his song. Like many of the themes in Seinfeld, it had a root truth. There is music that touches us, resonates with our internal rhythms maybe — it reaches deep without intercession. It sometimes can be a strange or comically inappropriate song for such a reaction — but we are still moved. It could be sentimental pap, a show tune, or some other commercially manipulated sound effluvia. Somehow it gets to you. Past the genre, past the lyrics often (but not always), the underlying melody insinuates.

I remember hearing a reporter say he went to The Lion King stage show. He said he had never done anything like that before, but the emotion he felt so overflowed, he began to weep. If you remember, the music from that show has a primitive driving trance beat — a Phil Spector wall of sound. It got to him — floating on the waves of existence at a stage show. Besides the next mention my all time favorite, stop me in my tracks: Mio Babbino Caro. Painfully, incredibly beautiful.

But the real subject of this post: Years ago NPR had a show called Roots of Reggae. It was a survey show which included songs that were native to the Jamaican genre. Among the songs played was a gospel style song called, as I remember, Saturday Night. They pronounced it “Sateeday Night”. It was the most beautiful song I'd ever heard. Although it seemed to be about, what else?, a weekend night, it was drenched in a yearning melancholic romanticism — a central tone in Western art, even if this piece wasn't directly of the traditions of the West. In its languorous falling rhythms the song embraced a heartfelt weariness borne of hard experience. I wrote NPR to ask where they got the song, or if it could be pulled from the track and purchased from them. Never heard back.

Saturday Night begins, ” Lord, what a night, what a night, what a Saturday night…”

BBC, Misunderstanding A Society

Ideology is a toxin that defeats thinking, common sense, education and any native intelligence. Once infected by the addictive adrenalin rush of excess (very different than truly righteous passion) few emerge from the cocksure chrysalis free of bitterness. In an unusually difficult hat trick, a former current affairs BBC staffer recounts being a joiner, blind to the bias of his tribe, and finally emerging sane. The hat trick is that he doesn't slam the positive values of liberalism, veering to another extreme, but has attained clarity and perspective:

… the starting point is the realisation that there have always been two principal ways of misunderstanding a society: by looking down on it from above and by looking up at it from below. In other words, by identifying with institutions or by identifying with individuals.

To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting apart – the individual components shooting off in different directions until everything dissolves into anarchy.

To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.

Those who see society in this way are preoccupied with the need for liberty, equality, self-expression, representation, freedom of speech and action and worship, and the rights of the individual. The reason for the popularity of these misunderstandings is that both views are correct as far as they go and both sets of dangers are real, but there is no “right” point of view.

The most you can ever say is that sometimes society is in danger from too much authority and uniformity and sometimes from too much freedom and variety.

His describes his BBC tribe:

“We belonged instead to a dispersed 'metropolitan media arts graduate' tribe. We met over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner to reinforce our views on the evils of apartheid, nuclear deterrence, capital punishment, the British Empire, big business, advertising, public relations, the royal family, the defence budget – it’s a wonder we ever got home.”

At the end he admits that if he went back to the BBC he would probably be re-infected by the bias, reflecting a depth of understanding about himself and the workings of groups. There are many in the US that could use a dose of such bracing circumspection.

Curry, Williams, Moran

With Brian Williams off taking an anchor's fun vacation — soon to be a news magazine story because they will film a segment about anything (and people will watch?) — Ann Curry has been filling in. With all the to-do about Couric you wonder how people missed that Curry has clearly been superior in a role in which Couric, with all the network support, still struggles with mightily, her ratings dismal. Great speaking voice, a quiet serious demeanor, an attractive woman who does the job without making it a spectacle — here's a vote for Ann Curry, when she decides to run for something, like NBC anchor.

Williams and Terry Moran are the new type news-types. More in your face, quicker on the draw, seemingly less constrained by their living-corporate-logo status, they try to be relevant and net current, and they succeed to an extent. The networks are desperate to feed off the web. Moran in particular is often, for a network talking head, remarkably direct in his blog. Williams was part of an online forum at Slate after The Sopranos closed up shop. Williams, judging by his posts at the Slate forum, is something of an odd duck, heaping allusions and pop references, reflexively piling onto his own references with more references, but never snuggling up to insight, or sometimes, even coherence. Curry, Williams, Moran all seem brighter than their predecessors, give them that.

Kirn on Coetzee

This is very third hand, but here is a review by Walter Kirn of a book of reviews by J. M. Coetzee that is worth reading just because Walter Kirn is worth reading (and Kirn makes it clear that Coetzee is worth reading — so some sort of lit-crit circle is complete).

What little I know about Sebald’s novels comes from Coetzee’s commentaries on them, but this knowledge feels strong and suggestive nonetheless.

“There is a lead-up full of compulsive activity, often consisting of nocturnal walking, dominated by feelings of apprehension. The world feels full of messages in some secret code. Dreams come thick and fast. Then there is the experience itself: one is on a cliff or in an aircraft, looking down in space but also back in time; man and his activities seem tiny to the point of insignificance; all sense of purpose dissolves.”

This brisk little stroke of literary summary (itself an underappreciated form) gratifies that base side of our nature that wants to grasp before it has to reach and to caption before it has to scrutinize while also inviting us to examine firsthand what, for the moment, we must take Coetzee’s word about: Sebald’s distinctively fertile melancholia. It’s a valuable service, ably performed, with just the mix of concreteness and generality that letters of introduction ought to have. Thanks to Coetzee, Sebald stands at our door now, still a stranger but no longer a mystery, and our sense of how he’s likely to behave inclines us to usher him inside.

Nothing like good writing about good writing.

Sedgwick on Ferguson

Kyra Sedgwick said that in her part in _The Closer_ she "bosses men around." Craig Ferguson asked if she liked that and she gave a big yes. "Do you have an outfit for that?" Ferguson asked.

That sort of off the wall stuff makes Ferguson second only to Jimmy Kimmel in the late night wars. Ferguson adopts the persona of a suave dufus when the show comes back from break, greeting the audience with something like "hello my merry chickens", giving off an approximation of an animal sound and smiling flirtatiously. The guy is hysterical.

Conan seems to have diminished with age -- he tries so hard and is likable and no doubt will be a positive change from Leno, but Ferguson, if he inherited the Letterman show, would be real competition for Kimmel.

Sedgwick @ Wiki:

Sedgwick was born in New York City to Henry Dwight Sedgwick V and Patricia Rosenwald.[2] She is a descendant of Judge Theodore Sedgwick, Endicott Peabody, the founder of the Groton School, William Ellery, signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rev. John Lathrop, and Governor Thomas Dudley, first cousin once removed of Edie Sedgwick, a star of Andy Warhol's early films, niece of the writer John Sedgwick, and half-sister of jazz guitarist Mike Stern[3]. Sedgwick's father was an Episcopalian and her mother was Jewish. Kyra considers herself Jewish,[4] and she starred in the Emmy Award-winning [5] 1992 made-for-TV film Miss Rose White as a Jewish immigrant who comes to terms with her ethnicity. A 1996 interview referred to her as "an all-American Jewish WASP actress".[6] Sedgwick graduated from the University of Southern California.

Scholarly Objectivity

In this lecture DANIEL MENDELSOHN: From Roman Games to Reality TV--Mass Entertainment & Imperial Politics presented at the New York Public Library, you can hear a scholarly, tendentious, most preciously superior, subtextually contemptuous mix -- a conflation of often disgusting, delightfully historical tidbits and simple bias about the US meant to make the audience feel justified in its condescension towards the country in which they live.

This is faux cultural discussion used to the purposes of ideology -- a common perversion of scholarly objectivity in many of the dark corners of academia these days. The US sucks is what Mendelsohn is saying; the culture is the pop culture, and that pop culture expresses what lowlifes we are. It is all the same: melodrama is drama, a vibrant public debate is meaningless, things of value are to be ignored (he jokes about what he characterizes as intentional elisions upon questioning).

Questions the lecture evokes: Aren't these TV shows he attacks often imported/copied from other countries? How could these shows be resonant with the collapse of our society if other societies eat up the pop culture productions that do originate here when they are exported elsewhere? Doesn't the pop culture express bias on both sides of the political spectrum? Aren't cheaply produced reality shows on TV at present because mainstream media is what is now collapsing from the competition of other media, not our society itself. Mendelsohn remembered that when he was a kid quiz shows were what expressed the better standards of the times. This fond remembrance ignores that in this period an assistant professor at Columbia cheated on a quiz show -- a major scandal at the time.

Easy criticisms of "the American Empirium" and pop culture are pulled together to show that all is lost -- our decline all but complete. Even politically correct TV is dismissed; compared to the Ancient Greeks and their fathomless wisdom our culture is worthless. The real point, "Imperial Politics", is right there in the lecture title. It's almost as though there is a contempt for the audience at the NYPL as well -- too clueless to get it unless the real point is pushed in its face in the lecture title itself.

At the end, a woman in the audience asked how Mendelsohn could compare the Roman spectacles which ended in the death of the participants and _American Idol_ winners gaining lucrative careers.

Hitchens and Sharpton

I've been listening to a lot of Hitchens. His promotion of his book has him appearing everywhere. He is a natural debater and iconoclast, generating controversy without trying; with a combination of strong, many times over the top assertions, immense forensic skills and a wonderful if showy scholarship. He means to impress and does.

This long discussion with Al Sharpton was more interesting than I thought it might be. Although Sharpton is a character out of a Rocky movie, a self-satirizing media creation hard to take seriously, Sharpton actually did all right in the interchange. Later I read an interview with Hitchens in which he said that he had felt reluctant to be too tough with Sharpton because it was at Hitchens' request that Sharpton appeared at all in this venue — essentially aiding the promotion of Hitchens' book.

It is possible the lack of contest diminished Hitchens; his arguments were heavy handed, at one point gratuitously rude to a questioner, he seemed not “himself”, whoever that might be.

Sharpton took the tack that without religion there is no morality. Hitchens said that of course there would be morality — there is a genetic predisposition toward moral behavior because it aids the species; it is inborn, or as he put it better later, “incultured”. Sharpton could have responded, were he another human being, that the benefit religion confers is that it can institutionalize morality; a morality that engenders variants of the golden rule might not be so bad for a society. Politics can't legislate morality and Hitchens' expectation is only a withering hope: to rely on the kindness of strangers. Religious institutions can be a force for good. This makes a large assumption: that the Founding Fathers wish that religion and politics remain distinct is honored. Isaiah Berlin made it clear that strong intervention on the part of religion into the political sphere gets you Iran.

Hitchens seemed too often to set up straw men: literalist interpretations were taken as the standard for all spiritual interpretation. All to easy dismissive waving of the hand followed. Hitchens was disappointing in his misunderstanding of the complexities of the spiritual impulse.

There is one other issue about Hitchens that is apparent. He is a chain smoker and drinker and it is beginning to show. He is so valuable a public intellectual, saying so many things that matter with unmatched cogency — I sure hope those close to him intervene, not only for his value to public debate, but out of simple human concern. The golden rule.

Bergman's Soap

SlateV.com doesn't make it easy to link to a particular video without embedding it, but today's, Thursday, August 2, 2007, video aggregation of Ingmar Bergman's soap commercials made during a studio shutdown in the 1950s has a fascination.

Bergman had a 19th century sensibility appended to 20th century technique; he had a narrative and symbolic talent — a theater director's inventiveness. These advertisements are quaint, strangely contemporary, and slightly off-putting. They place his technique on display without the big ideas he grappled with in his theatrical movies. He clearly got a pleasure in just exploring technique — it was where his playfulness fully revealed itself. There isn't much harmony or music in Bergman, although he directed what is considered to be the best movie of an opera ever ( The Magic Flute ); his rhythms are staccato, somewhat joyless, yet strikingly original. Art can make for strange mixtures — which is a good description of the human personality.