David Lynch

David Lynch is such a strange character that you never know what to make of him. In this talk at Berkeley he is talking about Transcendental Meditation, which he has been practicing for decades. He is a fantastic salesman for the simple process; he says the organization charges $2500 to learn it — Lynch said when he started it was $35. He doesn't say this as a criticism but justifies it as well worth it.

Here is what you do: You sit and focus on a word, sensical or nonsensical word/sound, for 20 minutes, twice a day. That's it. The rest is rationalization, what is called in a deeper tradition, the “stink of Zen” — discourse; in art school we used to call it being “an art school lawyer”.

You watch Lynch to try and figure out if he is kidding, but he always convinces you, he is the real thing. Art derives in part from the shaman function and Lynch is a manifestation of that art-as-magic model, as well as to the 1960s, with all its self-absorption intact. What finally wins you over is that Lynch is harmless and affirms good things — imagination and beauty and the interior experience and the sense of wonder. Whether Lynch achieves these qualities in his work you can determine for yourself. Rejecting Lynch himself would be like rejecting individuality.

Biography

From 1994, a New York Times survey of biographies that still speaks to the zeitgeist, decrying the exploitative biography, attempting to pass as “honest”, serious examination:

…Joyce Carol Oates has called this disturbing new subgenre “pathography.” “Its motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct. Its scenes are sensational, wallowing in squalor and foolishness; its dominant images are physical and deflating; its shrill theme is 'failed promise,' if not outright 'tragedy.' “

Whereas traditional biographies of artists used the life to shed light on the work, pathography uses the work to speculate about the life, if, in fact, it addresses the work at all. In many cases, the artist's work, the very thing that made him or her worthy of a biography in the first place, is virtually ignored.

Celebrity den-mother Arianna Huffington's book about Picasso elicited these comments:

To read Ms. Huffington's biography of Picasso (“Picasso: Creator and Destroyer”), one would think the artist were simply “a sadistic manipulator,” who worked out his destructive relationships with women in his paintings. To read Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Jackson Pollock (“Jackson Pollock: An American Saga”), one would think the painter were simply the self-destructive product of a dysfunctional childhood, who managed to translate the proddings of his unconscious onto canvas.

These books do little to help us understand their subjects' artistic development; they ignore the role that craft, imagination, historical tradition, intellectual convictions and the influence of colleagues have played in shaping their oeuvres. Instead, the painters' work is baldly explained in Freudian paint-by-numbers terms as simple collections of autobiographical allusions, or mechanical transcriptions of unconscious feelings. As a result, the reader gets no appreciation of the painters' artistic achievement, no understanding of the mysteries of the creative process; one gets only depressing portraits of dysfunctional human beings.

Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith, and Ms. Huffington, write with a tone of arrogant assurance, as if they and they alone have the goods on their subjects. In Ms. Huffington's case, she also makes clear her complete contempt for Picasso, referring to him as a “totalitarian,” a “hyena preying on others' weaknesses,” an artist who “used razor blades in his life as creatively as he used them in his art.”

The pop culture's attempt to make things subjective and easy, to diminish in order to make an effort to understand unnecessary, or derogate in order to allow the audience to feel good about itself, to titillate and deplore, is derived from postmodernist self-absorption.

John Guare

I've been cleaning out some old stuff; some articles clipped from various sources are on the ragged fringe of usefulness — yellowed with long presence in unattended folders. So here are some clips worth preserving before their final entropy into senseless scraps; from an article about John Guare:

Guare, about teaching at Yale:

The class was all about the three of us (Arthur Kopit, Derek Walcott) yelling at each other. We disagreed on every student's play. And it was wonderful. It showed them there was no one way to do anything.

About his next play: “You can't predict where your mind is going to be….Everything deals with what you're afraid of. Same old fears. They find new costumes, new names…I'm writing to find out… [what he is afraid of]”

About Henry James,

[James talks about…] the balloon of experience, how you can go as far out as you want as long as you keep that string connected to Earth. But if you let the balloon float free, you're lost. Craft is that string. Having feelings ain't enough.

New Book: Drawing On Walls

A new book of drawings and photographs: Drawing On Walls.

This book was unplanned — the way I've found much creative work hovers, and waits for the landing pad; the landing pad being the form that can contain and extend the idea. I had been taking photographs on runs without much intent. They just were interesting images — as photos they had a dynamic, graphical quality. I draw everyday and, when I chanced the combination, serendipity, that friend of optimism, rewarded the effort.

As usual, the book took much longer to produce than I thought it would. Sometimes I think you convince yourself, “Oh, this will be easy”, just to encourage yourself through the inevitable struggles ahead. I photographed using a good but not even “prosumer” camera: the Canon A620. They were processed in Adobe Lightroom, combined in Photoshop with the scanned in drawings, and reprocessed in Lightroom. Output to InDesign and thence to a PDF which was uploaded to a POD publisher (print on demand). Took about 6 revisions of the book to get things right.

Anyway, I'm proud of the book.

Here is a gallery of some reproductions from the book at PaintedMatter.

Here is a link at the publisher's site to see the general layout; images are lower resolution but you get a look at the Foreword. (Please be patient, their galleries take a bit of time to load.)

Here are all the books in the PaintedMatter bookstore.

Comedy Time With Bill, Hillary, Barack and Tom

The pop culture comedy express has been chugging along, what with Tom Cruise's combative space-cadet video, Bill Clinton, losing it in his attacks on Barack and being told publicly by his buds to hush-up, then falling asleep as he sat behind a speaker onstage; and then there is Barack and Hillary playing that gosh-you-just-gotta-love-them bickering couple from the game show, Let's Elect A Prez.

Many of these spectacles elicit amusing commentary — just read the comments section of the blogs.

About Cruise, this comment was posted: “What a fall from grace. Sad, he was such a golden boy at one time. Now just a conductor on the train to crazy-town.”

And, ” 'I've canceled that in my area.' I am going to be saying that all the time forever!”; and, ” 'We know…we just know…I don't know, but we just know…ya know, it's just it…we see things…whatever, we're here to help…' Such eloquence…BTW, if I'm in a traffic wreck, get me a trauma surgeon, not some guy looking to chase the Thetans out of my fractured femur.”

Oliver Sacks, 2

Oliver Sacks is marching through the elements as I read his book, Uncle Tungsten. Sacks' life as a child was immersed in the world of chemicals. He was born to the manor of science — many of his relatives were accomplished in the sciences; an ideal context for a child with great intelligence and curiosity about the physical world. His emotional life follows along in the tale, like a puppy following its child master.

Oliver Sacks was beaten at school (which seems an English tradition), from below and above as it were, assaulted by headmaster and older students, resulting in trauma, and as he terms it, becoming somewhat disturbed. Sacks says,

“My friend Eric Korn, who had known me [earlier]…felt that something had happened to me. I had been aggressive and normal, he said, before the war, would pick fights, stand up for myself, speak my mind; where now I seemed intimated, timid did not start fights or conversations, withdrew, kept my distance.”

Sacks, with the perspective of years of therapy, at advanced age, says without remark that he stopped picking fights — he stopped being aggressive “and normal”. A curious value system. Although he doesn't explicitly say it, it sure sounded as though his older brother who developed schizophrenia had at least been partially pushed over the edge by a similar brutality.

In this intermittent tale of emotional development, punctuated with long stretches of his fascination with chemistry, Sacks never blames his parents, but rather, as a reaction formation I suppose, sees them as busy and wanting the best for him. At the same time, he admits he was angry with them — but never spoke of it to them. He never discusses this crucial elision — in many ways a central presence in the book of his life.

Sacks dedicated the book to Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel prize winning chemist who befriended him as he wrote the book. At learner.org, Hoffman hosts educational podcasts. He is a shy fellow himself, but radiates warmth. Sacks never notes that his friendship with Hoffmann has the added continuity: Hoffman's greatest fascination is with the structure of the elements; yet Sacks never associates this with his mother, whom he describes as being fascinated with the structure of living things. She taught anatomy and was a surgeon.

The guy is a mystery to himself and to the reader. Sacks' public persona, a man with a shy manner, little warmth, and an aggressive curiosity, communicates the same individual presented in the book. He is consistent and admirable, if lacking any semblance of circumspection.

The Wire, Season 4

We just finished watching all of Season 4 of The Wire — aka “the best thing on TV” — according to the pleased-with-self meme. It probably is the best depressing thing on TV. The saving grace of art, a catharsis, isn't exactly served up in this sad tale of a corrupt and poverty-stricken environment in which the adults are either absent or having problems, the cops are trapped by the political system and their own careerist bureaucracy, and the kids are just trapped. But all are given their due as human beings, for the most part trying to do their best in an impossible situation. The efforts of teachers and of people in the community to save some of the kids was particularly heart-breaking. The Wire is informative about the hidden underclass: we learn, from a reporter and former cop about what they saw and heard, which gives the whole enterprise some heft.

The commentaries are always best when a writer is in on them. Commentaries teach that actors for the most part have little to say. That is often true about directors as well, who talk more about locations than the logic of the story. Co-creator and writer David Simon's remarks are at least interesting, even if his wise guy demeanor is off-putting. Simon is prone towards grandiose claims, no doubt a result of all the praise. The show, he tells us: it is larger than itself, about the great themes. In earlier commentaries Simon referenced the Iraq war (?!), and in this commentary he makes reference to the individual and the institution. This really isn't War and Peace, (or, as it was originally titled, War, What Is It Good For?) It is more a good, conventional TV show. At best though, you can feel how much David Simon and Ed Burns care about these kids, empathizing with their circumstances, trying to honorably present issues society would rather ignore.

Steven Pinker

Many theoretical discussions are great at framing the dilemma. If they maintain their honor though, at the end, the complexity and ambiguity of things makes clear answers less easily prescribed. That is a minor problem in this brilliant article by Steven Pinker.

The article is about the moral instinct, which he models as something perhaps physiologically based. Fairly dry, and possibly true. But this article is filled with subtle distinctions and deep understanding. As much a philosophical meditation as a posited idea about a moral sense, the article digs deeply into current research and historical understanding with clarity, transparency. The article gives a basic human instinct, to be fair and good, its due. It is worth reading every word.

Here are some snips:

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal…The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished…Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue…People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning,…but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification…

Some more snips about a predisposition to moral behavior:

The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals …including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos… moral concerns across the globe, … find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere,… think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.

Pinker's discussion about “moral spheres” is particularly current,

…The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

Brilliant piece.

On the other hand…I have to admit after thinking about Pinker's ideas, a day later, that my unmoderated admiration needs… moderation.

I think Pinker is such a gentleman scholar — if you have ever seen him speak, he is a gentle soul, very smart, articulate, yes, truly admirable biped — that I missed some important things. I missed that Pinker's argument rationalizes moral equivalence. There is a moral sense, he is justified in theorizing about that, but equating a society as outraged that its authority figure is insulted and thence taking depraved retribution is quite different than a society — in one of his examples — which fears nonconformity and therefore ostracizes an individual. No moral equivalence there.

Hillary's Gaffe

The campaign has just begun but all ready you feel you have heard too much.

Clinton says something about Martin Luther King in relation to Lyndon Johnson and we are off to the identity politics PC races. Clinton is attacked as diminishing the historical importance of King.

Clinton's words:

“Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”

Clinton says her words are being twisted — looking as afflicted as she has in the past, at what are typical political manipulations to gain advantage. Obama, looking more and more arrogant, makes a public statement that it is none of his affair; it is between Hillary and the media who made the charges.

Then there are media interviews: “defenders” of the two campaigns, who seem to say nothing, and the media itself, which got the thing rolling, like the chuckle heads in the crowd who try to get fights going for entertainment value; the media never asks the right questions after the spectacle has begun, losing yet more credibility.

You wonder: Why didn't Obama just disown the divisive thrust, meant as support by those in the media, but doing nothing but roiling the waters, if he wants to bring us together? Why doesn't Clinton get it: she isn't a princess who must be treated most decorously? Over and over again Hillary reveals she is no Bill; the woman is tone deaf. She thought she was making a talking point about her experience, and instead lost track of the hypervigilant PC public she is trying to win over. To paraphrase the movie, “it's Chinatown Jake”; it's politics Hillary.

The more you hear from the candidates, the less you like them.

Fragmentary Arts

In this piece David Brooks thinks things are breaking apart in pop music. The fragmentation isn't good because mass audiences aren't attracted, and I suppose, that means we are heading for a tower of pop culture Babel.

The fine arts, as it often does, prefigured this. The isms and movements and theoretical constructs were supposed to deepen and intellectualize the arts, making them a proper subject for study, formalizing them into academic seriousness; but they just were distractions from the impulse to make art and to enjoy it.

Brooks, quoting Steve Van Zandt,

…[Van Zandt] says that most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs.

As a result, much of their music… stinks.

Van Zandt thinks the answer is education,

Van Zandt has a way to counter all this… He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. … he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

Brooks says, “It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.”

When Larry Summers ran Harvard he suggested to an art history prof that they teach a survey class. She laughed at him.

Hillary: The Human Bean

The campaign coverage about Hillary — “she showed real emotion” — is paradigmatic of the media. Is it a Muskie moment? Is it a revelation that Hillary really has feelings?

Do you care? Well, I guess. The human displays seem to shift things. Obama's recurrent dismissiveness, manifested recently in a debate as, “you're likable enough Hillary”; Edwards' saying he wouldn't comment about Hillary near tears — then saying we “need a strong president”. McCain's sarcasm about Romney's changed views — all of those things do reveal something or other. Maybe if the campaigns didn't manufacture Stepford candidates a sign of the tell-tale human heartbeat rustling the surface would be less fascinating. How many times can these pols utter the mind-numbing meme, “change”, without the public looking for something more interesting — a more personal indicator?

Obama was right when asked about Hillary tearing up: “the campaign can get to be a grind”. She was just exhausted.

Iowa

As is the wont of commentators on the Left, Mark Shields tallied the identity politics scorecard on Lehrer and for once, rather than evoking a zone out, it gave pause. Shields pointed out that contenders for president include an African-American, a woman, a Mormon, an Italian-American — not too bad for a society some like to attack as racist. That said, let's leave identity politics back where it belongs now, amongst the hysterical, self-righteous and self-pitying — the cynical manipulators trying to guilt their way to personal advantage.

This is so far a celebrity campaign, with Oprah's appearance as a fairy godmother for Obama an early indicator. The media picked Obama and Hillary as the most interesting and ignored Dodd and Biden. Either Dodd or Biden would have been excellent candidates if given a chance. But the media likes newness and conflict and they have given aid to Obama in his battle with Clinton; Obama is a likable, bright individual, who is pretty much an unknown at this juncture. Huckabee, a man with no sign of urban edge, bitterness or deviousness, was elected by a narrow constituency of Evangelicals. How far that popularity will carry beyond Iowa seems a real question. As the spotlight narrows, and fewer candidates crowd the field of potential contenders, defects will be brought more sharply into relief — the ebb and flow of positive and negative feelings will become more pronounced.

We are just at the beginning, but most likely, when the new president is finally installed, it will be a human being with many flaws and a dubious history who will do what any of the other contenders would probably have done as well — there isn't that much difference in what they can do. The huge ungainly enterprise of the Republic has its own momentum.

Of course, a shift of emphasis from corporate advantage and religiosity in the public square; an attitude that allows science to be science and personal belief a private guide — separating into their natural domains — that would be welcome as real change. But if a new president loses track — that we are fighting a real war against a real and evil enemy — that it isn't ourselves we need to amend but those who deny the humanism that is at the core of hope, we will be cluelessly wandering into the wilderness.

As a country, we will continue to hope and try to be positive and support the frail being elected by us to face so many problems. We can only hope that this time the president will be a real leader. It is not so much “change” as cohesiveness and coherence that the country needs to feel.

Oliver Sacks: Uncle Tungsten

The science writer George Johnson said that Uncle Tungsten was the best science book he had ever read. And reading books about science is what Johnson has done his whole life. I had read things by Oliver Sacks, bits and pieces, here and there, but am now rolling forward with said book.

Sacks was always an appealing figure — his gentle manner, erudition, lack of affect; Sacks is a civilized man. But I also knew that sometimes people who on the surface are gentle-appearing and quiet in manner are repressed and can have negative aspects to their nature that leak out unexpectedly. I also was a bit suspicious of what seemed to me someone who was something of a fabulist, not trusting that the audience would share his wonder at things, and so enhanced the story and cued the audience. I'd prefer to just be told about the experience than prodded. We'll see…I'll be making some notes as I go along, reading and posting.

The first few chapters set the scene — it appears this will be a life in science. Sacks has the ability to remember his early sense of wonder with clarity and has admirably retained that sense into his maturity. This is no mean feat as cynicism and distraction can lead to a sour demeanor as experience whittles away energy and hope.

I have learned that it also is not always a feeling people experience in their youth (or sometimes, ever) — that sense of the innate mystery of things — a sore lack I think. But the world and its mystery were early with Sacks, and his difficult experience at a vulnerable age, being bullied by his fellow students and beaten by a crazy headmaster in WW11 Europe, elevated this sense of wonder about the physical world into a land of escape; science became a realm where things were perfect of their sovereign nature — a world in which to lose himself.

Planet Earth: Tooth and Claw

Next in the Blockbuster queue has been the BBC documentary series Planet Earth. Four DVDs I think. We've just seen the first and it is really something. The spectacular photography and skillful editing make the series one of the most beautiful nature series we've seen. That is saying a lot, because the general level of documentaries has risen in quality year by year. They have just learned how to do it.

One thing of note in this and many other nature series is the angle the producers take. Essentially they have defined the series as,

1. go to a remote and beautiful locale
2. show predator killing prey, or
3. show young animal not making it in the wild — falling down that cliff… falling, falling…

What's up with that? We know: it is nature — might as well accept it.

Well, it is one aspect of nature surely, but you don't usually watch these series to watch predators rip into prey. It isn't as bad as some in this regard, but it still seems indicative of a certain mindset. It isn't clear if this is just a cynical attitude about the low attention threshold of the audience; or cynicism about what people are interested in; or immaturity on the part of the crew (my guess). They could instead have taken a cue from EO Wilson and given you a look at the flora and fauna in these might-as-well-be-on-another-planet locales.

In the “Diaries” afterward, one of the producers is devastated that the wild dogs didn't get the impala. I was rooting for the impala.