Mad Men & The Beatles

Readers who legitimately do not give a shit about Mad Men may still be interested in my comments on the Beatles album Revolver after the embedded YouTube video.

I have no interest whatsoever to blog seasons of television or do recaps or anything that needs to be timely or consistent, but I do want to say that I’m enjoying Mad Men so much this season; it may be my favorite season so far. I’m sure that almost everyone has decided at this point whether they’re into the show or not, so writing or talking about the show can feel a little circlejerky, but the show has changed so much over time that I feel like evangelizing the show all over again.

I feel like Mad Men‘s dramatic juice has always come from this combination of elements (and disregarding, for the moment, other concerns like marketing, costume design, cast etc.):

1. The charisma and mystery and glamour of the character of Don Draper.
2. The art and science of advertising, and
3. The knowledge that the next decade, and the judgment of history, are going to hit this class of people like a bus.

Mad Men’s M.O. has generally been to foreground 1 & 2, while letting 3 work quietly in the background, visible only to the viewers. This formula has shifted over time. For one, Don Draper is just less mysterious. We may still be captivated by the way that he behaves and his responses to situations, but there’s no more puzzle to his history, and we’ve come a long way from watching him navigate between his wife and his piece on the side. For the last couple of seasons, even as the show stays anchored in the workplace, there is less emphasis on the advertising business. In the first season, it seemed like the show was going to establish a product-of-the-week format. This season, there have still been some high profile clients that contribute a C- or D-plot (Howard Johnson’s, Miracle Whip), but there’s less pontificating on the nature of advertising, fewer Draper pitches, fewer observations about what people want.

But where this season has been really shining is with that third element. Change has come to the foreground. Changes in music, in morés, style and class, there hasn’t been an episode this season where our characters haven’t been confronted by the culture moving to another place, or disrupted by a person that’s already there. One of my roommates is watching the show for the first time, and one huge contrast between the first season and the current season is the first season, both in both its style and its narrative, is about deeply controlled people. Their suits are fitted. Their lives, even as they are falling apart behind closed doors, are carefully compartmentalized. The most shocking moment of the pilot is Don Draper, who we’ve come to know in the context of his workplace, open his door and step into his role as father and husband. In comparison, this season is very messy. Characters are divorcing, shacking up; colors are loud, patterns clash; and the braintrust of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is increasingly buffeted by changes in mass taste and an increasingly politicized culture.

Some of the fun of this season is watching unexpected reactions to those changes–the same Roger Sterling who performed in blackface has seemingly skipped a generation and become an LSD-dropping nihilist, while the same Pete Campbell who was batted away from pursuing black-targeted accounts has begun to act out with all the propriety of a drunken salaryman at a karaoke bar–but none has been more interesting to watch than Don Draper. Because this is supposed to be the time where the culture catches up to Don Draper. In earlier seasons, Don is shown to be operating ten years ahead of his clients by producing ads that focus on the lives and desires of consumers rather than on products. At times, particularly in his preference for and interactions with strong, independent women, and his apparent dislike for the rules prescribed for men in gray suits, he has seemed like the audience-insertion character. Don’s pitches used to promise the future. But now we’re in the future, and it’s a new world of Beatles and beatniks, of civil rights and antiwar left, a world that Don is increasingly reluctant to embrace.

Last episode featured the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows” in an extremely effective manner. This season has featured many “the 60′s are here” moments, but few have been as powerful as Ringo’s snare knocking on Don Draper’s door to introduce sounds that have become deeply integrated into contemporary pop culture’s DNA. And so I have found myself completely, and admittedly sheepishly, obsessed with Revolver.

It is because of the centrality of the Beatles catalogue to popular music that it has been hard for me to listen to their music as music, or listen to their albums like any other band. It was only a few months ago that I decided to try and listen to the albums through to get a sense of them as albums, instead of units containing some of the hits that I knew. I began with Sgt. Pepper’s, then slowly through  Rubber Soul  and Abbey Road. Somehow, I had not yet gotten to Revolver. I had heard from music people that Revolver was the best Beatles album, but I never appreciated the extent to which it–and Sgt. Pepper’s–are simply in a league of their own*. Rubber Soul is too indebted to their earlier pop rock sound, Abbey Road has a signal to noise ratio that’s too low, and Let It Be is moribund. In these two albums, they managed to do everything they do well right, and produce an astonishing amount of perfect songs on each. My the worst track on Revolver is either “Doctor Robert” or “Taxman,” and both of them are extraordinarily good songs.

*I’m going to break in with a couple of caveats here: One, a general disclaimer that I haven’t heard all of the albums yet. So I’ll admit the possibility that one of the other albums might just be that much better (though somehow I don’t think Magical Mystery Tour will be it). Two, it’s relevant that I really hate most of the early-Beatles, teen idol-y songs. I imagine that there is still some cohort that dislikes all of their albums after they went to India. But for me, almost all of those early albums are going to be disqualified.

Listening through Revolver also provided me with one of those cherished opportunities to check in with my own evolving tastes. I remember having a conversation with my piano teacher’s husband about whether we liked the Beatles by John Lennon or the Beatles by Paul McCartney better. I declared myself a McCartney man. My piano teacher told me to “give that time.” And that’s proven to be completely true. I can see where I was coming from; I played piano, and all of the best Beatles songs to play on the piano are Paul’s ballads (“Let It Be,”"Yesterday”)**. Lennon’s songs tended to be more guitar-riff driven and  production-heavy.*** Scanning a tracklist of Revolver reveals that all of the songs that have been rocking my shit are Lennon songs.

**It took me time to discover that the best McCartney songs are the quasi-art songs: “She’s Leaving Home,” “Penny Lane” “The Long and Winding Road” etc. 

***Though, of course, those taxonomies can be deceptive. “Helter Skelter,” for example, is a McCartney song and is about as aggro as the Beatles get, while “Something” was written by George Harrison and is (with the exception of an extra-prominent guitar solo) almost a quintessential Paul song.

And now just a few thoughts on individual tracks:

• “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Here, There and Everywhere” are weirdly mirror images of each other; the root of the chord progressions in their choruses are extremely similar, 1-2-3-4 (Here, There and Everywhere) and 1-2-3-2 (I’m Only Sleeping), yet I can’t stand HTE, and can’t get enough of IOS. IOS contains maybe my favorite use of sweet oohing harmonies, and the backtracked guitar solo is still just the greatest.
• For all that the 90′s Britpop genre (Oasis, etc.) is pretty much defined by an indebtedness to the Beatles, “She Said, She Said” is maybe the only song in their catalog that I think could just be a 90′s song, if John Lennon didn’t have one of the most distinctive voices in rock. For that matter, the guitar intro could kick off a Pavement song. The drumming on this track is sublime; the only time that I have been completely impressed with Ringo Starr.
• “For No One” is almost a perfect song, but the dotted rhythm at the end of “no sign of love behind the tears” is like jamming an icepick into my ears, I hate it that much.
• “Tomorrow Never Knows” is still the greatest: epic tape loops and distortion; Lennon’s incantation-like delivery; anti-guitar solos; mystical nonsense that smells like profundity; a killer drum and bass ostinato; a maximalist masterpiece.

eyePhone

Blind iPhone users, via stuff.co.nz.

I was fascinated by this story from The Atlantic, describing how accessibility features of the iPhone are rapidly changing blind users’ daily lives. A description of some of the features:

Tatum is what Edmead calls “a techie.” She had a previous, failed experience with the Android, which almost made her give up the touch technology. Luckily, she kept her mind open enough to see how those around her are adapting to the iPhone. “I started ‘Info share’ five years ago, where a group for visually impaired people can share information.

A young lady, Eliza, got an iPhone, and she was entranced.” The sales representatives at the Verizon store, she says, were very nice and helped her set up her email account and sync her contacts. They didn’t know much besides that, and she had to teach them how accessibility is turned on (through Settings.) “They all went ‘Whoa!’,” she says.

Tatum and Rios happily volunteer to show off all their iPhone can do. “See, I tap it,” says Tatum, her iPhone stretched in front of her, “and it started reading out what is on the screen.”

Blind people use their iPhones slightly different than the sighted because, well, they can’t see what they’re tapping on. So instead of pressing down and opening up an app, they can press anywhere on the screen and hear where their finger is. If it’s where they want to be, they can double-tap to enter. If it isn’t, they’ll flick their finger to the right, to the left, towards the top or the bottom, to navigate themselves. The same for the simple “slide to unlock” command.

The article goes on to describe the way that apps developed specially for the blind, including navigational apps, color identifiers, and paper money identifiers, have started to replace single-use machines and even open up new sensory experiences. Austin Seraphin describes on his blog some of his first impressions in his first week of using an iPhone. Here, he describes being able to explore and share the world of color with the aid of an app:

The other night, however, a very amazing thing happened. I downloaded an app called Color Identifier. It uses the iPhone’s camera, and speaks names of colors. It must use a table, because each color has an identifier made up of 6 hexadecimal digits. This puts the total at 16777216 colors, and I believe it. Some of them have very surreal names, such as Atomic Orange, Cosmic, Hippie Green, Opium, and Black-White. These names in combination with what feels like a rise in serotonin levels makes for a very psychedelic experience.

I have never experienced this before in my life. I can see some light and color, but just in blurs, and objects don’t really have a color, just light sources. When I first tried it at three o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t figure out why it just reported black. After realizing that the screen curtain also disables the camera, I turned it off, but it still have very dark colors. Then I remembered that you actually need light to see, and it probably couldn’t see much at night. I thought about light sources, and my interview I did for Get Lamp. First, I saw one of my beautiful salt lamps in its various shades of orange, another with its pink and rose colors, and the third kind in glowing pink and red.. I felt stunned.

The next day, I went outside. I looked at the sky. I heard colors such as “Horizon,” “Outer Space,” and many shades of blue and gray. I used color cues to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger. I then roamed my yard, and saw a blue flower. I then found the brown shed, and returned to the gray house. My mind felt blown. I watched the sun set, listening to the colors change as the sky darkened. The next night, I had a conversation with Mom about how the sky looked bluer tonight. Since I can see some light and color, I think hearing the color names can help nudge my perception, and enhance my visual experience. Amazing!

Some other interesting links: AppAdvice has a list of apps targeted toward blind users, or with thoughtful support for accessibility functions, as well as a list of games that blind users may enjoy.  MacWorld has a rundown of where these settings are located, and what each means. One feature not on the list, but mentioned by Seraphin in the post linked above, is that blind users have the option of disabling the screen and camera, which strikes me as pretty badass in the same way that when I was a kid I thought it was awesome that people who could read Braille could read in the dark. Finally, in a different realm of accessibility, David Pogue of the New York Times describes Apple’s implementation of custom gestures and options for users that don’t have the physical mobility to use multitouch gestures. Comments on the post from users are very interesting. Here’s one sample:

My 11 year old nephew has cerebral palsy. The iPad has opened up a whole world for him. Before the iPad, Nick needed help to surf the web, type, etc., with a regular computer. He lacks the strength and accuracy to press down on a physical keyboard. In addition to motor control problems, Nick’s speech can be difficult to understand. He has used and benefitted from two different AAC devices (assistive and augmentative communication) but they never became something he used in his daily life, only at/for school.

But Nick can use the iPad 100% independently, even without Assistive Touch, because he can tap, swipe and type on the large on screen keyboard, which is much larger than any smartphone. He can do everything on it and with it that any other kid can. He WANTS to use it because it’s cool and because it’s NOT for the disabled. He’s not different when he uses his iPad, he’s just like any other kid. Only luckier, cuz most of his friends don’t have one!

I am a speech-language therapist and I use Android text to speech apps with my adult patients with aphasia, but only has a demonstration of what’s possible because the keyboards are too small for them to use. I was already thinking of switching to an iPhone, and this is another reason to do so. I know that there is a risk of simply giving people with disabilities, especially kids, iPads and expecting them to develop communication skills. It doesn’t work that way, and over using iPads for therapy and education does more harm than good. But in the hands of capable teachers, iPads, iPhones and iOS can change lives.

All of this is super cool and super interesting, but the thing that I was really tickled by in the Atlantic story was this comment from one of the blind advocates:

Yet for all that technology has helped achieve, many in the blind community fear it might result in illiteracy in the generations to come.  “I think the technology that’s coming out right now is wonderful,” says Chalkias,”but I also think it’s dumbing us down because it’s making everything so easy. I have a lot of teens who have speech technology and they don’t know how to spell, and it’s horrifying to see that.”

Rios has encountered the same problem. She is an administrative assistant at the music school of Lighthouse International “an organization dedicated to overcoming vision impairment,” based in Manhattan, and a tutor at CCVIP who helps Maria with teenagers. “Even now I come in contact with kids who can’t spell,” she says. “Young adults don’t read Braille because they have screen readers who read for them.”

“I definitely think there’s benefits to this technology” Chalkias says. ”But if it keeps getting easier we’re just going to be a society of idiots that can’t do anything except tell our computers what to do for us.”

Among all populations, the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Losing Touch With The Young Folk

I was pretty gobsmacked by this story out of Portland, Maine*:

Over the next two weeks, Portland’s school district will install filtering software on laptops issued to high school students, in order to block access to pornography, social networking sites and video streaming sites when the laptops are at home.

Access to those sites is blocked now only at school, through the school network. The current filter doesn’t work when laptops are off school property.

The district will install filtering software made by Sophos, an Internet security company based in Boston. The software will be downloaded automatically when the students boot up their computers at school. Only when students get home will they discover that their lives have changed in a big way.

No longer will they have access to social networking sites like Facebook and video-streaming sites like Hulu and YouTube. Also blocked will be forums and news groups, games, dating sites, gambling sites and chat rooms.

Fortunately, the Kennebec Journal didn’t shy from the implications of this decision:

[School board Chairwoman Kate] Snyder said the school district shouldn’t give students equipment that makes it harder for parents to do their job, which is to help children stay focused on academics. She said the district has the right to filter the Internet.

“It’s a school-issued laptop,” she said. “If that’s something that the student wants to do on their own time and on a family computer, that’s OK.”

The change’s impact on students will depend on whether they have access to other computers at home. For many poor families, the school-issued laptop is the only computer in the house.

In interviews with Portland High students last week, those from middle-class families expressed various degrees of annoyance when told of the new filtering measures. A group of immigrant students reacted with anger.

“When we are at home, we need to have something else to look at besides homework,” said Fatush Jama, a senior.

“Where can we go to share if we don’t have Facebook?” asked Nateho Ahmen, a 17-year-old junior. “Who came up with this idea? We are going to have a long talk.”

This is not a legal question. Of course the school district has every right to install whatever software it wants on the computers it owns. But it’s hard for me to see this decision as anything but smallminded and passive aggressive.

First of all, I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to state that internet filters are nothing but odious joy killing vectors of hate. We’ve all had that experience of being interrupted at school, or at work in our quest for the answer to a question by an overzealous filter. Using the internet behind a filter is like browsing with a doddering uncle on your shoulder. He’s not entirely sure what’s going on, but he’s pretty sure that he disapproves. Not being able to leave him behind at the end of the school day sounds hellish.

Second, I think it’s pretty galling that a small group of parents pushed this through and made parenting decisions for the entire school district (that’s conjecture–there’s nothing mentioned about it in the article–but given that the school board member was the one dishing out the quote about giving control to parents, I think it’s pretty solid). I’m pretty sure the low income parents that use the computer as part time family computer are not the ones complaining. Sure, it’s primarily intended as a tool for school, but giving computer access to these families is a pretty valuable secondary social function. There’s something frankly ugly about denying access to families that don’t have other options.

But third, and most important, this decision shows a real failure of empathy on the part of the parent groups for the students they are responsible. Becoming out of touch with the culture is somthing I’ve been thinking about a lot, as I’ve reconsidered my relationship to pop culture and what’s popular. As I grow older, and my tastes more specialized, I’ve had to think about what responsibility I have to keep up with the culture at large. Another mental milestone passed by when I was reading a review for the new YA novel Fear, by Michael Grant, which posits a world in which everyone over the age of 15 mysteriously vanishes, and I realized that I had joined the masses of the dead. They told me to never trust anybody over the age of 25, and now that doesn’t seem very far away at all.  

But being out of touch with the chatter of the world happens, and I don’t really worry about it. There’s so much much in the world, and I don’t think anybody cares that much when a sheep drops out of the herd. What I really worry about is this exact kind of losing touch, where new technologies, new ideas, new social dynamics cut you off from your own experiences and your own former selves. Empathy is a plastic thing; I’ve met people in high school that will never be able to see themselves in people that did not grow up like them, and I’ve met older people that have stayed young, despite growing up in a world that may not exist anymore. Facebook is a new thing. But wanting to talk to your friends, gossiping about your enemies, developing a personality apart from your parents, even avoiding homework, these are very old things. And the smallmindedness of banning Facebook from school computers is the same smallmindedness of banning conversation during lunch, or restricting recess.

And we’ll all become old things too, whether that means over 15, or over 25, or over 55; age is a moving target. The boundaries of us and them will change whether we listen to top 40 or read the news or go to the movies. But we can resist forgetting what it means to be young.

*Which is, as regional allegiances require me to point out, the worst Portland.

Worlds Collide

I was fascinated by this profile, in The Smart Set of Henry Steel Olcott, the American leader of a Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka in the late 19th century. It would be hard to find a better example of an extraordinary person doing extraordinary things than Olcott’s life, spanning from antebellum United States:

Henry Steel Olcott began life in 1832 on a farm in Orange, New Jersey, the eldest of six children. His parents were devout Presbyterians who traced their lineage to the Puritans. Olcott would study agricultural science at what is now New York University, and then work in experimental agriculture, publishing several influential studies that gave him international renown. Olcott was a confident man and a modern man, unconventional and independent, excelling at whatever he did, an embodiment of the American ethic. He allied himself with the liberal causes of mid-19th century America: the abolition movement, the women’s movement, the temperance movement, the cremation movement. There is some evidence that a young Olcott dabbled in Spiritualism, a fad at the time. Everyone who knew Olcott thought of him as a man of principle, and also a kook, and maybe a visionary, too. When he tired of agriculture, Olcott decided he would be a journalist, writing for the New York Tribune and a few other papers. Around this time, Olcott married the pious daughter of an Episcopalian minister who bore Olcott two sons. But husband and wife were destined to grow apart, and eventually they divorced, leaving Olcott to explore his more experimental side.

At the onset of the American Civil War, Olcott joined the Union Army and served as the special commissioner of the War Department investigating fraud, corruption, and graft at the New York Mustering and Disbursement Office. By the time he was through, Olcott had achieved the rank of colonel. He became so well respected as a man who could get to the bottom of any injustice, the secretary of war appointed him to investigate the conspiracy behind the Lincoln assassination, which was accomplished in two weeks’ time. At the war’s end, Olcott decided he would leave government service and become a private lawyer specializing in insurance, revenue, and fraud.

and ending as a leader of men:

By the time Olcott died in 1907, it was clear he had played a crucial role as just such a leader. In Sri Lanka, Henry Steel Olcott would create scores of Buddhist schools, and many more would be built in his name. It was Henry Steel Olcott who initiated the design of the international Buddhist flag, and you see it everywhere in Sri Lanka, from temples to trishaws. His Buddhist Catechism has been translated into more than 20 languages and is still used in Buddhist education all over the world. And Olcott has been honored in kind. There are Henry Steel Olcott statues in Sri Lanka, and Henry Steel Olcott streets. There is a Henry Steel Olcott Memorial Cricket Tournament (perhaps the greatest honor Sri Lanka could bestow upon a man) held across the country each year.

In 1967, at a ceremony for the commemorative stamp issued in Sri Lanka to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Olcott’s death, then-Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake summed up Olcott thus: “At a time when Buddhism was on the wane in Ceylon, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott…awakened its people to fight to regain their Buddhist heritage. Colonel Olcott was one of the heroes in the struggle of Lankan independence…. Colonel Olcott’s visit to Ceylon was a landmark in the history of Buddhism.”

On a more personal level, I was intrigued by this tidbit: “At his funeral in India in 1907, his successor as resident of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant, told the gathering of mourners that they were not to say goodbye to Colonel Henry Steel Olcott but merely to the cast-off garment that once held his spirit.” It turns out that this woman, Dr. Annie Besant, was one of the founders of Besant Hill School, a competing boarding school located in the town that I attended school in, Ojai, California. Ojai has a long history of strange religious establishment; the school that I attended is located next to a compound run by the followers of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

The Agony and the Ecstacy of Web Logs

I was poking around kottke.org and saw a post referencing the 10th anniversary of another blog, waxy.org. It’s a very high quality blog, and I had a great time poking through the archives. What’s been sticking with me, though, are some of the thoughts in the birthday post arguing for a personal vision and less content as the key to a great blog in the new internet landscape:

Ten years ago, I started this site with three simple rules: no journaling, no tired memes, and be original. 18 months later, I added a little linkblog.

In those ten years, I’ve posted 415 entries, including this one, and over 13,000 links.

….

 

Personal homepages and weblogs have long since faded from the popular trends. They’re no longer hip and nobody’s launching the hot new startup to reinvent them or make them better.

Most of the interest in writing online’s shifted to microblogging, but not everything belongs in 140 characters and it’s all so impermanent. Twitter’s great, but it’s not a replacement for a permanent home that belongs to you.

And since there are fewer and fewer individuals doing long-form writing these days, relative to the growing potential audience, it’s getting easier to get attention than ever if you actually have something original to say.

The particular information economics of the internet mean that the world of personal blogs and homepages have gone through as much change, though on a smaller scale, as the newspaper industry, though in an even more compressed timeline–and this is coming from someone who wasn’t even writing online in those early days. There’s way more competition for space; almost nobody gets attention anymore by being simply an X [stripper, line cook, police officer] that blogs. Even project blogs, á la Julie and Julia have become passé. And the early standbys of blogs: link aggregation, tv show recaps and the like have been almost entirely consumed by professional bloggers, whether they work for traditional news outlets, non-profit organizations, or commercial blogs. The point that Andy Biao (of waxy) makes is that personal blogs are not going to be able to compete on frequency of updates or density of coverage. The only way that they can compete is with personal vision and quality of content.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I go through another period of social media self-loathing. I’ve learned not to delete Twitter or Tumblr accounts because I inevitably will want to update or access the network, but just as predictable is the dissatisfaction at spending my time filling my thoughts with what is essentially disposable information.

In a culture where sharing of information has never been as easy. We are pressured to share our opinions and preferences both on a personal level, through peers on social networks, and in the aggregate, through the advertising that supports them. It has become the case that the rules of knowing when to speak, and knowing when to be silent, have broken. Though his famous quotation “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” easily fits in a 160 character limit, one suspects that Wittgenstein would not have been a prolific Twitterer.

So I’ve come around to the idea that in a world where we’re constantly incentivized to give our own opinions, in a world where we’re constantly reminded how many of our opinions are shared with so many people, the most radical act of self expression is to discern which are those unique thoughts, to discern which thoughts must be expressed. And if that means that I only update a couple times a month, perhaps that is the exact amount I should be updating.

easter song

happy easter, for those of you who believe as such. a note about the origin of the holiday name from Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin, you may find it as interesting as I did.

Above, the christian songwriter Keith Green performs “Easter Song.” Below, “El Cordero Pascual” (The Passover Lamb) from Oswaldo Golijov’s cantata La Pasión Según San Marcos. 

I was reading Gawker’s takedown of Alexandra Molotkow’s New York Times essay, “Why The Old-School Music Snob is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter” with some amusement. Their take dismisses it as a music snob version of Patton Oswalt’s Wired Magazine rant against nü-geek culture: this is nothing new, the past wasn’t as great as you remember it, and you’re just being elitist. Oh, and you’re 27, so shut the fuck up already.

That’s at least a little true. But some pieces of the essay really struck me. On the shift in musical culture after the rise of internet file sharing:

Within a few years, knowledge had ceased to confer any distinction, and hoarding it had become about as socially advantageous as stamp collecting. Thanks to the Internet, cultural knowledge was now a collective resource. Which meant that being cool was no longer about what you knew and what other people didn’t. It was about what you had to say about the things that everyone already knew about.

And

My quarrel here isn’t with the idea that cool people don’t know as much about stuff as they used to. If you really want to drill deep into your interests, you still have that option. You just have to accept that most of your findings will have no social value.

My beef is really with the factors that gave rise to this state of affairs, and I realize this beef is deeply stupid: I bridle at the idea that good stuff could be public in the first place, that I should have to share my tastes with the wider world.

I definitely think that it’s true that the High Fidelity ideal of the record-collecting, bootleg-recording, foreign release-hunting music nerd has, to some extent, been absorbed into the broader culture. And this is because we’ve won. Almost ten years ago in Freaky Friday, Lindsay Lohan and Chad Michael Murray fall in love through their mutual admiration for semi-obscure alt-rock acts like The Breeders and The Vines. Entire TV shows, notably The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy became enormously popular through their indie saturated, unusual-for-TV soundtracks. Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist. If everybody seems to be having the same conversation about the same artists peppered with the same references, it’s not because people have ceased to be adventurous with their music, it’s that the culture at large has shifted.

But it’s not all bad. These two things remain true: it’s really, really cool to be “into” music, but really, really uncool to be too into music; and, more importantly, people don’t even fucking hear 98% of what they listen to. As always, music is used today as a marker of what social groups you fit into, and somehow the highest form of praise one can give to another’s taste these days is eclectic. But get too music into talking about music, or, hell, talk about the music at all, and you start verging into uncool territory. Because people don’t know what they’re listening to. And to a snob like me, that’s reassuring, because even though what we listen to may be the same, we hear something different.

 

false prophets

I thought I would break my silence to cop to being one of the many duped by Mike Daisey’s monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, excerpted in This American Life. In January, when the episode aired, I made a little bit of hay with it, which I now regret.

You can find the transcript of TAL‘s “Retraction” episode here. The audio is also up here.

From Ira Glass’ blog post about the retraction:

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week’s episode ofThis American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.”

Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.

James Fallowes, editor and China correspondant for The Atlantic, writes about his and other China reporters’ responses to the original story and the revelation of its fabrication:

When I heard Daisey’s Shenzhen riff on C-Span late last year, I wrote to a longtime friend who is also a friend and supporter of Daisey’s and had been trying to get us together. I said: This doesn’t sound right. I also said that I was bleakly amused by Daisey’s presenting the far-off exotic territory of “Shenzhen, China” as some super-secretive realm that he alone had thought to unveil. I pointed out that I had done a gigantic cover story and on-line slide show about this unknown land back in 2007, plus later in a book and a video series; that the Wall Street Journal had done hundreds of stories with Shenzhen datelines before and since; that there had been countless books, picture shows, news features, etc, about the Shenzhen phenomenon; that “Foxconn” was hardly an unknown enterprise; etc.

What I didn’t do was push the point any further. Evan Osnos very well explains one reason why many reporters (other than Schmitz) failed to do so: the suspicion that in a place as big, chaotic, contradictory, and surprising as today’s China, Daisey could indeed have come across circumstances others had not discovered, or had stopped noticing. I also made a perhaps-craven “life is too short” calculation: I would spend my time trying to explain the China story the way I could, rather than devoting the time to picking apart an account I thought was wrong.

I thought I would also add a few words about why I think this whole incident is so unfortunate:

Chinese manufacturing is a sector of the global economy that is closed off to the average American consumer, is located at the intersection of incredibly powerful interests, and is covered by media outlets that make claims that are difficult to evaluate.

There are so many barriers to finding firsthand or reliable information about factory conditions. There’s a vast amount of difference between Chinese manufacturing plants and American factory farms, which also have an interest in keeping their operating procedures hidden from public view. One is the fact that it’s a hidden part of the supply chain for products that we use every day. Members of Apple’s design team at all levels are more accessible and have a larger public profile than the CEOs of the contractors and subcontractors that execute those designs. Then there’s the sheer distance between the consumer and the factories where the products are made, not to mention the language and cultural barriers that separate consumers and workers. Even if we had some grasp of the geographic and cultural dynamics of manufacturing in China, these are still closed factories, bound by secrecy policies.

And this information is extremely important. Large corporations in America, large corporations in China, and the Chinese government itself all have a great interest in keeping this part of global manufacturing hidden and keeping attention off of working conditions in these factories (not to mention the opposing interests of other electronics makers, domestic labor unions, and trade protectionists). None of these groups has a reputation for transparency, or ethics in any sense that a human being would understand. Yet these groups also have a tremendous amount of power to spread misinformation and competing narratives, as well as having open access to all of the information in order to strategically leak information and half-truths. Which makes it even more important that we have reputable reporters on the ground that have the expertise to sift through these competing claims for us.

And these media reports are not conclusive. Even the New York Times report on conditions in the factories of Apple’s supply chain, perhaps the most detailed reportage on the issue, makes it clear that it’s very hard to get a clear picture of the whole manufacturing ecosystem. And, as other journalists have noticed, the report did not even touch on the manufacturers for other tech companies or the conditions in the mines that supply raw materials for the electronics. I had heard about many of the things that Mike Daisey mentioned in his monologue. But I had no way to evaluate those claims, no one who was willing to stand up and vouch for the story.

The most appealing aspect of Daisey’s monologue was the idea that an average consumer–just like you!–might go to one of these factories and witness the conditions we’ve been hearing so much conflicting information about. There’s a tremendous power in saying “I saw these things. I witnessed these events.” And so it is tragic, and ironic, that the lasting effect of all the attention that Mike Daisey was able to bring to Apple might end up as another competing narrative spun from another web of truth and lies.

 

 

baking the body of christ

I was fascinated by this story on the economics of the communion wafer market from Killing the Buddha. Rowan Moore Gerety illustrates the changes in the Catholic Church in America and the commercialization of religious goods and functions by contrasting market leader the Cavanagh Company, a commercial bakery, and convent bakeries in Missouri and Texas:

Like many of the mom-and-pop business relationships buried and mourned with the rise of the corporate, the ties that bind monastic bakers and “their” churches are not easily reduced to those of sellers and buyers. Historically, the connection of convent bakeries to their clientele bears only an incidental relationship to its economic viability. It is not an industry, Sister Lynn said, but an “an extension of our Eucharistic charism…a way we support the faith life of the Church.” Commerce in the service of religion, rather than Cavanagh’s religion in the service of commerce.

The difference is evident on the factory floor. The production plant at the Clyde, Missouri monastery, is adorned throughout with crucifixes and religious art, like a flour-dusted store-front church. Beneath Jesus on the cross, the nuns’ concentrated devotion recalls the Shaker cabinetmakers of the nineteenth century, sculpting the back of dresser drawers for His eyes only. The Cavanagh Co. does not have any religious ornaments in their production facility: in a factory constantly clouded with pulverized wheat, it would be inappropriate, Dan Cavanagh reasoned, “to put a cross up and have it essentially defaced with flour dust.” Cavanagh Co. retains a Christian sensibility, but what capitalist does not think his customers’ beliefs are sacred? “The majority [of our staff] is Catholic, but I am not sure if they go to church regularly,” Dan went on. “From a company standpoint, this is not important, as their job entails making sure that the product quality is top-notch.” They simply do not identify with the product in the same way that women religious tend to. The Sisters in Clyde tell their customers “they’re not just getting a product, they’re getting a prayer,” and consider their prayers “part of our promise to our patrons.” They are enriched through prayer themselves.

Another of the prescriptions to emerge from Vatican II was that the hosts be uncontaminated during production. In a fortuitous convergence of doctrine between the Food and Drug Administration and the Catholic Church, the Cavanagh Company has taken “contamination” to mean human touch, and the company maintains a fully-automated production process where employees are forbidden from laying their hands on the wafers. “I feel pretty strongly that the host should not be touched,” Dan said. His view makes it easier to comply with legal guidelines for industrial food production, but it also gives the company something to market. “Our wafers are untouched by human hands,” boasts one promotional brochure. “That gets my dander up,” a Sister in Clyde told the Chicago Tribune: The Sisters’ touch gives what other businesses would call “added value.”

One interesting note in the story is one of the original ways that Cavanagh gained its market prominence was by marketing whole wheat communion wafers, and it also mentions that a growth sector is individually sealed communion kits, with individual servings of communion wine and and a single communion wafer. It’s hard not to see that as a symbol of the church becoming more like the world and losing its soul.

For another story of the hidden consequences of shifts in societal behaviors and preferences, see Mac McClelland’s story on working for a shipping distributor that contracts with Amazon.com.

March

Nature corridor, Clackamas County, Oregon.

14 Harps, Yale Union Laundry building, Southeast Portland, Oregon.

Very few updates in the month of February. I don’t really have any excuse; I had tons of time off as my workplace adjusts for a downturn of demand after the holiday season. Less hours also means less money in my pocket, so it’s actually been a pretty miserable month. I’ve also tried to make an effort to spend less time online. It’s always a trade off; I really like feeling plugged in an up on the news cycle, but I end up spending so much time without a real benefit, and I’m trying to redirect my time in a direction that’s a little more toward creative output and real heavy lifting, brainwise.

Hopefully things will pick up a little bit in March.

Dear Life,

Thank you very much for the gift last week of a flat tire, broken water heater, and the possibility of major dental work. I was especially heartened to see that you left me no time for myself. Don’t worry about the money–it’s not like I was going to spend it on something else anyway.

Matt.

January Photos

The best of the photos I’ve taken during January 2012.

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update: apple

Quick update to the Mike Daisey/Foxconn/Apple story I wrote about last week: The New York Times has written a long article about conditions in the factory and about Apple’s efforts to reduce labor violations in their supply chain. Two things that I thought were particularly noteworthy:

First, I thought it was very interesting that the article chose as its central human figure one of the relatively high-paid, skilled workers in the plant. The fact that this worker had high wages and extra perks relative to most of the other workers in the plant highlights the failure to protect workers from hazardous conditions as well as the callous way that large manufacturers treat the lives of their workers.

Also deeply fascinating was this selection of reader comments on the article from Caixin, a Chinese business magazine that the Grey Lady partnered with to publish the article in China. Granted, these comments come from people that both have internet access and are on a business magazine side, but they show the same range of opinions on the labor abuses that you would find in the US, from

Even though Apple should be ethically condemned, the key point is: whether the working conditions inside the factories are supervised by law. This (supervision) is the duty of judicial officers and labor unions. Now everything is driven only by G.D.P., so which government official would dare supervise those companies? They (the governments) have long reduced themselves to the servant of the giant enterprises.

to 

 By the way, construction workers and farmers are also living a harsh life in China, shall we also boycott housing and grains?

The This American Life episode struggled with this ambivalence; it’s true that China’s mass manufacturing industry has raised more people out of poverty than any other endeavor/period in history, but its also true that this has come at a staggering human cost. The queasy discomfort that we feel at buying these products is also felt by the countries that sell them.

highway rider

Changed my little album dealio on the left there after way too many months to Brad Mehldau’s 2010 album Highway Rider.

Highway Rider is an album that has really grown on me. I liked it immediately—I really like Mehldau’s easygoing harmonic language and percussive style, and the album was produced my one of my favorite musicians, Jon Brion—but the album is a little, well, tame and I never thought it would edge its way into my favorites. It’s not very harmonically adventurous, its sound is slick and sometimes over-controlled, sometimes Mehldau’s piano patterns are extremely repetitious, and it sometimes strays close to muzak or easy listening. The thing is, it’s also just so right. It’s an album that conjures a world in its sound, and that world is warm and inviting, both communal and apart. It’s pre-language, pre-cognition; the perfect music for sitting outside on a sunny day without a single thought in your head.

Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman performing “The Falcon Will Fly Again” from Highway Rider:

remainder of the ixday

Found art: moss growing in sidewalk. Clinton Street, Southeast Portland, Oregon.

Updates to previous items:

• Just when I sneer that most thinking fans of Downton Abbey are not simply blinded by the pageantry of the prewar landed gentry, Roger Ebert comes out with this saccharine love-letter to “the way things were” when “people knew their place.” Vom. And, for the record, I think P.G. Wodehouse sucks as well.
• In an interesting twist to that Caitlin Flanagan quasi-hit-piece on Joan Didion I linked to last week, New York Magazine has published an essay by Meghan O’Rourke that’s… kind of a hit piece on Caitlin Flanagan. In a tidy bit of parallelism, O’Rourke accuses Flanagan of being old and out of touch with the demographic she’s writing on. I generally believe that anything from NYMag should be taken with a grain of salt, but passages like this are pretty damning:

 The book [Girl Land] is supposed to be about “the great and unchanging questions of Girl Land, as they are asked and answered in the ever-shifting landscape of today’s youth culture.” Rather than face up to that challenging subject, she withdraws into the fifties, sixties, and seventies, when she grew up—so mired in Judy Blume and Patty Hearst that she neglects to fully explore social media, Twilight, Lady Gaga, or, really, anything about how girls live today.

and

And it’s this, as much as their new sexual vulnerability, that girls struggle with: They are endowed with powerful desire that is rarely acknowledged outside their own inner lives—or is viewed as frightening. We’ve traded a coercive system of sexual repression for a faux-permissive one that encourages and channels sexual expression but also cries out against it. No wonder some girls are the sexual equivalents of binge eaters, turning on one another, making themselves too readily available as a way of pretending that they are in control. This is a problem, but asking girls to turn back into Sandra Dee is not the solution.

 

Interesting items from the blogosphere:

• Interesting New York Times article on staying mentally sharp throughout life. Sometimes it does stray very close to truism (““We have shown that those with less education may be able to compensate and look more like those who have higher education by adopting some of the common practices of the highly educated,” Dr. Lachman says.”) but some of the other research it summarizes was new to me: “In another study, Dr. Lachman showed that adults, particularly men, with low levels of education could also improve mental function by using a computer. Although researchers are not sure why, they speculate that computers required users to switch mental gears more frequently or process information in a new way, which quickened reaction time.”
• Longtime readers of the blog will know that I have a special place in my heart for Seattle-area pastor Mark Driscoll. Careful longtime readers will remember that it is a place of loathing. Driscoll and his wife have a new book out, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together which is so misogynistic and just plain icky that it’s making other evangelicals uncomfortable. Driscoll is a perfect distillation of religious intolerance and secular douchebaggery, and it makes both perfect and no sense that he made it in the Pacific Northwest. I’m always curious about what has happened in a man or woman’s life such that they get comfort in Driscoll’s message.

mea culpa

My bad for the dearth of content this last week, especially after the kind words from mr. rafrenzy (who, formatted like that, sounds like maybe a clarinet teacher). All I can say is that time for blogging has never been more at a premium, and I don’t really have access to the internet at work (sometime once I’ve quit my job I’ll have some things to say about how my job is the first world version of the jobs in the piece rafrenzy highlighted).

Posting may always be a little light, but I try and fit it in when I can.

Instead of apologizing, I’ll just direct you to Cory Arcangel’s found HTML piece, “Sorry I Haven’t Posted.”

beautiful explanations

Leonard Bernstein delivering his Norton Lecture at Harvard University using Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-flat Major as an example. The lectures are available from your public library in a DVD set called The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard by Leonard Bernstein.

I pretty much killed myself the night before last, staying up all night to finish The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I’ll have some thoughts about that book later, but I still need to process it a bit more.

What I’ve been obsessed with at work during my semi-unsanctioned browsing time is the plethora of responses from scientific plenipotentiaries to Edge.org’s annual question for 2012: What is your favorite deep, beautiful, or elegant explanation? The responses include Eratosthenes’ measurement of the Earth’s circumference, Boscovich’s Explanation Of Atomic Forces, and are uniformly thoughtful and written with insight and passion.

I always find it fascinating to listen to people that have the magic combination of passion, expert knowledge of their field, and the old fashioned gift of gab. Becoming specialized in a field changes the way you look at your field, and the way that you see the world, and that change in perspective can be hard to communicate to other people. That gives it extra power when it does succeed. The responses really deserve to be read together as a piece, but to give you a taste of the flavor of the writing, here’s the punchline to the entry on Eratosthenes:

Eratosthenes brought together apparently unrelated pieces of evidence—the pace of caravans, the Sun shining to the bottom of a well, the length of the shadow of an obelisk—, assumptions—the sphericity of the Earth, its distance from the Sun—, and mathematical tools to measure a circumference that he could only imagine but neither see nor survey. His result is simple and compelling: the way he reached it epitomizes human intelligence at its best.

Was Eratosthenes thinking concretely about the circumference of the earth (in the way he might have been thinking concretely about the distance from the Library to the Palace in Alexandria)? I believe not. He was thinking rather about a challenge posed by the quite different estimates of the circumference of the Earth that had been offered by other scholars at the time. He was thinking about various mathematical principles and tools that could be brought to bear on the issue. He was thinking of the evidential use that could be made of sundry observations and reports. He was aiming at finding a clear and compelling solution, a convincing argument. In other terms, he was thinking about representations—theories, conjectures, reports—, and looking for a novel and insightful way to put them together. In doing so, he was inspired by others, and aiming at others. His intellectual feat only makes sense as a particularly remarkable link in a social-cultural chain of mental and public events. To me, it is a stunning illustration not just of human individual intelligence but also and above all of the powers of socially and culturally extended minds.

The question and answers made me think about the concept of elegance as well. It’s an interesting concept; the dictionary definition refers to concepts that are both aesthetic (graceful, tasteful, dignified, restrained) and more objective (precise, neat). And I can think of few adjectives that so easily describe both people and completely abstract concepts with little deviation in meaning.

I thought I’d share a couple of classical pieces that I think are elegant. Although all of them are among my favorite pieces of music, this is a different list than favorites, or greatest, or most beautiful.

• J.S. Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita for Violin No. 2. Bach manages to take very limited materials: a descending chord pattern, a single melody instrument made of four strings, and manages to spin it into a 15 minute monster that has managed to stay one of the hardest pieces in the violin repitoire since it was written around 1720.

W.A. Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Four catchy themes introduced. Then they’re mixed together like fire and gunpowder.

Steve Reich’s Piano Phase. One line of music. Two pianos.

Waking Belle

Saw the new Beauty and the Beast 3D rerelease tonight. I don’t have any special thoughts about the movie, as it has always been one of my favorites. I was a little too young to see it in theaters, however, and it did remind me that even now with high definition televisions and movie players the theater experience is something special.

It also made me think about Howard Ashman, the composer of Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast and a beautiful soul. His tragic young death of AIDS on the eve of Beauty’s release is covered in the excellent 2009 documentary, Waking Sleeping Beauty. We can never know what movies we’re missing if the dream team of Howard Ashman, Alan Menken, and the Disney Animation team were able to continue.

Downton Abbey and the Freight Train of Progress

From the Downton Pawnee tumblr.

Andrew Sullivan linked to a couple of different articles trying to explain the (unexpected?) popularity of Downton Abbey in the United States. For Newsweek, Simon Schama makes the case that the show is a snob-ridden piece of Hallmark-y tripe:

There are many things wrong with the Republic in 2012, but when historians come to write its chronicle they will notice that the country was gripped by the clammy delirium of nostalgia. Tea Partiers ache for what they imagine to have been a tricorny country, all innocent of the Monster Government. Politicians and radio ranters sell the credulous on an American paradise before “socialism,” in the wicked shape of Social Security and Medicare, ever came to be. And folks who might have better ways to pass their time have been falling like grouse to the gun before the mighty edifice of Downton Abbey. Deprived of a wallow in the dry-martini and bullet-bra world of Mad Men? Not to worry, Downton serves up a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery. It’s a servile soap opera that an American public desperate for something, anything, to take its mind off the perplexities of the present seems only too happy to down in great, grateful gulps.

Irin Carmon posits that the show’s popularity resides in an idealization of the class system and a portrayal of noblesse oblige on the part of the “upstairs:”

“I actually think it’s a lot like ‘The West Wing,’” Steve Jacobs, a political communications strategist and a fan of the show, told me. “Lord Grantham is the platonic ideal of an English aristocrat, just like Jed Bartlet was the platonic ideal of an American president. The very fact that Grantham and Bartlet are so good and selfless is, to me, an indication that they’re not meant to be completely accurate depictions of their real-life counterparts.” Even if a democratically elected president differs in earned legitimacy from an earl, both involve a Great Man shaping history. As Max Read, a writer at Gawker, says of the analogy, “Both shows suffer from operating under ideas of politics/history that focus on the individual actor rather than the system. So the nobility and selflessness of Bartlet and the earl justify the systems in which they work … It’s a very classically conservative notion of history.”

Kathryn Hughes interprets the show as a reflection of British social anxieties, and places the show in a line of historical class dramas:

The show’s values of cohesion and cooperation promise to be challenged by the war’s fallout. But they remain Downton Abbey’s guiding ethos. There may be disruptions looming (socialism, feminism, the small matter of international carnage), but if the classes just pull together, total breakdown may be avoided. The creator and chief writer of this careful and approving dramatization of a social unity that depends, paradoxically, on social separation is Julian Fellowes, who was recently made a Life Peer—which means he becomes Lord Fellowes, although his son will not inherit the title—and sits on the Conservative side of the House of Lords. Fellowes is too canny an operator to say out loud that he wishes we could return to the good old days in which the story is set. But as season two approached its close in Britain, there was no getting around an increasing sense of the show’s nostalgic longing for an age of what we might call consensual paternalism. Which is all very well, of course, as long as you’re the one on the right side of the social divide, the side that decides whether it feels like being benign to those less favored than itself.

Obviously I cannot speak for all viewers of the show, and I am certain that there are plenty of them who watch it for the pure spectacle of costume drama, but none of these perspectives quite gets at why I like the show. I agree that the show generally positions the Earl of Grantham as a pure actor in an opressive system, and that the show draws some of its power from societal shifts that are happening right now, but I think it’s entirely too superficial to dismiss the show as nostalgia for a time past.

http://seg.sharethis.com/getSegment.php?purl=http%3A%2F%2Fmatteilar.wordpress.com%2Fwp-admin%2Fpost-new.php&jsref=&rnd=1326914289114Most period films have to deal with the moral conflict produced by societal differences between our time and the period depicted. Films can sidestep those questions, either by depicting characters as evil because their time was “evil” (think Braveheart: William Wallace is our enlightened, educated, modern hero, but 13th century Englishmen are mostly evil because they’re 13th century Englishmen), or by idealizing the past and not engaging with the question at all. But most honest films do deal with it one way or another, even if not successfully. And clearly Downton does idealize its main characters. But I think this is a deliberate strategy to highlight the brutality and suffocation of the system they operate in.

The Mad Men comparison is apt. A big difference, of course, is that Don Draper and most of the characters on the show are clearly portrayed as extremely flawed people even in the context of their time. This makes it a better show than Downton, however where they come together is in detailing the lives of a class of people who are going to be absolutely rocked by the social changes that will affect them in the coming years. Just like the social unrest of the late ’60s that invisibly permeates Mad Men, so does the period between wars permeate Downton. And that’s where the idealization of this group of people that inhabit the system becomes a real driver for pathos. Whether or not this class system has value (and personally, I do think the show could come down harder on the side of the “or not”), these people are going to have their lives completely upended, and all of the norms that they have internalized through their lives are going to be called into question. Even these people.

To be fair, Schama acknowledges this point:

In the current series, historical reality is supposed to bite at Downton in the form of the Great War. The abbey’s conversion into convalescent quarters did indeed happen in some of the statelies. But if Fellowes were really interested in the true drama attending the port and partridge classes—more accurately and brilliantly related in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Isabel Colegate’s wonderful The Shooting Party—the story on our TV would be quite different. Instead of being an occasional suffragette, Sibyl would have turned into a full-on militant, carving, while incarcerated in prison, a “V” for “votes” on her breast with a piece of broken glass. Lord Robert, whose income from land and rents would have collapsed with the long agricultural depression, would be unable to service his mortgage and, subject to the estate duties imposed to pay for old-age pensions, would have to sell the place to a wheat baron from Alberta. And Matthew would be one of the 750,000 dead.

and I do think he has a point. Fellowes class affiliations should be called into question. And there’s plenty of time for the show to go on too many seasons, postponing the painful social change until nobody cares any more. But for now, that spectre of change, visible only to us, hovers over the show and I cannot wait for that other shoe to drop.

remains of the day 17 jan

Illness last week means that I have quite a few links that I’ve been sitting on:

• A pretty heartbreaking piece by Daniel Wakin in the New York Times Magazine about the process of selling expensive instruments when the virtuosi who play them decide that it’s time to let them go. It delves into the heady emotion of making that decision, as well as the intricate interplay between the current owners, the desire to pass them onto musicians of high caliber, and the market forces that push these instruments outside the means of the musicians that would most be able to make use of them.
• Oliver Sava tried to write a piece for the A.V. Club about what makes a good all-ages comic book, but ended up writing an article defining all good all-ages media. It took me right back to those children’s books that have persisted in my memory, those that still give me pleasure today, and also took me back to a more uncritical time where I took so much pleasure out of just keeping my head in a book.
• Arizona is crazy fucking racist.
• One part of the origin story of Olivier Messiaen’s transcendent Quartet for the End of Time is that it was written while the composer was imprisoned in a Nazi detention camp. On An Overgrown Path takes a look at that story and finds that it’s a little more complicated than that. I was struck by what a fine line it is here between truth-telling and mud slinging. After all, what really is worse: incorrectly labeling Messiaen as a Vichy collaborator, or holding him up as a symbol of artistic resistance against Nazi oppression while he was a (by all accounts, low key) collaborator?
• Constant affirmation vs. earning praise. Good job in trying to change the status quo, but it’s stupid that this is an argument.
• The Atlantic has a slideshow and interview with one of the graphic designers that created posters for ACT UP to promote awareness of the AIDS crisis, which is where the header image comes from. I wasn’t that familiar with the posters, and I was shocked and refreshed by how honest and direct some of the messages. Gay activism has become less confrontational since then, I feel, and I just can’t imagine a major campaign with the text “One in every sixty-one babies is born [HIV positive.] So why is the media telling us heterosexuals aren’t at risk? Because these babies are black. Because these babies are hispanic.” In the realm of public health, it seems like we could use a similar campaign to outline the general population health benefits of things like the HPV vaccine.
• Alexis Madrigal has a piece up about how Radiolab is/has changed the sound/approach of radio broadcasters. First off, nothing that he says doesn’t also apply better to This American Life, a show that I think has more directly influenced the way that NPR news edits their segments, the subjects they cover, and the way they conduct their man-on-the-street interviews. Second, I really hope not. I don’t think the show dumbs down their science that much, and I appreciate their editing and sound design, but it drives me batshit crazy the ways that Krulwich and Abumrad play dumb when they’re interviewing their subjects and summing up information. It’s not that I disagree with the approach, I just think they need to be better at their jobs. It strikes me as patronizing, transparently false, and deeply annoying. /minirant
• For some reason, Caitlyn Flanagan is in my mental “treat with caution” file for writers, but she has written an absolutely brilliant piece on Joan Didion for The Atlantic. I may have more to say on this later, it’s quite good. For what it’s worth, I’ve always appreciated Didion for the way she writes about California.
• One of my friends, artist Lucy Bellwood, is offering two issues of one of her titles, Baggywrinkles, available for free on her website. Go check it out.