A 1961 interview with Ayn Rand, a visionary and awful writer who lived inside her philosophies instead of the real world. She was an Objectivist to the end, even when collecting Social Security and Medicare.
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Tags: Ayn Rand
Amazon has been great for me as a reader, in the short run. I can get my ink-stained hands on just about any book I want, no matter how forgotten the title, often for just a few dollars. Of course, cheap can be expensive. Are serious writers marginalized by logarithms, with room for many more pawns but no kings or queens? Is everyone at the bottom of the new paradigm? I’m definitely in favor of the decentralization of media, but there negatives.
In the Jonathan Franzen essay I posted about earlier, and in another Guardian piece about him, the novelist and critic decries the Bezos effect on literature. (By the way, Franzen’s new book, The Kraus Project, which gives voice to his discontent with modern technology, can be purchased at Amazon.) From Franzen:
“In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer, Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, labouring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they’re the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you’re not making much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you want instant gratification (‘Overnight free shipping!’).
But so the physical book goes on the endangered-species list, so responsible book reviewers go extinct, so independent bookstores disappear, so literary novelists are conscripted into Jennifer-Weinerish self-promotion, so the Big Six publishers get killed and devoured by Amazon: this looks like an apocalypse only if most of your friends are writers, editors or booksellers. Plus it’s possible that the story isn’t over. Maybe the internet experiment in consumer reviewing will result in such flagrant corruption (already one-third of all online product reviews are said to be bogus) that people will clamour for the return of professional reviewers. Maybe an economically significant number of readers will come to recognise the human and cultural costs of Amazonian hegemony and go back to local bookstores or at least to barnesandnoble.com, which offers the same books and a superior e-reader, and whose owners have progressive politics. Maybe people will get as sick of Twitter as they once got sick of cigarettes. Twitter’s and Facebook’s latest models for making money still seem to me like one part pyramid scheme, one part wishful thinking, and one part repugnant panoptical surveillance.”
Tags: Jeff Bezos, Jonathan Franzen
In the Guardian, Jonathan Franzen, who came thisclose to being the male Gayle King, compares the Vienna of Karl Kraus to America in the age of Facebook and Apple, to an era that may have confused cool connectivity with a warm embrace. An excerpt:
“Vienna in 1910 was, thus, a special case. And yet you could argue that America in 2013 is a similarly special case: another weakened empire telling itself stories of its exceptionalism while it drifts towards apocalypse of some sort, fiscal or epidemiological, climatic-environmental or thermonuclear. Our far left may hate religion and think we coddle Israel, our far right may hate illegal immigrants and think we coddle black people, and nobody may know how the economy is supposed to work now that markets have gone global, but the actual substance of our daily lives is total distraction. We can’t face the real problems; we spent a trillion dollars not really solving a problem in Iraq that wasn’t really a problem; we can’t even agree on how to keep healthcare costs from devouring the GNP. What we can all agree to do instead is to deliver ourselves to the cool new media and technologies, to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and to let them profit at our expense. Our situation looks quite a bit like Vienna’s in 1910, except that newspaper technology has been replaced by digital technology and Viennese charm by American coolness.”
Tags: Jonathan Franzen, Karl Kraus
From a Five Books interview with journalist Caspar Henderson about our so-called Anthropocene Age, an excerpt about an intriguing title by Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz to be published this month:
“Question:
Tell me about your final choice, The Techno-Human Condition.
Caspar Henderson:
Climate change is likely to be a huge challenge in this century and beyond, but it’s unlikely to be the only one. Some challenges may come as a surprise but among those we think we can see coming are how we will feed nine to twelve billion humans, how we will keep a lid on deadly conflict and how we will increase the likelihood that what is most valuable and marvelous in the rest of the living world thrives.
Responses and debate often focus on how science and technology can ‘save’ us. Sure, there will be no solutions without advances in science and technology. Equally surely, science and technology alone almost never provide a solution. Technical advances usually bring unforeseen consequences. More importantly, poor political and social choices can lead to terrible outcomes.
There is a large and serious literature emerging on how to ‘manage’ the planet in the Anthropocene. Books for non-specialists include Mark Lynas’s The God Species and Al Gore’s The Future. There is also a growing array of writers and thinkers who are sceptical of the very idea of planetary management, often accusing the ‘managers’ of overly simplistic analysis and recommendations. I recommend Allenby and Sarewitz’s book not because it is especially critical of, say, geo-engineering – in fact their first target is transhumanism – but because it can help the reader to think more clearly about the actual complexity and inherent unpredictably of the situation in which we find ourselves. They are not suggesting that we should cease to act rationally or ethically, just that we understand more fully our ignorance about most complex systems, not least the human context for science and technology and our frequent inability to control them. We need, they say, to ‘add a degree of psychological and institutional flexibility that acknowledges and dignifies our ignorance and limits. Rehabilitate humility.’ This is, if you like, about thinking slow as well as thinking fast about the planet, and there is nothing here that a good and wise scientist would disagree with. Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist who has looked carefully into geo-engineering, stresses the uncertainties – and, by the way, emphasizes that other options such as reducing emissions are likely to be cheaper and more effective. The late Carl Woese, one of the most eminent biologists of recent times, argued that our first priority should be ‘not to engineer nature but to listen to its harmonies.’
Science and technology are key to our future but even more important are the ethical and political challenges we have to overcome if we are truly to grow up in the Anthropocene. If Jared Diamond was right in Collapse, societies disintegrate when those in charge cease to think about the interests of the people as a whole. This looks like one of the clear and present dangers facing us today. To find the resources to fight the necessary battles we need to find strength inside ourselves. This means allowing plenty of room for the inner child to play. Music, the arts and the sciences, which are making discoveries of surpassing beauty almost daily, can help us find plenty of space, amidst all the uncertainty, for wonder and celebration.”
Jon Voight is at least two things in life: a racist a-hole and a brilliant actor. In the aftermath of David Frost’s death, when I was done sitting shiva, I got my hands on a copy of The Americans, a book of transcribed interviews from the TV presenter’s conversations with prominent U.S. citizens. (If you’re interested, there are quite a few 1¢ used copies at Amazon.) It features talks with all manner of accomplished Americans: Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, Clare Booth Luce, Helen Hayes, Johnny Carson, Dennis Hopper, James Baldwin, etc. I think my favorite one is with Voight. In one exchange, he explains how he readied himself for Midnight Cowboy and responded to its astounding success. An excerpt:
“David Frost:
How long did you prepare yourself for the part in Midnight Cowboy?
Jon Voight:
I had read the book about five years earlier, so I just was sitting around thinking about it for a long time. It was probably the only part I really wanted to do. I turned down an awful lot of things. But finally when we got to it, and they gave me the role, we had a couple weeks’ preproduction shooting in New York. I had a week with a voice coach in New York, fellow by the name of J.B. Smith who did a lot of accents. And then I went down to Texas and I spent a week in Texas. And then when I came back, we rehearsed it for fourteen or eleven days, and then started shooting.
David Frost:
How much of you is there in the character in Midnight Cowboy?
Jon Voight:
I really don’t know. I think it’s very easy for me to be Joe Buck. It’s almost more comfortable for me to be Joe Buck now than it is for me to be me. I like him a lot. But he goes on his own steam, as a character does when it takes off.
David Frost:
What kind of experiences did you have in Texas?
Jon Voight:
Well, I did very cliché things in a way. I’d say, ‘I’m going out tonight to a bar, and I’m going to sit there and talk with the people.’ Now they have liquor bars in Texas, and then they have beer bars, and I went to a beer bar. And I sat there, and there was one guy sitting there, and somebody listening to the jukebox, and me. And I’m waiting for a conversation to start up so I can just maybe get into the accent a little bit. And half an hour goes by, and he doesn’t say anything. And we’re nodding to the music and tapping out a few things and looking at each other. ‘I’ll have another beer, please.’ He looks up at me. Like we had some kind of thing going. I don’t know what it was.
(Laughter.)
And then finally I said, ‘You in cattle?’ He said, ‘Oil.’
David Frost:
He ad-libbed.
Jon Voight:
Yeah. ‘Oil.’ ‘Oil, oh.’ ‘Yeah.’ Another half hour.
(Laughter.)
It was like that. I mean it was a whole night like that, see. And it was funny. We talked about the water.
(Laughter.)
I said, ‘The water’s hard here in this part of Texas.’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’s good for your second teeth, though.’
(Laughter.)
And then I went to a boot shop and worked there with a bunch of people, and I really got to love them.They knew that I was an actor in town and some of the local characters would stop by the boot shop in Stanton, Texas. They were terrific guys. They’d be these old guys that’d come in. They have nothing to do, see, and they’re just sitting by the drugstore up the street. And they’d come in and say something about the weather. They say, ‘The wind’s down.’
(Laughter.)
I can’t really represent them properly because they make jokes about the wind, and they’d come in with a little thing they had to say. And it was really sweet. Really nice people. And I talked with this fellow by the name of Otis Williams, who was maybe nearly seventy. He used to be a bronc buster in the rodeo. We talked for long periods of time, and he wanted me to go to a rodeo with him, and I wanted to go, but I knew that we had to leave shortly, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it. I found out later that he’d gotten tickets for me, and really was excited about the fact that I might go, and I feel kind of disappointed that I didn’t. Anyway, I was leaving that day, and I said, ‘Well, Otis, I’ll see you, I’m gonna go. You know, maybe I’ll be back in New York. Maybe I’ll come up and see the rodeo. I’d like to. But, you know, if I don’t, it’s been real good talking.’ So I walked out of the store, and I’m getting in my car. And Otis comes out of the shop with his saddle, and he’s walking away. And it’s like he wanted to say goodbye, because he probably knew that I wasn’t going to see him again, right?
So I walked over toward the car, and Otis walked this way and said, ‘Yep.’ And he looked at me and I said, ‘Yep.’ And we stood there for a long time. And he’s looking and trying to think of something nice to say. And I didn’t know what to say either, but here we were along in the street of this old ghost town of a place, this old cowboy and me. And I’m standing there, and he finally looks up and says. ‘There’s a lot of good horseflesh up there.’
(Laughter.)
It was really touching.
David Frost:
And good for your second teeth, too. Jon, what’s it been like after the fantastic success of Midnight Cowboy? You’ve become a sort of youth-sex, or sex-youth, symbol? Did the reaction knock you out when it first happened?
Jon Voight:
I suffered a lot of different reactions. When something like that hits, it hits very heavily for me. I was really unprepared for it. A lot of things happened. Like when I walk down the street, and somebody knows the work and understands it and likes Joe Buck maybe as much as I like him says, ‘Hey, terrific!’ And he walks on. That’s a great feeling.
I came in today to check something, and I walked out front, and a bus driver was driving by, and he said, ‘Hey, Joe! How you doing?’ I said, ‘Terrific!’ That kind of acceptance is really a nice thing to feel. But I’m an actor, and I feel that I have to keep trying other characters. Maybe Joe’s the only one I’ll ever feel that I ever fulfilled. But I just have to keep going and keep trying other things and getting interested in other things and trying to make those things work. I’ll succeed and I’ll fail and I’ll fool around a little bit.
David Frost:
You said something about when the movie first hit you almost wanted to hide.
Jon Voight:
Yeah, I did. I didn’t know what I could follow it with it was so big. I almost didn’t want to follow it. It says so many nice things that I really like, and it’s so powerful a movie. It’s like I want to take a break for a while. But I also want to prove that I’m fallible too. I was thinking of going back on the stage right away and just test my stage legs again. Somebody said, ‘Why don’t you do Streetcar, but I’m not right for it in many ways. I could build up to it, like I built up to Cowboy, and have a lot of fun doing it. I thought, why not? And then I thought, well, somebody’s going to say, ‘There he is. That’s Jon Voight. He’s a fifth-rate Marlon Brando’ And I’m going to say, ‘Hey! Wait a minute. Third-rate!’
(Laughter.)”
••••••••••
“Where’s that Joe Buck?”:
Tags: David Frost, Jon Voight
At the New Yorker‘s “Currency” blog, Vauhini Vara and Vijith Assar have published “What the Dow Tells Us About Ourselves,” a fun, interactive timeline that explains how companies were viewed in America in the year they were added or subtracted from the Dow. From “1991 through 2004”:
“It’s easy to forget that the late eighties and early nineties saw as strong a backlash against consumer culture as we’ve seen in the post-Vietnam era: it was in those years, remember, that Nirvana and Clerks happened. It also happened to be the period in which the Dow added both McDonalds and Walt Disney, two of the era’s most memorable symbols of capitalism’s effect on our culture. By the time Walt Disney joined, in 1991—the year it released Beauty and the Beast—the company had long been seen in some quarters as an evil empire. In a 2006 article for the magazine, Anthony Lane, quoting a 1971 broadside by the writer and activist Ariel Dorfman, wrote, ‘Disney has somehow become shorthand for the cushioning with which, knowingly or otherwise, we protect and console ourselves against experience: ‘All the conflicts of the real world, the nerve centers of bourgeois society, are purified in the imagination in order to be absorbed and co-opted into the world of entertainment.’’ (The broadside’s title: How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.) By the end of the nineties, of course, people were distracted by a new trend in consumer culture: the rise of the technology industry, which brought Hewlett-Packard to the average in 1997, followed by Microsoft and Intel in 1999.”
Tags: Anthony Lane, Ariel Dorfman, Vauhini Vara, Vijith Assar
A few exchanges from the early part of an excellent Ask Me Anything at Reddit being conducted by the Sports Illustrated and ProPublica journalist David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance.
__________________________
Question:
I have always thought that Usain Bolt was dirty. He was beating the best guys in the world easily, and they were doping. But in your book you talk about why the Jamaicans are so good at sprinting. Essentially it is years of breeding amongst the best athletes that produced the best sprinters in the world in this tiny part of this tiny island. After reading that section, I started thinking, “Wow, this guy may actually be clean!” So do you think Bolt is clean, or just the possessor of the best genes the human race has to offer?
David Epstein:
I don’t want to be naive, but if I were absolutely forced to bet on it at this moment, I would go “clean” for Bolt. Would I be surprised to be wrong? Not really. After all the lying from athletes, it’d be crazy to be surprised any more. That said, there hasn’t been the proverbial “smoke” around Bolt yet, and not because people aren’t looking, so I give him the benefit of the doubt. And not that this means he’s clean, but I think his junior records are at least as impressive as his world records, so at least my suspicion index doesn’t increase just because he made bizarre performance jumps. Honestly, I think a guy like Randy Moss would potentially be Bolt-like, but in how many countries does a guy who is 6’4″ at age 15 with blinding speed end up on the track? Jamaica, Trinidad, Bahamas, maybe Barbados, and probably nowhere else. I believe there are other Bolts out there, but the sifting system I describe in chapter 10 makes sure they find them in Jamaica.
__________________________
Question:
How do you think the U.S. would do in World Cup Soccer if the best athletes in pro football, baseball, and basketball were playing soccer instead?
David Epstein:
I think the U.S. would do extremely well. In The Sports Gene, I write about a Danish scientist who takes muscle biopsies of soccer players, and his frustration that they don’t get enough guys with a high proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers at the top level. We have a load of sprinters here! And I also write about the Netherlands soccer pipeline, and a sports scientist who helps track the top kids, and look how well they’ve done with a relatively small population. One thing she has found is that the kids who go on to the pros are always, starting from age 12, about a quarter second faster on shuttle runs than the kids who don’t make it. I tend to think if Adrian Peterson and athletes like him grew up playing soccer, we’d have a much better team. At numerous points in the book, it’s clear that one way a country dominates a sports is simply by making sure the best general athletes go through the talent funnel of that sport. Obviously, we’re massively diluting that in the U.S. I think we would be a world power if even just American football were taken out of the equation.
__________________________
Question:
With all the new science on concussions and other health issues, do you think football, the NFL in particular, will exist in a decade.
David Epstein:
I think it will exist. I look at boxing, which is completely medically indefensible, and it still exists. That said, every time I look through the new scientific literature on brain trauma, here’s the troubling trend: rather than concussions being of primary importance, the accumulation of sub-concussive hits is taking center stage. So all the rule changes in the NFL that go toward protecting defenseless receivers and all that, those are great PR but do nothing for the linemen who are taking the sub-concussive hits to the frontal lobe on every single play. And, of course, the majority of players who are ending up with their brains dissected are linemen, not receivers. …In The Sports Gene, I write about a gene variant–ApoE4–that about one in five people and that we know makes it more likely that a carrier will have permanent brain damage from taking hits to the head. All in all, I think there’s increasing evidence that some people, maybe many people, simply can’t play football without being brain damaged in some way, whether that damage is temporary or permanent. I do think, ultimately, that it will reduce the pipeline of children who participate in football, but I don’t think the game will be gone in a decade. Here’s a piece I wrote about subconcussive hits in high school players, for whom the cost/benefit analysis is vastly different than an NFL pro.•
Tags: David Epstein, Usain Bolt
Charles Bukowski, a poet of despair who questioned the wisdom of crowds, was a person of interest for the FBI. Open Culture points out that Bukowski.net has published 113 pages of FBI documents from 1968. It’s mostly pointless investigation into a man who was most dangerous to himself and his spouses, but it’s there if you’re a completist.
Tags: Charles Bukowski
I used to have the complete version of Alan Whicker’s 1971 documentary about the wet-dream merchant Harold Robbins on the site until it was removed from Youtube. But even just the opening posted below is worth watching, with the trashy author making his way through his childhood neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen, during New York City’s bad old days. Robbins, who was the best-selling novelist in the world at the time, specialized in literature that was most suitable for the beach or masturbation, though preferably not both at the same time.
Another thing to worry about: jellyfish. In “They’re Taking Over!” Tim Flannery’s New York Review of Books critique of Lisa-ann Gershwin’s Stung!, he explains how the colorful stingers are perhaps becoming kings of the sea. An excerpt:
“To understand why jellyfish are taking over, we need to understand where they live and how they breed, feed, and die. Jellyfish are almost ubiquitous in the oceans. As survivors of an earlier, less hospitable world, they can flourish where few other species can venture. Their low metabolic rate, and thus low oxygen requirement, allows them to thrive in waters that would suffocate other marine creatures. Some jellyfish can even absorb oxygen into their bells, allowing them to ‘dive’ into oxygen-less waters like a diver with scuba gear and forage there for up to two hours.
Jellyfish reproduction is astonishing, and no small part of their evolutionary success: ‘Hermaphroditism. Cloning. External fertilization. Self fertilization. Courtship and copulation. Fission. Fusion. Cannibalism. You name it, jellyfish [are] ‘doing it.’’ But perhaps the most unusual thing is that their eggs do not develop immediately into jellyfish. Instead they hatch into polyps, which are small creatures resembling sea anemones. The polyps attach to hard surfaces on the sea floor, and are particularly fond of man-made structures, on which they can form a continuous jelly coating. As they grow, the polyps develop into a stack of small jellyfish growing atop each other that look rather like a stack of coins. When conditions are right, each ‘coin’ or small jellyfish detaches and swims free. In a few days or weeks, a jellyfish bloom is observed.
One of the fastest breeders of all is Mnemiopsis. Biologists characterize it as a ‘self-fertilizing simultaneous hermaphrodite,’ which means that it doesn’t need a partner to reproduce, nor does it need to switch from one sex to the other, but can be both sexes at once. It begins laying eggs when just thirteen days old, and is soon laying 10,000 per day. Even cutting these prolific breeders into pieces doesn’t slow them down. If quartered, the bits will regenerate and resume normal life as whole adults in two to three days.
Jellyfish are voracious feeders. Mnemiopsis is able to eat over ten times its own body weight in food, and to double in size, each day. They can do this because they are, metabolically speaking, tremendously efficient, being able to put more of the energy they ingest toward growth than the more complex creatures they compete with. And they can be wasteful. Mnemiopsis acts like a fox in a henhouse. After they gorge themselves, they continue to collect and kill prey. As far as the ecosystem goes, the result is the same whether the jellyfish digest the food or not: they go on killing until there is nothing left. That can happen quickly. One study showed thatMnemiopsis removed over 30 percent of the copepod (small marine crustaceans) population available to it each day.
Jellyfish ‘can eat anything, and often do,’ Gershwin says. Some don’t even need to eat, in the usual sense of the word. They simply absorb dissolved organic matter through their epidermis. Others have algae living in their cells that provide food through photosynthesis.
The question of jellyfish death is vexing. If jellyfish fall on hard times, they can simply ‘de-grow.’ That is, they reduce in size, but their bodies remain in proportion. That’s a very different outcome from what is seen in starving fish, or people.”
Tags: Lisa-ann Gershwin, Tim Flannery
All the Lawrence Weschler books I’ve read—Vermeer in Bosnia, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and A Wanderer in the Perfect City—are wonderful, difficult, surprising and unique. The same can be said of his new Smithsonian article about artist David Hockney’s relationship with technology and optical techniques. An excerpt:
“As I say, despite his critique of the optical look created by early technologies, a striking openness to new technologies has long been a feature of Hockney’s career. There was a time when the people at Canon photocopiers used to ply him with experimental cartridges, long before they went to market, just to see what he’d come up with. (He came up with a suite of ‘handmade prints.’) Likewise fax machines in the time of their impending ubiquity, and the long-distance, widely broadcast collages he managed to wrest out of those. For that matter, he was one of the first people I knew who had tape and then CD players installed in his cars—the better to choreograph elaborately pre-scored drives through the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, soaring and swooping hours-long affairs, alternating between composers, that almost invariably culminated as one came hurtling over the last pass heading back toward the coast, Wagner at full throttle, with a transcendent vantage of the setting sun just as it went slipping into the sea.
Now it was the turn of the iPhone, whose dazzling potential as a color drawing device, by way of its Brushes application, Hockney was one of the first artists fully to exploit. He’d spend hours noodling around on its touchscreen, and further hours away from the phone itself, just thinking about how he might achieve certain effects: the effect of white porcelain, for example, or cut glass or polished brass; the effect of cut flowers or bonsai or cacti; the effect of the morning sun rising slowly over the sea. This last challenge proved especially engrossing for Hockney. An inveterate chronicler of California sunsets, he’d long wanted to introduce sunrises into his repertory, but had never been able to do so, since it was always too dark to make out the paints and colored pencils, and when he turned on an indoor light to see them, he’d drown out the dawn. But since with the iPhone light itself was the very medium, this was no longer a problem; he could chronicle the most subtle transitions starting out from the pitchest dark. Suddenly his friends all around the world began receiving two, three, or four such drawings a day on their iPhones—each of the incoming dispatches, incidentally, “originals,” since there were no other versions that were digitally more complete. ‘People from the village,’ he told me one day, ‘come up and tease me, ‘We hear you’ve started drawing on your telephone.’ And I tell them, ‘Well, no, actually, it’s just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.’ And indeed, the iPhone was proving a much more compact and convenient version of the sorts of sketchbooks he always used to carry around in his jacket pockets, and a less messy one at that (notwithstanding which, each time he slid the phone back into his pocket, he’d rub his thumb and forefinger up against his trousers, by force of habit, wiping off all that digital smudge).
From the iPhone he graduated to the iPad; and from interiors of cut-flower bouquets or the morning view out his window over the dawn-spreading sea, he moved on to more elaborate plein-air studies of the Bridlington environs of the kind he’d already been painting on canvas. In particular, there was an extended suite, comprising 51 separate digital drawings titled The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven). Later that fall, back in California for a visit, he launched a perhaps even more evocative iPad investigation of Yosemite Valley—wider vistas in a narrower frame.
At the same time he and his team began exploring the limits of technological capability when it came to transferring digital drawings onto paper—the crisper the image and greater the surface, the better. The resulting wall-size prints held up exceptionally well and soon became an integral feature of the exhibitions surveying this Yorkshire period of Hockney’s lifework.”
Tags: David Hockney, Lawrence Weschler
On his new ESPN show, Keith Olbermann just interviewed author David Epstein, whose book, The Sports Gene, I blogged about earlier in the week. In this segment, he explains the two-fold reason why Jamaica turns out the world’s greatest sprinters.
Tags: David Epstein, Keith Olbermann
Just one entry from Roberto Baldwin’s fun Wired piece about tech items that were available thirty years ago in the Fall/Winter Sears catalog:
“Timex Sinclair 1000 Computer: $49
Catalog Description:
2K memory expands to a powerful 16K. Most of the 40 keys are programmed for up to five commands. ‘One Touch’ keyword entry system eliminates a great deal of typing keywords (RUN, LIST, PRINT, etc) all have their own single key entry. Pressure Sensitive, plastic membrane keyboard.
The Timex Sinclair 1000 Computer was the entry-level computer for anyone interested in computing. While it didn’t measure up to more sophisticated offerings from Atari and Texas Instruments, it could still connect to any TV and read and write to a compatible cassette recorder. If you splurged on the $40 16K RAM expansion, you could even play some of the hottest black and white games on the market.
The real power of the Sinclair 1000 was teaching you how to program in BASIC — something that would be helpful years later when you wanted to understand ’20 GOTO 10′ jokes. All of this and it was $48 cheaper in the Fall/Winter 1983 catalog than the one prior. Now that’s a value!”
Tags: Roberto Baldwin
David Frost was mocked as a lightweight outsider by mainstream media when in 1977 he purchased an interview with Richard Nixon, especially excoriated by Mike Wallace the week before it was to air. But he ultimately checkmated the disgraced former President in a contest that was even higher stakes than Fischer-Spassky.
From a colorful Hollywood Reporter essay about the colorful Frost by former girlfriend Caroline Cushing Graham, who was with him during the momentous interviews and was played by Rebecca Hall in the Ron Howard adaptation of Peter Morgan’s play:
In 1975 David and I traveled to Florida for a series of The Guinness Book of World Record shows he hosted. One was about the fattest man, the sword swallower, and another about a post office built for small people. The human bomb blew himself up for the camera, he had added an extra stick of dynamite to impress David. We were impressed and horrified by the effort – that was a typical Frost program.
In February 1977 David asked me to come to Beverly Hills, where he was preparing for the historic interviews with Richard Nixon. At the time there was anxiety and money needed, and ads to be sold to pay for the cable TV channel airing the interviews. In the Beverly Hilton, a group of famous journalists were researching questions with David, along with our good friend and advisor Clay Felker, founder of New York and New West magazines.
David worked himself to the bone in Beverly Hills, with a painful root canal emergency done a few days before the Laguna Beach interviews. I accompanied David with the team down south to Laguna, he did not drive, contrary to the Frost/Nixon movie. As David prepared to interview Richard Nixon, I made the sandwiches for their lunch. When the last days’ interview was over, there were 28 hours of interviews, Nixon invited us for drinks at the Western White House. Diane Sawyer accompanied us to a private room for cocktails. Nixon asked me if I liked good wine, as he was proud of his cellar. Driving away that evening I felt sorry for Nixon, he was so lonely and we were going to a party at Ma Maison, where Sammy Kahn was performing.
Nixon had said to David, as we posed for a photograph with him: “Marry that girl, she lives in Monte Carlo.” David laughed at Nixon’s remark and it became a standing joke between us – he used it in his book I Gave Them a Sword. As we returned to Beverly Hills David was anxious to meet with his team and get their reaction to the interviews before we went out to dinner.”•
From a later Frost special for the Guinness Book of World Records:
Tags: Caroline Cushing Graham, Clay Felker, David Frost, Diane Sawyer, Richard M. Nixon, Sammy Kahn
From “Disruptions: More Connected, Yet More Alone,” Nick Bilton’s New York Times article which wonders whether smartphone immersion is permanent or whether there will be a retreat from its ubiquity:
“In the late 1950s, televisions started to move into the kitchen from the living room, often wheeled up to the dinner table to join the family for supper. And then, TV at the dinner table suddenly became bad manners. Back to the living room the TV went.
‘It never really caught on in most U.S. homes,’ said Lynn Spigel, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Communication and author of the book, Make Room for TV. ‘At one point, a company even tried to invent a contraption called the TV Stove, which was both a TV and a stove,’ she said.
So are smartphones having their TV-in-the-kitchen moment?”
Tags: Lynn Spigel, Nick Bilton
Here’s a question worth asking: Why do we get outraged over the unfairness of athletes using PEDs to become superior but have no problem with some competitors having ridiculous genetic advantages? We cheat and so does nature. It’s not something that exists only in racehorses but in people as well. Doesn’t this have something to do with the quaint notion of humans not upsetting God or else, I don’t know, lighting bolts will be thrown from the sky? The opening of “Man and Superman,” Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece which begins with an example from David Epstein’s book, The Sports Gene:
“Toward the end of The Sports Gene (Penguin/Current), David Epstein makes his way to a remote corner of Finland to visit a man named Eero Mäntyranta. Mäntyranta lives in a small house next to a lake, among the pine and spruce trees north of the Arctic Circle. He is in his seventies. There is a statue of him in the nearby village. ‘Everything about him has a certain width to it,’ Epstein writes. ‘The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with a stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man.’ What’s most remarkable is the color of his face. It is a ‘shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple,’ and evocative of ‘the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil.’
Mäntyranta carries a rare genetic mutation. His DNA has an anomaly that causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. That accounts for the color of his skin, and also for his extraordinary career as a competitive cross-country skier. In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles—a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles. Mäntyranta, by virtue of his unique physiology, had something like sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male. In the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Winter Olympic Games, he won a total of seven medals—three golds, two silvers, and two bronzes—and in the same period he also won two world-championship victories in the thirty-kilometre race. In the 1964 Olympics, he beat his closest competitor in the fifteen-kilometre race by forty seconds, a margin of victory, Epstein says, ‘never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since.’
In The Sports Gene, there are countless tales like this, examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us. They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.”
In “Paper Versus Pixel,” Nicholas Carr’s excellent new Nautilus essay, he argues that print won’t be disappeared by 0s and 1s. The opening:
“Gutenberg we know. But what of the eunuch Cai Lun?
A well-educated, studious young man, a close aide to the Emperor Hedi in the Chinese imperial court of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai invented paper one fateful day in the year 105 A.D. At the time, writing and drawing were done primarily on silk, which was elegant but expensive, or on bamboo, which was sturdy but cumbersome. Seeking a more practical alternative, Cai came up with the idea of mashing bits of tree bark and hemp fiber together in a little water, pounding the resulting paste flat with a stone mortar, and then letting it dry into sheets in the sun. The experiment was a success. Allowing for a few industrial tweaks, Cai’s method is still pretty much the way paper gets made today.
Cai killed himself some years later, having become entangled in a palace scandal from which he saw no exit. But his invention took on a life of its own. The craft of papermaking spread quickly throughout China and then, following the Silk Road westward, made its way into Persia, Arabia, and Europe. Within a few centuries, paper had replaced animal skins, papyrus mats, and wooden tablets as the world’s preferred medium for writing and reading. The goldsmith Gutenberg would, with his creation of the printing press around 1450, mechanize the work of the scribe, replacing inky fingers with inky machines, but it was Cai Lun who gave us our reading material and, some would say, our world.
Paper may be the single most versatile invention in history, its uses extending from the artistic to the bureaucratic to the hygienic. Rarely, though, do we give it its due. The ubiquity and disposability of the stuff—the average American goes through a quarter ton of it every year—lead us to take it for granted, or even to resent it. It’s hard to respect something that you’re forever throwing in the trash or flushing down the john or blowing your nose into. But modern life is inconceivable without paper. If paper were to disappear, writes Ian Sansom in his recent book Paper: An Elegy, ‘Everything would be lost.’
But wait. ‘An elegy’? Sansom’s subtitle is half joking, but it’s also half serious. For while paper will be around as long as we’re around, with the digital computer we have at last come up with an invention to rival Cai Lun’s.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Nicholas Carr
Writer Harlan Ellison, a brilliant wiseass who has never taken any shit from anybody, even that insecure thug Frank Sinatra, recently made a public appearance in Los Feliz, getting a haircut and addressing an audience. Patton Oswalt and David Ulin were there. (Thanks L.A. Review of Books.)
Tags: David L. Ulin, Harlan Ellison, Patton Oswalt
Below is the opening of Isaac Asimov’s classic NYT report about the 1964 New York World’s Fair. He was certainly right that we would continue to withdraw, but the palace of retreat was the inside of our heads and not an underground home. The excerpt:
The New York World’s Fair of 1964 is dedicated to “Peace Through Understanding.” Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. So let the missiles slumber eternally on their pads and let us observe what may come in the nonatomized world of the future.
What is to come, through the fair’s eyes at least, is wonderful. The direction in which man is traveling is viewed with buoyant hope, nowhere more so than at the General Electric pavilion. There the audience whirls through four scenes, each populated by cheerful, lifelike dummies that move and talk with a facility that, inside of a minute and a half, convinces you they are alive.
The scenes, set in or about 1900, 1920, 1940 and 1960, show the advances of electrical appliances and the changes they are bringing to living. I enjoyed it hugely and only regretted that they had not carried the scenes into the future. What will life be like, say, in 2014 A.D., 50 years from now? What will the World’s Fair of 2014 be like?
I don’t know, but I can guess.
One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.
Windows need be no more than an archaic touch, and even when present will be polarized to block out the harsh sunlight. The degree of opacity of the glass may even be made to alter automatically in accordance with the intensity of the light falling upon it.
There is an underground house at the fair which is a sign of the future. if its windows are not polarized, they can nevertheless alter the ‘scenery’ by changes in lighting. Suburban houses underground, with easily controlled temperature, free from the vicissitudes of weather, with air cleaned and light controlled, should be fairly common.•
Tags: Isaac Asimov
From Hannes Eder’s Literary Platform essay about the Swedish model for settling the dispute between publishers and libraries in the age of e-book lending:
“Again and again e-books just won’t behave like their print counterparts. And not only when it comes to libraries for that matter; when you click the ‘buy now’ button on Amazon the fine print shows what’s really going on. The following comes from the Kindle store’s Terms of Use:
‘Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may include additional terms for use within its Kindle Content. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict.’
If treating ebooks like physical books is beginning to feel a bit like trying to push a square peg through a round hole, that feeling is confirmed by the the letter of the law. In a legal sense e-books aren’t goods. That’s why the right of first sale-doctrine doesn’t apply to them, which in plain English means that you can’t do what you want with an e-book just because you payed for it. Instead e-books are considered services, and services are licensed on terms that need to be negotiated between the licensor and the licensee. That’s why libraries and publishers now need to sit down to negotiate, where before there was really no need to talk.
Some say the war over e-books can’t be solved since libraries lack enough of a value proposition to make publishers even want to sit down at the table. New York-based business analyst Mike Shatzkin has made this point, and perhaps it holds true in America where the war is raging most ferociously and where none of the biggest publishers are now making their full e-book catalogs available to libraries.
But what’s true in America doesn’t have to be true in Europe, which the example of Sweden clearly shows.
Sweden has a long tradition of building community based cultural infrastructure that is controlled in full neither by the state nor by private interest. To mention just one of many examples: Ingmar Bergman probably wouldn’t have had such a tremendous reach if he hadn’t been backed by the Swedish Film Institute, in which the private film industry pools its resources together with state money.
The book industry is no different. Just over a decade ago publishers and librarians formed a joint task force that came up with a model for e-book lending which still to this day seems unique in the world: transaction fees for every loan; no cap on the number of concurrent loans; and access to full catalogs without entry fees. In short, e-books are treated as services.”
Tags: Hannes Eder
Patti Smith in 1978 visiting Mike Douglas to allegedly promote her book, Babel. Mike doesn’t approve of her looks. She didn’t have to put up with that crap in Penthouse. The host and guest surprisingly spend time discussing Muhammad Ali losing to Leon Spinks. Smith was apparently friends with Ali.
Tags: Leon Spinks, Mike Douglas, Muhammad Ali, Patti Smith
I’m firmly in the camp that believes Muhammad Ali legitimately beat Sonny Liston twice. The second fight, in 1965, caused so much consternation because Ali scored his knockout on a so-called “phantom punch” (which was actually an anchor punch). Howard Cosell corralled Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano, and journalists Jimmy Cannon and W.C. Heinz to discuss the controversy.
Postscript: Marciano “fought” Ali four years later via computer, right before perishing in a plane crash. In 1968, Heinz co-wrote the novel M*A*S*H under the pseudonym “Richard Hooker.”
Tags: Howard Cosell, Jack Dempsey, Jimmy Cannon, Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, W.C. Heinz
Most men (and women, too) lead lives of quite desperation, but Henry Miller hollered. That resulted in some genius writing and some real crap. The author was best profiled by filmmaker Tom Schiller, an original SNL writer, in 1975. In this very good 1974 video, Miller is joined by Anais Nin and Lawrence Durrell.
Tags: Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell
The opening David L. Ulin’s Los Angeles Times review of the first comprehensive biography of Charles Manson, who remains as inexplicable as he is despicable four decades after this scar of a man taught American parents that their children were, to an extent, unknowable–strangers, even:
“Early in Jeff Guinn’s Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, the first full biography of the infamous mass killer, there’s a moment of unexpected and discomforting empathy. It’s 1939, and Manson — 5 years old, living with relatives in West Virginia while his mother is in state prison for armed robbery — has embarrassed himself by crying in a first-grade class. To toughen him up, his uncle takes one of his daughter’s dresses and orders the boy to wear it to school.
‘Maybe his mother and Uncle Luther were bad influences,’ Guinn writes, ‘but Charlie could benefit from Uncle Bill’s intercession. It didn’t matter what some teacher had done to make him cry; what was important was to do something drastic that would convince Charlie never to act like a sissy again.’
That’s a key moment in Manson — both for what it does and for what it cannot do. On the one hand, it opens up our sense of Guinn’s subject, establishing him in a single brush stroke as more than just a monster, as a broken human being. On the other, it ends so quickly, without revealing what happened once he got to class, that it never achieves the necessary resonance.”
Tags: Charles Manson, David L. Ulin, Jeff Guinn
The opening of Seth Abramovitch’s Hollywood Reporter article about that town’s strange obsession with the Blackwing 602, a pencil that went out of production in 1998 and whose supply continues to dwindle:
“In the spring of 1960, Vladimir Nabokov was living in a rented villa in Los Angeles’ Mandeville Canyon, hard at work adapting his novel Lolita into a screenplay for Stanley Kubrick. He wrote in four-hour stretches, planted in a lawn chair ‘among the roses and mockingbirds,’ he later wrote, ‘using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil for rubbing out and writing anew the scenes I had imagined in the morning.’ With more than 1,000 cards to work with, the scribe found that his pencil arguably became his most trusted collaborator.
Nabokov isn’t alone in his devotion to the Blackwing 602, without question among the most fetishized writing instruments of all time. It counts among its cultish fan base some of the greatest creative geniuses of the 20th century, from John Steinbeck (‘I have found a new kind of pencil — the best I have ever had!’ he wrote) to Quincy Jones (the Thriller producer says he carries one under his sweater when making ‘continual fixes’ to his music) and Truman Capote (who stocked his nightstands with fresh boxes) to Stephen Sondheim, who has composed exclusively with Blackwings since the early 1960s.
The pencil even made its way onto television’s most object-obsessive series, AMC’s Mad Men, put there by TV director Tim Hunter, who says, ‘I just had always felt that these folks would be using Blackwings.’ Animators, including artists who drew such iconic characters as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, remain its most die-hard devotees — and earliest hoarders: The Blackwing 602 is becoming increasingly rare as it fast approaches its 80th birthday, with ostensibly only a few thousand in existence among the 13,000 that comprised its last lot in 1998, when the line was phased out.”
Tags: John Steinbeck, Quincy Jones, Seth Abramovitch, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Sondheim, Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov