Excerpts

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“Those Saloon Bedrooms, Located A Drunken Stagger From The Bar, Provided A Haven For Prostitutes”

January 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Theodore Roosevelt, NYC Police Commissioner, 1895.

File this one under unintended consequences. Theodore Roosevelt attempted to reduce drunkenness in 1890s New York City while he was police commissioner and instead encouraged vice of all kinds. From “How Dry We Aren’t,” Richard Zacks’ new Opinion piece in the New York Times:

“During the November elections in 1895, corrupt Tammany Democrats won in a landslide by campaigning against Rooseveltism and dry Sundays. Undaunted, Roosevelt lobbied the Republican-dominated legislature to pass even tougher excise laws. On April 1, 1896, the Raines Law went into effect, expanding the Sunday shut-down hours from midnight Saturday to 5 a.m. Monday, banning “free lunch” counters, and requiring that saloon doors be kept locked and blinds raised to let police peer inside. The law also exempted hotels with 10 rooms, which could serve guests liquor with a meal 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In a New York minute (actually the next few months), more than 1,000 saloons added 10 dinky rooms. Tammany building inspectors didn’t care if some had four-foot-high ceilings or were in former coal bins. “Ten beers and one hard-boiled egg scarcely constitute a meal,” complained Roosevelt, but local judges disagreed, allowing most anything to pass for food. The playwright Eugene O’Neill once described on a saloon table “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese which only the drunkest yokel from the sticks” would ever dream of eating.

New York — already awash in illegal casinos and brothels — was transformed into the city that never sleeps. These Raines Law saloon-hotels could serve round the clock. Even the Metropolitan Opera added 10 bedrooms to be able to offer late-night wine. And those saloon bedrooms, located a drunken stagger from the bar, provided a haven for prostitutes and a temptation to couples who’d had a few too many drinks. Adding 10,000 cheap beds was bound to loosen the city’s morals.

Roosevelt’s liquor crackdown backfired; so did the Raines Law. The city’s spirit of place, what Stephen Crane once dubbed New York’s ‘wild impulse,’ refused to be tamed.”

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Roosevelt is interred on Long Island, 1919:

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Dorothea Lange, Seated Atop A Ford (1936)

January 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

This classic picture taken by Rondal Partridge profiles genius photographer Dorothea Lange in California in 1936, the same year she snapped her most famous image, “Migrant Mother.” Posessing the eye of a painter and the sensibilities of a documentarian, Lange captured the rough-hewn life of Americans during the Great Depression, particularly that of the Okies. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, she eventually settled in San Francisco, where she opened a studio. Lange passed away there in 1965. From her obituary in the New York Times:

“Her portrait ‘Migrant Mother,’ is in the Library of Congress. In 1960 it was selected by a University of Missouri panel as one of the 50 most memorable pictures of the last 50 years.

She enjoyed telling newcomers how to improve their work. ‘Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion,’ she advised them. ‘Then pick another, or handle several themes at a time. Let yourself loose on a theme. It is the only way to make the most of it.'”

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“The Real Turning Point Was The Lie Detector”

January 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A description of William Shockley from Tom Wolfe’s 1983 Esquire article about Robert Noyce, who worked for a time for the Bell Labs genius and boss from hell, whose erratic nature alienated pretty much everyone, and that was before he dirtied himself with nonsense eugenics theories: 

The first months on Shockley’s Ph.D. production line were exhilarating. It wasn’t really a production line at all. Everything at this stage was research. Every day a dozen young Ph.D.’s came to the shed at eight in the morning and began heating germanium and silicon, another common element, in kilns to temperatures ranging from 1,472 to 2,552 degrees Fahrenheit. They wore white lab coats, goggles, and work gloves. When they opened the kiln doors weird streaks of orange and white light went across their faces, and they put in the germanium or the silicon, along with specks of aluminum, phosphorus, boron. and arsenic. Contaminating the germanium or silicon with the aluminum, phosphorus, boron, and arsenic was called doping. Then they lowered a small mechanical column into the goo so that crystals formed on the bottom of the column, and they pulled the crystal out and tried to get a grip on it with tweezers, and put it under microscopes and cut it with diamond cutters, among other things, into minute slices, wafers, chips; there were no names in electronics for these tiny forms. The kilns cooked and bubbled away, the doors opened, the pale apricot light streaked over the goggles, the tweezers and diamond cutters flashed, the white coats flapped, the Ph. D.’s squinted through their microscopes, and Shockley moved between the tables conducting the arcane symphony.

In pensive moments Shockley looked very much the scholar, with his roundish face, his roundish eyeglasses, and his receding hairline; but Shockley was not a man locked in the pensive mode. He was an enthusiast, a raconteur, and a showman. At the outset his very personality was enough to keep everyone swept up in the great adventure. When he lectured, as he often did at colleges and before professional groups, he would walk up to the lectern and thank the master of ceremonies and say that the only more flattering introduction he had ever received was one he gave himself one night when the emcee didn’t show up, whereupon – bango!- a bouquet of red roses would pop up in his hand. Or he would walk up to the lectern and say that tonight he was getting into a hot subject, whereupon he would open up a book and – whump! -a puff of smoke would rise up out of the pages.

Shockley was famous for his homely but shrewd examples. One day a student confessed to being puzzled by the concept of amplification, which was one of the prime functions of the transistor. Shockley told him: ‘If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification.’

On November 1,1956, Shockley arrived at the shed on South San Antonio Road beaming. Early that morning he had received a telephone call informing him that he had won the Nobel Prize for physics for the invention of the transistor; or, rather, that he was co-winner, along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Shockley closed up shop and took everybody to a restaurant called Dinah’s Shack over on El Camino Real, the road to San Francisco that had become Palo Alto’s commercial strip. He treated his Ph. D. production line and all the other employees to a champagne breakfast. It seemed that Shockley’s father was a mining engineer who spent years out on remote durango terrain, in Nevada, Manchuria and all over the world. Shockley’s mother was like Noyce’s. She was an intelligent woman with a commanding will. The Shockleys were Unitarians, the Unitarian Church being an offshoot of the Congregational. Shockley Sr. was twenty years older than Shockley’s mother and died when Shockley was seventeen. Shockley’s mother was determined that her son would someday ‘set the world on fire,’ as she once put it. And now he had done it. Shockley lifted a glass of champagne in Dinah’s Shack, and it was as if it were a toast back across a lot of hardwrought durango grit Octagon Soap sagebrush Dissenting Protestant years to his father’s memory and his mother’s determination.

That had been a great day at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. There weren’t many more. Shockley was magnetic, he was a genius, and he was a great research director–the best, in fact. His forte was breaking a problem down to first principles. With a few words and a few lines on a piece of paper he aimed any experiment in the right direction. When it came to comprehending the young engineers on his Ph.D. production line, however, he was not so terrific.

It never seemed to occur to Shockley that his twelve highly educated elves just might happen to view themselves the same way he had always viewed himself: which is to say, as young geniuses capable of the sort of inventions Nobel Prizes were given for. One day Noyce came to Shockley with some new results he had found in the laboratory. Shockley picked up the telephone and called some former colleagues at Bell Labs to see if they sounded right. Shockley never even realized that Noyce had gone away from his desk seething. Then there was the business of the new management techniques. Now that he was an entrepreneur, Shockley came up with some new ways to run a company. Each one seemed to irritate the elves more than the one before. For a start, Shockley published their salaries. He posted them on a bulletin board. That way there would be no secrets. Then he started having the employees rate one another on a regular basis. These were so-called peer ratings, a device sometimes used in the military and seldom appreciated even there. Everybody regarded peer ratings as nothing more than popularity contests. But the real turning point was the lie detector. Shockley was convinced that someone in the shed was sabotaging the project. The work was running into inexplicable delays, but the money was running out on schedule. So he insisted that one employee roll up his sleeve and bare his chest and let the electrodes be attached and submit to a polygraph examination. No saboteur was ever found.•

A 1974 Firing Line with Shockley, who at this point was sadly tarnishing his reputation with a second act as a quack trying to link race, class and IQ, with African-Americans not faring too well in his theories nor anyone who was an unskilled laborer.

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“She Called Court Officers ‘Fascist Dogs!’ When They Clashed With Her Supporters”

January 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of the last spooky echoes of the violent elements of the ’60s Radical Left was the armed robbery of a Brinks truck in suburban New York in 1981. The crime went from bad to worse, with two police officers being murdered. Judith Clark, a 31-year-old veteran political activist who was the getaway driver, was arrested and has remained in prison ever since, despite transforming herself from violent activist to model prisoner. I think it’s great when a prisoner reforms, but it’s difficult for me to accept that she should be released considering the nature of the crime. In all fairness, many people, including Clark’s former warden, disagree. The opening of Tom Robbins’ new article about the longtime prisoner in the New York Times Magazine:

“On Oct. 20, 1981, a band of militant zealots armed with automatic weapons tried to rob a Brink’s truck in a shopping mall in Nanuet in Rockland County, N.Y. Before it was over, two armored-car guards were shot and two police officers — one black and one white — were gunned down at a roadblock. The crime was one of the last spasms of ’60s-style, left-wing violence. To the militants, it was an ‘expropriation’ for something they called the Republic of New Afrika, a place that existed mainly in their fevered dreams.

Judith Clark was one of four people arrested that day for armed robbery and murder. She was 31, a veteran of the white left who traveled the radical arc from student protest to the Weathermen to the fringes beyond. A new single mother, she kissed her infant daughter goodbye that morning, promising to be home soon.

No one ever accused Clark of holding or firing a gun that deadly afternoon. But she was there, a willing participant, at the wheel of a tan Honda getaway car. Over the next two years while she awaited trial in jail, Clark became a fiercer warrior than she was on the day of the robbery. During court hearings, she told the judge she was a ‘freedom fighter’ who didn’t recognize the right of imperialist courts to try her. She called court officers ‘fascist dogs!’ when they clashed with her supporters.

Her better-known co-defendant, Kathy Boudin, arrested at the scene of the shootings after having been a fugitive since a 1970 bomb blast in a Greenwich Village town house killed three of her Weather Underground comrades, sat mutely beside her. At trial, Clark and two other defendants — David Gilbert, a Weather Underground member, and Kuwasi Balagoon, a former Black Panther — boycotted the courtroom, listening to the piped-in testimony from their basement cells. The defendants insisted on representing themselves; no one cross-examined witnesses on their behalf. When Clark appeared in court to make a closing argument, she merely confirmed her guilt. ‘Revolutionary violence is necessary, and it is a liberating force,’ she told the jury.”

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“Get Rid Of Doctors And Teachers And Let Your Computers Do The Work”

January 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of a Techcrunch article by Vinod Khosla about his extreme faith in the efficacy of algorithms, believing they can even supplant our most basic institutions:

“I was asked about a year ago at a talk about energy what I was doing about the other large social problems, namely health care and education. Surprised, I flippantly responded that the best solution was to get rid of doctors and teachers and let your computers do the work, 24/7 and with consistent quality.

Later, I got to cogitating about what I had said and why, and how embarrassingly wrong that might be. But the more I think about it the more I feel my gut reaction was probably right. The beginnings of ‘Doctor Algorithm’ or Dr. A for short, most likely (and that does not mean ‘certainly’ or ‘maybe’) will be much criticized. We’ll see all sorts of press wisdom decrying ‘they don’t work’ or ‘look at all the silly things they come up with.’ But Dr A. will get better and better and will go from providing ‘bionic assistance’ to second opinions to assisting doctors to providing first opinions and as referral computers (with complete and accurate synopses and all possible hypotheses of the hardest cases) to the best 20% of the human breed doctors. And who knows what will happen beyond that?” (Thanks Browser.)

••••••••••

“Maybe the way to innovate schools is to eliminate schools”:

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“He Planned To Gather The 100 Most Brilliant Minds In The World In A Room”

January 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

James Lee Byars, “The perfect Love Letter is I write ‘I love you’ backwards in the air," 1974.

From “The Man Who Runs the World’s Smartest Website,” an Observer piece about literary agent John Brockman and his heady site, Edge, which grew from an idea by the late artist James Lee Byars:

“In cyberspace, Brockman is best known for Edge.org, a site he founded as a continuation of what he describes as ‘a failed art experiment’ by his late friend, performance artist James Lee Byars. Byars believed, Brockman recalls, ‘that to arrive at a satisfactory plateau of knowledge it was pure folly to go to Widener Library at Harvard and read six million books. Instead, he planned to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world in a room, lock them in and have them ask one another the questions they’d been asking themselves. The expected result – in theory – was to be a synthesis of all thought.’ But it didn’t work out that way. Byars did identify his 100 most brilliant minds and phoned each of them. The result: 70 hung up on him.

Byars died in 1997, but Brockman persisted with his idea, or at any rate with the notion that it might be possible to do something analogous using the internet. And so Edge.org was born as a kind of high-octane online salon with Brockman as its editor and host. He describes it as ‘a conversation. We look for people whose creative work has expanded our notion of who and what we are. We encourage work on the cutting edge of the culture and the investigation of ideas that have not been generally exposed.’”

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“Although No One Was Named In These Items, Colonel Mann Devised An Easily Breakable Code”

January 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Colonel William d’Alton Mann, photo undated.

A brief history of the blind item, a staple of gossip pages since 1891 which has only proliferated during the Internet Age, from an Awl piece by Carrie-May Siggins:

“Credit for the invention of the blind item is given to a man named Colonel William d’Alton Mann. After becoming a Civil War hero in the battle of Gettysburg, he made a fortune licensing an invention for an equipment-hauling rig to the US and Austrian armies. In 1891, his brother, who published the New York City society paper Town Topics, vanished after he discovered he was wanted on an obscenity charge. Mann, whose long white beard and shock of white hair made him a dead ringer for Santa, took over Town Topics and transformed it into one of the most notorious gossip rags ever published.

Colonel Mann’s written contribution to the paper was a column called ‘Saunterings,’ a sharp, sardonic weekly piece about the goings on in high society, much of which he witnessed himself. He often kept his musings nameless, as with this example from February 3, 1893:

‘High society has been treated to a sorry spectacle of inebriety during the last two weeks at balls and dinners, and I am glad to say that this shocking example, though unfortunately a woman, is not an American, but a specimen of British aristocracy. … If Great Britain is to send us such specimens of her boasted aristocracy, I would advise society to entertain in camera and with a bread and water diet.’

Although no one was named in these items, Colonel Mann devised an easily breakable code to help tip off readers. Flip over the piece of newsprint and directly on the other side of ‘Saunterings’ one would find a tepid write-up about an act of charity by a member of the Sykes family, or a barely news-worthy piece about William Vanderbilt. Blind item solved.”

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“We’re All Foreigners Here, In A Wider Sense”

January 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Who is The Foreigner? Is it a guru? A person?" (Image by William McElligott.)

Before religious conversion, a name change, disgraceful comments about the fatwa declaring death to Salman Rushdie, a no-fly list with his new name (Yusuf Islam) on it and a couple of libel lawsuits, Cat Stevens was a wildly popular yet skittish rock star whose work suggested a burgeoning spirituality but could not predict the many permutations ahead. In 1973, as he was releasing his album Foreigner, Stevens was profiled by Paul Gambaccini in Rolling Stone. An excerpt:

“Stevens is a person who obeys his instincts. He went to Jamaica to record Foreigner not so much for studio facilities as ‘for sunshine. I couldn’t get it in England, and I didn’t want to go to America.’ He didn’t work with longtime producer Paul Samwell-Smith because, ‘I wanted an immediate feel to it. He is a great producer, but he is very clean, if a note is wrong he wants to fix it up. This time I wanted to do a certain part, I wanted to just play it, and let it be.’

Veteran musician Phil Upchurch was selected to play because, ‘I was listening to the radio and this long track was playing and it was just getting better and better and I wanted it to end so I could see who it was by and yet it just kept getting better. They said it was Phil Upchurch and I went out and bought an album. I knew from that that he was right to work with.’

‘Foreigner Suite,’ he said, was not a pre-planned opus. ‘It happened. I wrote fragments that came together and as they did I said, what’s happening here? And it turned out to be what I now consider to be not the many parts, but one song.

The only thing left to do was to title the work. Although the word never appears in the suite, ‘foreigner’ was chosen, because: ‘We’re all foreigners. Say to a foreigner that he’s a foreigner and he’ll say you’re a foreigner! We’re all foreigners here, in a wider sense. One hundred years from now I won’t be here, there’ll be nothing left of me, but the earth will still exist. People ask me, ‘Who is The Foreigner? Is it a guru? A person?’ It’s wider than any single person.”

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The complete 18-minute “Foreigner Suite,” 1973:

“I’d try to phone Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is”:

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“They Are Now Targeted No More Frequently Than Are Toiletries And Cigarettes”

January 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Not Worth Nicking,” a new article in the Economist about the evolving taste of U.K. thieves, who, unsurprisingly, shun old-school media goods in favor of portable computing products: 

“Indeed, thefts of entertainment products like CDs and DVDs have collapsed in England and Wales, to the point that they are now taken in just 7% of all burglaries in which something is stolen (see chart). They are now targeted no more frequently than are toiletries and cigarettes

The reason is the falling value of physical media products. The average price of a CD album in Britain fell from £10.77 to £7.32 between 2001 and 2010, according to the BPI, a trade group—almost a halving, in real terms. And the dishonest get their music and films free, via the internet. DVDs are under pressure not just from piracy but also from video-on-demand services.

Computers, on the other hand, are both valuable and increasingly portable: they are now taken more commonly than anything except purses and wallets.”

“It Will Begin With Nervous Parents Reading About Brain Trauma”

January 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of “The Fragile Teenage Brain,” neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer’s devastating Grantland examination of football’s concussion problem, a plague not only on the NFL but also on high schoolers playing under the lights on Friday nights:

“If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion. The stadiums will still be full on Sunday, the professionals will still play, the profits will continue. But the sport will be sick.

The sickness will be rooted in football’s tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency.”

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Colt McCoy gets concussion, returns to game two plays later:

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Henry Ward Beecher At Slavery’s End (1865)

January 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

This classic photograph of preacher, politician and fervent abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher was taken at some point between 1855 and 1865 by Mathew Brady’s studio. From an eyewitness account in the New York Times of a speech Ward delivered in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 17, 1865, less than three months after the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, as countless former slaves who had been sold and sold again tried to reunite with family:

“Feeling was accumulating in the audience, and began to be heard in the low moaning and response, like the sound of the waves upon a distant shore; but when he spoke directly to the blacks before him, of their sufferings in the days gone by, and now of their release; of the loss of their children and of the return of so many, and exhorted them since God had done so much for them to wait with faith and patience for the remainder, and assured them that the morning was on the mountains and the day was at hand, they broke out all over the house in low ejaculations of praise and of thanksgiving. The day was at hand, and they saw it; and the suppressed tone was that of men who could not restrain their joy for the vision. There was no loud shouting, nothing boisterous; it was simply the overflow of deep feeling that could not be restrained. If any of you have open sins, he said, abandon them. If any harbor revenge, rid yourselves of it. I hear good things of you; do better. Mothers in Israel, I expect to hear still more worthy things of you. Fathers, I expect to hear of you counseling better things than ever before. Young men, I expect to hear that you are more virtuous and manly than those that have gone before you.

Many of you old saints will only look over into the promised land, and see it afar off, but your children will enter in. Israel is going to be free. [Cries of ‘Bless de Lord,’ ‘We believe it,’ and one voice near me broke out into a clear hearty laugh of joy.] Intelligence is coming, liberty is coming, virtue is coming.

It is not my joy that this family is down or that one, but this is my joy, that Charleston is free, and every man guiltless of crime can walk her streets unmolested. That our nation marked out for so great things is free. And brethren, consecrate yourselves to the service of Christ, live nobler lives. Bear the cross, it is not for a great white. Some of you are almost down to the river, and it is not half as deep as you think it is. They wait for you on the other shore; you that have showed kindness to the poor white prisoners; you that have borne stripes for it; your reward is waiting you on the further shore.

Sobs and ejaculations of praise swelled through the church.”

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“Most Normal Brains Can Tell The Difference Between A Man And The Moon”

January 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I have a neurological disorder that makes it difficult for me to recognize faces out of context, even of people I know well. The average brain, however, is wired to do a pretty remarkable job at such a task–but how? The opening of “How the Brain Spots Faces,” a post by Mark Brown at Wired UK that reports on MIT face-recognition experiments:

“Our brains are made to find faces. In fact, they’re so good at picking out human-like mugs we sometimes see them in a jumble of rocks, a bilious cloud of volcanic ash or some craters on the Moon.

But another amazing thing about our brain is that we’re never actually fooled into thinking it’s a real person looking back at us. We might do a second take, but most normal brains can tell the difference between a man and the Moon.

Neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to investigate how the brain decides exactly what is and is not a face. Earlier studies have shown that the fusiform gyrus, located on the brain’s underside, responds to face-like shapes — but how does it sort flesh from rock?”

••••••••••

A parade of faces from “Cry,” Godley & Creme, 1985:

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“When The Pepper-Spray Video Came Out, That Was The Hook”

January 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Occupy Wall Street, Day 21. (Image by David Shankbone.)

From a smart oral history about the Occupy Wall Street movement, via Max Chafkin at Vanity Fair:

“CHELSEA ELLIOTT
Freelance graphic designer
I’d gone there the first week, and I was telling my friends about it: ‘Oh, there’s this great march on Saturday. Marches are so fun. We dance, and there’s music, and we laugh the whole time.’ I mean, parts of it were like that, but it was huge and there was chaos.

RAYMOND W. KELLY
New York City police commissioner
You need a permit to have a parade—that’s 50 or more people. In our minds, if you’re not having an actual parade, we’ll let you walk on the sidewalk. But on Saturday in Union Square Park, they decided to violate the tacit understanding that they would stay on the sidewalk. It was at University Place where they ran down the street and started blocking traffic. I happened to be in the area that day and I actually saw people doing this. That’s where the first large number of arrests took place.

CHELSEA ELLIOTT
I was on the sidewalk at 12th Street and University, and this group of cops stood in front of me and said, ‘You can’t go past here.’ There was this girl behind me who was getting upset, screaming ‘Fascists.’ A cop came and slammed her down on the ground and dragged her by her hair. I just started screaming. Then another officer walked over and pepper-sprayed us. It took a few seconds to actually feel it. I was like, ‘What happened? Why am I wet?’ And then all of a sudden it hurts to open your eyes and you can’t really breathe. It’s this horrible burning all over your face.

Elliott was never arrested. She fell to the ground and was attended by volunteer medics. The officer who sprayed her was later identified by Anonymous as Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna. A Police Department review found that he had broken protocol and docked him 10 vacation days as punishment.

CHELSEA ELLIOTT
I walked back to the park. I talked to some of the people I knew, and they were like, ‘Yeah, there’s already a video online.’

VLAD TEICHBERG
Former derivatives trader; co-founder, Global Revolution
When the pepper-spray video came out, that was the hook. That’s what made people focus on [Occupy Wall Street]. The video showed that we weren’t just a bunch of quote-unquote anarchists. It showed our humanity.”

•••••••••••

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“Our Planet Is The Tower Of Babylon, And Every Single Support Beam Is A Piece Of Technology”

January 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

On the Inevitable Thoughts blog, Colin Vanderbilt argues that everything we fear from the rise of the machines is already here:

“Our society has become awe-inspiring because of the technology we created and used, but there was a cost. We are now dependent on it. Our planet is the Tower of Babylon, and every single support beam is a piece of technology. Our tower will continue to get higher every year as everything gets ‘better’ and ‘progress’ continues, but let’s consider why we are convinced that we must build our technological tower higher?

Technology kills hundreds of thousands of people every year (cars, guns, industrial working conditions), it causes upwards of 50,000 species a year to go extinct, it poisons our drinking water and our bodies every day, it cuts down 13 million hectacres of forest every year, and all this without any kind of artificially intelligent robots. Everything that we could possibly fear that robots will do when they rule the planet is already happening.”

 

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“Americans Were Not Itching For Obama To Make Peace With Corporate America”

January 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

"Obama issued a course correction and started pursuing a strategy that’s in line with the realities of public opinion." (Image by Elizabeth Cromwell.)

William Daley’s demotion from White House Chief of Staff today is the clearest sign yet that President Obama is loading up for bear during this year of election, that he’s through trying to make nice with those whose only goal is to bring him down, from GOP insiders to Wall Street bankers to corporate CEOs. An exceprt from Jonathan Chait’s smart assessment of the surprising news at New York‘s Daily Intel blog;

“The effort failed because Daley’s analysis — which is also the analysis of David Brooks and Michael Bloomberg — was fatally incorrect. Americans were not itching for Obama to make peace with corporate America. Americans are in an angry, populist mood — distrustful of government, but even more distrustful of business. In the most recent NBC/The Wall Street Journal poll, 60 percent of Americans strongly agreed with the following statement:

The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich.

What’s more, it may be true that a bipartisan deal to reduce the deficit would have bolstered Obama’s standing. The trouble is that Republicans believed the exact same thing. Here’s how McConnell frankly explained his calculation:

‘The only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.’

Republicans believed that making bipartisan agreements with Obama would make Obama and his agenda more popular. Republicans are not in the business of helping Obama win reelection. And so they refused to sign a bipartisan agreement, and Obama simply looked weak and ineffectual.

Since that debacle, Obama issued a course correction and started pursuing a strategy that’s in line with the realities of public opinion and the Congress, as opposed to Daley’s fantasy version thereof. Recognizing public populism and GOP intransigence, he is outlining the legislation he wants on jobs, under no illusion that Republicans will cooperate, in order to clarify which party is responsible for inaction. Obama’s approval ratings, after sinking under the weight of Daley’s failed gambit, now appear to be rising.”

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“He Wouldn’t Break My Arm, But He Would Really Twist It Around”

January 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Never knew that Laurie Anderson was a running partner–and wrestling partner–of Andy Kaufman back in the day, until I read this passage from a Believer Q&A conducted by Amanda Stern:

“BLVR:

Did he talk about why he was doing what he was doing?

Laurie Anderson:

He didn’t have to. The hardest part was wrestling with him, because he would be doing these club shows where he was very abusive to women, very abusive: ‘Those broads think they are… Who do they think they are?’ You know, ‘I will not respect a woman until she comes up here and wrestles me down,’ and that was my cue to come up there and wrestle him down, and I’m like on my third whiskey—I don’t usually drink, but trying to get up the nerve—and he would fight, and he wasn’t pretending. He’d twist my arm.

BLVR:

Did you ever get really hurt?

Laurie Anderson:

No, he wouldn’t break my arm, but he would really twist it around, and I fought back. It was definitely not pretend-wrestling. He wasn’t acting, and neither was I, but at the same time it was a game. There are plenty of ways you can play the game of fighting and really seem to be fighting without going for the jugular. Anyway, he was just curious about taboos. To be playing bongos and sobbing—I mean, everyone in the club is looking at that and going, ‘My god, this is so embarrassing.’ You’re not supposed to cry while you sing or play. That’s our job as the audience. We get to have a tear roll quietly down our cheeks, but not the performer.”

______________________

Andy was Intergender Wrestling Champion, back when that title still meant something:

Laurie looked at the viral nature of language in 1984, before all communication went in that direction:

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“The Letter Noted The Statement Sunday By The Cardinal In Which He Said That He Would Not Read The Book”

January 8, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Another moral failing in the recent history of the Catholic Church came in response to the death sentence imposed on Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini after the publication of The Satanic Verses. From a 1989 New York Times piece by Michael T. Kaufman:

“In the United States, 17 Roman Catholic writers, including William Kennedy, Maureen Howard, Garry Wills and the Rev. Andrew Greeley, wrote a letter critical of statements by John Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York. The letter noted the statement Sunday by the Cardinal in which he said that he would not read the book but that he proclaimed ‘his sympathy for the aggrieved position’ of Muslims.

The Catholic writers said they ‘deplore the moral insensitivity to the plight of Mr. Rushdie and an ecumenical zeal that would appear to support repression.’

Gara LaMarche, the head of the freedom-to-write program of American PEN, an international writers’ group, acknowledged that ‘for a short period of time immediately after the death threat there was a great deal of discussion about what was the best way to help Salman Rushdie.’ He said that this may have ‘given an impression of reluctance,’ but he added that in recent days writers have been calling from all over the world to offer their help with petitions and readings.”

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Christopher Hitchens addresses the non-defense of Rushdie, 1989:

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“Artificial Illumination Has Arguably Been The Greatest Symbol Of Modern Progress”

January 8, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The electric street lamp, a beacon of modernization, is disappearing across America due to the flagging economy. A. Roger Ekirch looks at a darker reality in an Opinion section piece in the New York Times. An excerpt:

“Leaving the hyperbole aside, artificial illumination has arguably been the greatest symbol of modern progress. By making nighttime infinitely more inviting, street lighting — gas lamps beginning in the early 1800s followed by electric lights toward the end of the century — drastically expanded the boundaries of everyday life to include hours once shrouded in darkness. Today, any number of metropolitan areas in the United States and abroad, bathed in the glare of neon and mercury vapor, bill themselves as 24-hour cities, open both for business and pleasure.

So it is all the more remarkable that, in what appears to be a spreading trend, dozens of cities and towns across America — from California and Oregon to Maine — are contemplating significantly reducing the number of street lamps to lower their hefty electric bills. In some communities, utility companies have already torn posts from the ground. Faced with several million dollars in unpaid bills, Highland Park, Mich., has lost two-thirds of its lamps, whereas officials in Rockford, Ill., have extinguished as many as 2,300, or 16 percent of all the city’s streetlights.”

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“The Voice Is One Of The Unique Things That Defines Stephen In My Opinion”

January 8, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"It wouldn't be Stephen's voice any more" (Image by Errol Morris.)

From “The Man Who Saves Stephen Hawking’s Voice,” a New Scientist Q&A conducted by Catherine de Lange with the phsyicist’s personal technician, Sam Blackburn, who is soon leaving his post:

“Stephen’s voice is very distinctive, but you say there might be a problem retaining it?
I guess the most interesting thing in my office is a little grey box, which contains the only copy we have of Stephen’s hardware voice synthesiser. The card inside dates back to the 1980s and this particular one contains Stephen’s voice. There’s a processor on it which has a unique program that turns text into speech that sounds like Stephen’s, and we have only two of these cards. The company that made them went bankrupt and nobody knows how it works any more. I am trying to reverse engineer it, which is quite tricky.

Can’t you update it with a new synthesiser?
No. It has to sound exactly the same. The voice is one of the unique things that defines Stephen in my opinion. He could easily change to a voice that was clearer, perhaps more soothing to listen to – less robotic sounding – but it wouldn’t be Stephen’s voice any more.”

••••••••••

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”:

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“Mickey Mouse, Superman, And Eventually Darth Vader And Luke Skywalker All Belong In The Commons”

January 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Kevn Kelly’s comments on the Technium about copyright law and the public commons:

“It is in the interest of culture to have a large and dynamic public domain. The greatest classics of Disney were all based on stories in the public domain, and Walt Disney showed how public domain ideas and characters could be leveraged by others to bring enjoyment and money. But ironically, after Walt died, the Disney corporation became the major backer of the extended copyright laws, in order to keep the very few original ideas they had — like Mickey Mouse — from going into the public domain. Also ironically, just as Disney was smothering the public domain, their own great fortunes waned because they were strangling the main source of their own creativity, which was public domain material. They were unable to generate their own new material, so they had to buy Pixar.

A tragedy of the commons occurs when members behave selfishly and deny the commons what is due. As Disney shows, when members keep their creations out of the common pool for others to exploit, their gain is only short lived. Mickey Mouse, Superman, and eventually Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker all belong in the commons. The world will be a better place when they are.

We should repeal unreasonable intellectual property laws, to keep the incentives for a period no longer than the life of its creators (how can you be invented if you are dead?). But in the meantime, imagine what the creative public could do with these works, and weep — because nothing like that will happen for a very long time.”

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Inside the Disney vault, with Robert Smigel:

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“The Company, For Instance, Invented The Digital Camera—In 1975—But Never Managed To Capitalize On The New Technology”

January 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Such uncertainty was once unthinkable at Kodak." (Image by Doug Coldwell.)

A former blue-chip bleeding red, Kodak is preparing to file bankruptcy. From a WSJ piece about the fall of a giant, by Mike Spector and Dana Mattioli:

“That Kodak is even contemplating a bankruptcy filing represents a final reversal of fortune for a company that once dominated its industry, drawing engineering talent from around the country to its Rochester, N.Y., headquarters and plowing money into research that produced thousands of breakthroughs in imaging and other technologies.

The company, for instance, invented the digital camera—in 1975—but never managed to capitalize on the new technology.

Casting about for alternatives to its lucrative but shrinking film business, Kodak toyed with chemicals, bathroom cleaners and medical-testing devices in the 1980s and 1990s, before deciding to focus on consumer and commercial printers in the past half-decade under Chief Executive Antonio Perez.

None of the new pursuits generated the cash needed to fund the change in course and cover the company’s big obligations to its retirees. A Chapter 11 filing could help Kodak shed some of those obligations, but the viability of the company’s printer strategy has yet to be demonstrated, raising questions about the fate of the company’s 19,000 employees.

Such uncertainty was once unthinkable at Kodak, whose near-monopoly on film produced high margins that the company shared with its workers. On ‘wage dividend days,’ a tradition started by Kodak founder George Eastman, the company would pay out bonuses to all workers based on its results, and employees would use the checks to buy cars and celebrate at fancy restaurants.

Former employees say the company was the Apple Inc. or Google Inc. of its time.”

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“Turn Around,” popular 1960s Kodak ad:

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“We Have Only Snapshots Of Theresa Marie Schindler’s Life Before The Series Of Events That Interrupted And Eventually Ended It”

January 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Joan Didion’s writing about the sad and torturous Terri Schiavo case, in the New York Review of Books in 2005:

“Theresa Marie Schindler was born on December 3, 1963, to prosperous and devoutly Catholic parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, in a Philadelphia suburb, Huntingdon Valley. Robert Schindler was a dealer in industrial supplies. Mary Schindler was a full-time wife and mother. They named their first child for Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic who believed the Carmelites insufficiently reclusive and so founded a more restrictive order. We have only snapshots of Theresa Marie Schindler’s life before the series of events that interrupted and eventually ended it. According to newspaper accounts published in the wake of those events, there had been the four-bedroom colonial on the leafy street called Red Wing Lane. There had been the day the yellow Labrador retriever, Bucky, collapsed of old age in the driveway and Theresa Marie tried in vain to resuscitate him. There had been the many occasions on which her two gerbils, named after the television characters Starsky and Hutch, got loose and into the air-conditioning unit in the basement.

She gained more weight than she wanted to. The summer she graduated from high school she went on a NutriSystem diet and began to lose the weight. Until then she hung out at the mall. She did not date. She bought her little brother Bobby his first Bruce Springsteen album. She pasted birthday cards into a scrapbook. She read Danielle Steel novels. She saw An Officer and a Gentleman with Richard Gere and Debra Winger four times in one day. She went to a Catholic grade school and a Catholic high school, where the single activity listed in her yearbook entry was ‘Library Aide,’ an extracurricular effort on which she and a friend had settled for the express purpose of having something besides their names in the yearbook. The college application process, in the sense of the crucial competition that it was for many in her generation, an exercise in the marshaling and burnishing of deployable accomplishments, seems not to have entered the picture.

She enrolled in the two-year program at Bucks County Community College, where, in a psychology class during her second semester, she met Michael Schiavo. He was from Levittown. He is said to have been the first person she had ever kissed. At the time they married two years later, in 1984, she was just under twenty-one; he was eight months older. After a honeymoon at Disney World, they moved in with her parents in Huntingdon Valley, then, when the Schindlers decided two years later to move to Florida, preceded them there. They lived first in a condominium the Schindlers had in St. Petersburg. Theresa Schindler Schiavo clerked at the Prudential Insurance Company. She dyed her hair blonde. She lay out by the pool and drank several quarts of iced tea a day. Michael Schiavo, who after his wife’s cardiac arrest would begin and eventually complete studies in nursing and respiratory therapy at St. Petersburg Junior College, took restaurant jobs.”

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“Long Before ‘Popsie’ Hunt’s Death, However, An Ugly Struggle Had Already Begun Within His Family”

January 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

When you possess $5 billion and several families full of highly ambitious people, you bequeath a great deal of drama along with great wealth when you die. H.L. Hunt, an oilman with a backstory as large as Texas itself, left just that sort of a messy arrangement in 1974 when he succumbed to cancer. His descendants behaved in such a manner that they reputedly were the inspiration for the melodramatic TV series, Dallas. From a 1974 People:

“Haroldson Lafayette Hunt was 32 and broke when he sat down to a game of five-card stud in the Arkansas boom town of El Dorado and won his first oil well. By the time he died of cancer two weeks ago at age 85, H.L. Hunt had pyramided his poker winnings into a global oil empire that made him one of the world’s half-dozen wealthiest men. Long before ‘Popsie’ Hunt’s death, however, an ugly struggle had already begun within his family over the disposition of the Texas tycoon’s personal fortune, estimated at $5 billion. 

The issue is between Hunt’s children by his first wife and those of his second. His first marriage to Lyda Bunker Hunt produced four sons and two daughters—Mrs. Al Hill, 59, H.L. Jr., 57, Mrs. Hugo W. Schoellkopf Jr., 52, Nelson Bunker, 48, Herbert, 46, and Lamar, 42. Hunt’s second wife was Ruth Ray Wright, a former Hunt company secretary, who married H.L. two years after Lyda’s death in 1955. She had four children, whom H.L. immediately adopted: Ray, 30, June, 29, Helen, 26, and Swanee, 23. (Friends say members of the family have told them H.L. was their actual as well as adoptive father.) 

The internecine intrigue began, H.L. confidant Paul Rothermel told a federal grand jury, when he convinced the patriarch in 1969 to leave 51% of Hunt Oil to the ‘second family.’ The first six children, recalled Rothermel, had already amassed many millions of their own. However, the other four children had ‘only’ about $3 million all-told in trust funds. Two years later, private detectives working for Nelson Bunker and Herbert were convicted of tapping the phones of Rothermel and four other Hunt Oil executives believed sympathetic to the younger set of Hunts. Themselves now under federal indictment for ordering the wiretaps, Nelson Bunker and Herbert have pleaded not guilty, arguing that they simply wanted to investigate unaccountable company losses of $62 million over two years. Should the two Hunts be convicted, they could be fined up to $10,000 or be sentenced to five years, or both. For his part, Rothermel has come to an undisclosed out-of-court settlement with the Hunts over the wiretap. “

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Hunt was a staunch conservative, 1950s:


Dallas reboot, coming in 2012:

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“In Two Generations, A Healthy Language — Even One With Hundreds Of Thousands Of Speakers–Can Collapse Entirely”

January 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Say No More,” Jack Hitt’s 2004 New York Times Magazine piece about language death, a segment about the Kawésqar tongue of Chile:

“”The Kawesqar are famous for their adaptation to this cold, rainy world of islands and channels. The first Europeans were stunned. The Kawesqar and the other natives of the region traveled in canoes, naked, oiled with blubber, occasionally wearing an animal skin. The men sat at the front and hunted sea lions with spears. The women paddled. The children stayed in the sanctuary between their parents, maintaining fire in a sand pit built in the middle of the canoe. Keeping fire going in a land of water was the most critical and singular adaptation of the Kawesqar. As a result, fire blazed continuously in canoes and at the occasional landfall. The first European explorers marveled at the sight of so much fire in a wet and cold climate, and the Spanish named the southernmost archipelago the land of fire, Tierra del Fuego.

When Charles Darwin first encountered the Kawesqar and the Yaghans, years before he wrote The Origin of Species, he is said to have realized that man was just another animal cunningly adapting to local environmental conditions. But that contact and the centuries to follow diminished the Kawesqar, in the 20th century, to a few dozen individuals. In the 1930’s, the remaining Kawesqar settled near a remote military installation — Puerto Eden, now inhabited mostly by about 200 Chileans from the mainland who moved here to fish.

The pathology of a dying language shifts to another stage once the language has retreated to the living room. You can almost hear it disappearing. There is Grandma, fluent in the old tongue. Her son might understand her, but he also learned Spanish and grew up in it. The grandchildren all learn Spanish exclusively and giggle at Grandma’s funny chatter.

In two generations, a healthy language — even one with hundreds of thousands of speakers — can collapse entirely, sometimes without anyone noticing. This process is happening everywhere. In North America, the arrival of Columbus and the Europeans who followed him whittled down the roughly 300 native languages to only about 170 in the 20th century. According to Marianne Mithun, a linguist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the recent evolution of English as a global language has taken an even greater toll. ‘Only one of those 170 languages is not officially endangered today,” Mithun said. ‘Greenlandic Eskimo.'” (Thanks TETW.)

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Incubator Babies At Seattle World’s Fair (1909)

January 4, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"As announced in 'The Seattle Daily Times' on February 14, 1909, 'The baby incubators will be seen at The Exposition, as well as W. H. Barnes with Princess Trixie, the educated horse.'"

These classic 1909 photographs, showing a baby incubator exhibition, were taken at the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition. Such sideshows were common at the time. From an historical article about the exhibit:

“Baby incubator exhibits were an expected feature on exposition midways from the 1896 Berlin Exposition on. Visitors to Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898, Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition in 1901, St. Louis’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, and Portland’s Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905 experienced a similar concession. (At most of these, including the Lewis and Clark Exposition, the Baby Incubator Exhibit was managed by Dr. Martin Couney, the foremost promoter of the baby incubator sideshows at expositions. Couney’s Baby Incubator Exhibit at Luna Park in New York’s Coney Island ran from 1903 to 1943. Although A-Y-P’s Baby Incubator Exhibit bears a strikingly similar physical resemblance to Couney’s baby incubator shows, no connection between Couney and the A-Y-P has yet been discovered.)

As announced in The Seattle Daily Times on February 14, 1909, ‘The baby incubators will be seen at The Exposition, as well as W. H. Barnes with Princess Trixie, the educated horse.’ The display of human infants on the Pay Streak midway apparently elicited no protest from fairgoers (includingvisiting physicians), or from the local medical community.

Seattle already had a permanent (or at least seasonal) baby incubator exhibit: the Infant Electrobator concession at Luna Park in West Seattle. (An electrobator was an incubator heated by electricity.) Further details about this concession, where infants must have been rattled by the clatter of the wooden roller coaster and soothed by calliope music from the nearby carousel, appear to have vanished. It is possible that the A-Y-P exhibit and that at Luna Park were in some way connected.

French physician Alexandre Lion’s incubator, patented in 1889, was commonly used in baby incubator exhibits at expositions. These incubators varied greatly from the infant incubators utilized in modern neonatal intensive care units. The A-Y-P’s incubators regulated the temperature inside the unit and pulled in outside air for ventilation, nothing more. They would have been beneficial to well preemies needing no special care beyond steady warmth. The incubators exhibited at fairs and expositions had no ability to aid babies who could not breathe on their own, and there was at the time (and for many subsequent decades) no therapy for such children.

The A-Y-P Baby Incubator Exhibit apparently experienced no deaths, and it is unlikely that babies who lacked a very good prognosis would have been put on display for fear of negative public relations should they not survive, if for no other reason.”

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