Excerpts

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“My Gut Tells Me Things Are Changing For The Worse”

January 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, the Kim Jong-un of casino bankruptcy, had largely played footsie with Ted Cruz even while excoriating all other GOP hopefuls. That changed recently, however, when the two most detestable of all the candidates began throwing haymakers at one another. Amusing to hear Trump play the likability card with Cruz, since the former Apprentice host has tried to not only connect with members of the 4-H club but also those in the 3-K club.

The most telling line of the entire GOP race was spoken before Trump and Cruz were torn asunder, when they still resisted attacking one another. The aspiring potentate said this of his Texan-Canadian competitor: “Everything I say, he agrees with me. No matter what I say.” It was a tacit acknowledgement by Trump that he knew he was spouting crazy shit because he thought it would resonate with nativist voters he needed to float his cockamamie campaign.

Largely it has, at least with a sizable-enough swath of a frayed and divided party. It’s been the Reality TV version of the political season, full of disgraceful taunts and pathetic posturing, and the question is if the show gets cancelled in Iowa and New Hampshire or if the season is sadly extended.

From Edward Luce’s Financial Times column about the approaching American hour of reckoning:

Returning to America after a trip, I encountered a chatty immigration officer. “You guys should have finished off the crusades when you had the chance,” he said as he handed back my British passport. In themselves such encounters mean little. But I have had many similar ones recently — and the plural of anecdote is data, as they say.

Within the next three weeks, we shall find out if the rise of Donald Trump is silly season froth that comes before voting, or whether we are in the midst of a dramatic upheaval in US politics. My head is agnostic. But my gut tells me things are changing for the worse. Either way, the time for speculation is nearly over.

The rest of the world is almost as obsessed about America’s political health as the US. Every time I have been abroad in the past few months, people ask the same question: “Could Donald Trump be president?” The answer is probably not. But it comes with a strict health warning. More seasoned observers have been wrong about US politics in the past year and show few signs of lifting their batting average.

In spite of that, the consensus holds that Mr Trump will not be the Republican nominee. Should he become so, he would lose the presidential election. If, by some miracle, he won it, he would make a disastrous president. The next question is: “What is fuelling Mr Trump’s popularity?” (And for better informed foreigners, that of Ted Cruz too.) This is the issue that matters most.•

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“Going To The Stars Is Often Regarded As Humanity’s Destiny”

January 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Has there ever been an era when enthusiasts have gotten so far ahead of themselves in terms of scientific and technological possibilities? I was reading an article the other day, clearly written by an intelligent person, who proclaimed that by 2050 we would see the “end of death,” that we will have left mere biological life behind. I’m not saying that such a transition is impossible, but it won’t be happening during our lifetimes. We are, ultimately, toast.

Likewise, I have no doubt we can eventually colonize space if we don’t do ourselves in first. We should certainly be sending human-less probes and 3D printers to Mars and elsewhere, but it’s probably a good idea to stay realistic about what we can accomplish in each era. In a rush to save ourselves, we may lose sight of the proper path.

In “What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?” a Scientific American article, Kim Stanley Robinson stresses the difficulty of near-term colonization of other star systems. The opening:

The idea that humans will eventually travel to and inhabit other parts of our galaxy was well expressed by the early Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who wrote, “Earth is humanity’s cradle, but you’re not meant to stay in your cradle forever.” Since then the idea has been a staple of science fiction, and thus become part of a consensus image of humanity’s future. Going to the stars is often regarded as humanity’s destiny, even a measure of its success as a species. But in the century since this vision was proposed, things we have learned about the universe and ourselves combine to suggest that moving out into the galaxy may not be humanity’s destiny after all.

The problem that tends to underlie all the other problems with the idea is the sheer size of the universe, which was not known when people first imagined we would go to the stars. Tau Ceti, one of the closest stars to us at around 12 light-years away, is 100 billion times farther from Earth than our moon. A quantitative difference that large turns into a qualitative difference; we can’t simply send people over such immense distances in a spaceship, because a spaceship is too impoverished an environment to support humans for the time it would take, which is on the order of centuries. Instead of a spaceship, we would have to create some kind of space-traveling ark, big enough to support a community of humans and other plants and animals in a fully recycling ecological system.•

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“Probably His Most Enduring Interest Is A Fellow Polymath, An 18th-Century German Named Matthias Buchinger”

January 17, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If I could have dinner with any three living Americans, Ricky Jay would definitely be one, even though I can’t say I care much for magic. Jay, of course, practices magic in the same sense that Benjamin Franklin flew kites. It’s the invisible stuff being conducted that makes all the difference.

It’s always amazed me that Jay’s enjoyed so much success despite having a brilliance driven so far from the mainstream by manias about marginalia, things barely perceptible to most. In that vein, he’s written a book about Matthias Buchinger, an eighteenth-century German magician whose unlikely success even outdoes Jay’s. 

Buchinger was a 29-inch tall phocomelic who lacked properly formed limbs yet managed to gain acclaim in a variety of fields: marksmanship, bowling, illustration, music, dance and micrography. The latter gift–the ability to write in incredibly small letters–is the basis of the book and a part of an exhibit at the Met.

From Charles McGrath at the New York Times:

The magician Ricky Jay, considered by many the greatest sleight-of-hand artist alive, is also a scholar, a historian, a collector of curiosities. Master of a prose style that qualifies him as perhaps the last of the great 19th-century authors, he has written about oddities like cannonball catchers, poker-playing pigs, performing fleas and people who tame bees. But probably his most enduring interest is a fellow polymath, an 18th-century German named Matthias Buchinger.

Buchinger (1674-1739) was a magician and musician, a dancer, champion bowler and trick-shot artist and, most famously, a calligrapher specializing in micrography — handwriting so small it’s barely legible to the naked eye. His signature effect was to render locks of hair that, when examined closely, spelled out entire Psalms or books from the Bible. What made his feats even more remarkable is that Buchinger was born without hands or feet and was only 29 inches tall. Portraits show him standing on a cushion and wearing a sort of lampshade-like robe. Yet he married four times and had 14 children. Some people have suggested that he also had up to 70 mistresses, but Mr. Jay says that’s nonsense.

Mr. Jay, 67, has been studying Buchinger and collecting his work since he was in his 20s and has now written a book about him, just out from Siglio, with the mouthful of a title Matthias Buchinger: “The Greatest German Living,” by Ricky Jay, Whose Peregrinations in Search of the ‘Little Man of Nuremberg’ are Herein Revealed.•

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“Repopulating The Earth With Humans Is Quite Another Matter”

January 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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If the population of humans on Earth dwindled to just one man and one woman, I’m willing to wager that Homo sapiens would soon be extinct. That’s because whatever catastrophic event(s) led to the extreme thinning of the ranks would soon claim the last of us. 

Ignoring that likely outcome, Zoria Gorvett at BBC Future presents a thought experiment: If you place a post-apocalyptic Adam and Eve on Earth with just one another, would they be able to repopulate the planet? Well, they’d have to fuck like bunnies, and think of the incest! It’s actually best not to think about it. Hundreds of years of inbreeding would not be pretty, in any sense. Even if people somehow survived, the lack of diversity would probably cause us to transition into a different species. The most positive way to look at it? Anything’s possible.

The opening:

The alien predators arrived by boat. Within two years, everyone was dead. Almost.

The tiny islet of Ball’s Pyramid lies 600km east of Australia in the South Pacific, rising out of the sea like a shard of glass. And there they were – halfway up its sheer cliff edge, sheltering under a spindly bush – the last of the species. Two escaped and just nine years later there were 9,000, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Adam and Eve.

No, this isn’t a bizarre take on the story of creation. The lucky couple were tree lobsters Dryococelus australis, stick insects the size of a human hand. They were thought to be extinct soon after black rats invaded their native Lord Howe Island in 1918, but were found clinging on in Ball’s Pyramid 83 years later. The species owes its miraculous recovery to a team of scientists who scaled 500ft of vertical rock to reach their hiding place in 2003. The lobsters were named “Adam” and “Eve” and sent to start a breeding programme at Melbourne Zoo.

Bouncing back after insect Armageddon is one thing. Female tree lobsters lay 10 eggs every 10 days and are capable of parthenogenesis; they don’t need a man to reproduce. Repopulating the earth with humans is quite another matter. Could we do it? And how long would it take?•

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“Decisions About Space Policy Have Enormous Consequences For The Future Of Human Welfare”

January 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

spacecolony8“Greed is good,” proclaimed fictional robber baron Gordon Gekko in 1987, echoing a speech from a year earlier by the very real Ivan Boesky, who by the time Wall Street opened had traded the Four Seasons for the Graybar Hotel, his desires having pried him from the penthouse. The point is well-taken, however, when applied correctly: Unhealthy desires can be useful. You don’t get people to risk life and limb–emigrating to the “New” World or participating in the dangerous Manifest Destiny–unless there’s a potential for a better life, and, often, a bigger bank account. 

I’ve posted previously about my queasiness over recent U.S. regulation which unilaterally allows its corporations to lay claim to bodies in space, but perhaps the quest to go for the gold in out there has a silver lining. While it’s gross for those already fabulously wealthy to be wondering who will use asteroid mining to become the first trillionaire, Grayson Cary considers in a smart Aeon essay that perhaps avarice is a necessary evil if we are to colonize space and safeguard our species against single-planet calamity. As the writer states, past multinational treaties may inhibit unfettered speculation, but probably not. Private, public, U.S., China, etc.–it’s going to be a land rush that sorts itself out as we go, and go we will. As Cary writes, “There comes a point at which Earthbound opinions hardly matter.”

An excerpt:

Over the 2015 Thanksgiving holiday – which, in the spirit of appropriation, seems appropriate – President Barack Obama signed into law the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act. It had emerged from House and Senate negotiations with surprisingly robust protections for US asteroid miners. In May, the House had gone only so far as to say that ‘[a]ny asteroid resources obtained in outer space are the property of the entity that obtained them’. In the Senate, commercial space legislation had moved forward without an answer to the question of property. In the strange crucible of the committee process, the bill ended up broader, bolder and more patriotic than either parent.

‘A United States citizen,’ Congress resolved, ‘engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained.’ It’s a turning point, maybe a decisive one, in a remarkable debate over the administration of celestial bodies. It’s an approach with fierce critics – writing for Jacobin magazine in 2015, Nick Levine called it a vision for ‘trickle-down astronomics’ – and the stakes, if you squint, are awfully high. A small step for 535 lawmakers could amount to one giant leap for humankind.

If you hew to the right frame of mind, decisions about space policy have enormous consequences for the future of human welfare. Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, offered a stark version of that view in a paper called ‘Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development’ (2003). By one estimate, he wrote, ‘the potential for approximately 1038 human lives is lost every century that colonisation of our local supercluster is delayed; or, equivalently, about 1029 potential human lives per second’. Suppose you accept that perspective, or for any other reason feel an urgent need to get humanity exploring space. How might a species hurry things up?

For a vocal chorus of pro-space, pro-market experts, the answer starts with property: to boldly go and buy and sell. ‘The only way to interest investors in building space settlements,’ writes the non-profit Space Settlement Institute on its website, ‘is to make doing so very profitable.’ In other words: show me the money.•

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“Bowie Himself Is Unlikely To Last Long As A Cult”

January 15, 2016 in Excerpts | Permalink

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You had to have had a particularly fetid heart if you were a young adult in 1973 and despised David Bowie, but New Statesman found such a grinch in Martin Amis, who dragged his rotting teeth to what would be the penultimate Ziggy Stardust performance and had a miserable time. Amis has since written some excellent novels, but I want to say this to his 23-year-old self: Fuck you, you privileged snot.

An excerpt:

For all his preening and swanking Bowie often seemed a frail, almost waiflike figure, curiously dwarfed by the electric aura of knowing sexiness and modish violence on which his act depends – panicky strobes, dizzying light effects, a Clockwork Orange-theme ritornello, and SS lightning-flashes.

This incongruity may be responsible for Bowie’s appeal and for what (if anything) is sinister about it. Among certain more affluent hippies Bowie is apparently the symbol of a kind of thrilling extremism, a life-style (the word is for once permissible) characterised by sexual omnivorousness, lavish use of stimulants – particularly cocaine, very much an élitist drug, being both expensive and galvanising – self-parodied narcissism, and a glamorously early death. To dignify this unhappy outlook with such a term as “nihilist” would, of course, be absurd; but Bowie does appear to be a new focus for the vague, predatory, escapist reveries of the alienated young. Although Bowie himself is unlikely to last long as a cult, it is hard to believe that the feelings he has aroused or aggravated will vanish along with the fashion built round him.•

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“That’s The Data”

January 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Confirmation bias is a dangerous thing, so the Harvard economist Roland Fryer likes to stick to data, which can, of course, lead to some inconvenient truths. How about being an African-American scholar in the time of Ferguson who’s convinced that police in the U.S. are no more likely to shoot a black person than a white one?

Fryer’s argument, which he relates to John McDermott of the Financial Times, is that the numbers say officers harass and manhandle African-Americans in a disproportionate way, but actual lethal violence is proportionate among different race groups. The more minor and incessant acts of persecution persuade black folks that they are being shot far more often. 

Well, I haven’t studied the numbers, but if this is true it should make us incredibly vigilant of the type racial profiling and serial intimidation that divides us. The so-called quality-of-life approach to policing has provided too much wiggle room for some to be targeted. Even Fryer himself acknowledges that he had guns pulled on him by police six or seven times during his youth.

An excerpt:

At a quiet table in the cavernous Hawksmoor Seven Dials, a branch of the high-end restaurant chain in central London, where the decor is brown and the meat is red, Fryer tells me how he spent two days last year on the beat shadowing cops in Camden, New Jersey. (On his first day on patrol a woman overdosed in front of him and died.) What Fryer wanted to figure out was whether the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner — two African-Americans whose deaths led to widespread protests — were part of an observable pattern of discrimination, as activist groups such as Black Lives Matter have suggested. After his week on patrol, he collected more than 6m pieces of data from forces such as New York City’s on cases of blacks, whites and Latinos being victims of police violence.

The graph he passes between the salt and pepper displays his provisional findings. The horizontal axis is a scale of the severity of the violence, from shoving on the left all the way to shootings on the right. The curve starts high, suggesting strong differences in minor incidents, but descends to zero as the cases become more violent. In other words, once contextual factors were taken into account, blacks were no more likely to be shot by police. All of which raises the question: why the outcry in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, where Brown was shot?

“That’s the data,” Fryer says. “Now one hypothesis for why Ferguson happened — not the shooting but the outcry — was not because people were making statistical inference, not from whether Michael Brown was guilty or innocent but because they fucking hate the police.” He continues: “The reason they hate the police is because if you spent years having hands put on you and [being] pushed to the ground and handcuffed without proper cause, and then you hear about a [police] shooting in your town, how could you believe it was anything but discrimination?”•

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“I Stared At Her Notes For A Few Minutes Before It Hit Me: She Was A Bot”

January 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Almost all the entries in my Gmail spam folder are boner-juice ads written by bots in barely comprehensible English. They suck. But according to Nellie Bowles’ new Guardian piece, the performance of high-end virtual email assistants has recently risen to an impressive, and perhaps unsettling, level. These tools can show empathy just as surely as they arrange business meetings, and the humans who interact with them often treat them like people even when they know they’re not. The opening:

It started as a normal email exchange with a tech CEO. He was up for a coffee, and passed me to his assistant to find a date. But then it turned a bit strange.

Her emails were too good: all written in the same carefully casual, slightly humourless style. All formatted the same. All sent at socially convincing times. And all at believable intervals from my own messages. But they were off just a little.

Hi Nellie,

No worries! Unfortunately, Swift is unavailable tomorrow morning. Can you talk at one of the following times?

Tuesday (Nov 10) at 3pm EST

Tuesday (Nov 10) at 4:30pm EST

Let me know!

Best,

Clara

I stared at her notes for a few minutes before it hit me: she was a bot.

Leaving aside the issues around giving the admin bot a female name, as all these services seem to do, this feels like one of those moments the future promised us. So now it’s here, I thought to myself, staring at her emails. It has arrived. She is among us. And she’s excellent.

“You asked me how I conceived of ‘her,’ not ‘it’. When you talk about ‘her,’ we’re 90% there already,” said Dennis Mortensen, whose company, X.ai, has pioneered email bot personal assistants. “You already conceive of her as a human being even though you know she’s a machine. Now we have something to work with.”•

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“His Diet Was Red Peppers, Cocaine And Milk”

January 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

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The growling, hirsute deejay Wolfman Jack used to tell bawdy tales of David Bowie’s Los Angeles years, a period of extreme decadence that belied the rock star’s cyborg persona. In a really well-considered Economist obituary, the protean performer’s coked-up California days are recalled. An excerpt:

Some called him a chameleon, but he was the reverse. Chameleons change hue to blend in with their background; he changed to stand out, and dared others to mimic him. He was never afraid to murder his darlings. Ziggy was killed off in 1973 as he finished an exhausting worldwide tour at London’s Hammersmith Odeon; he was being too much imitated, and Mr Bowie always had to be one step ahead. One successor was Aladdin Sane, a zigzag of painted lightning across his face; another, the most troubled, was the Thin White Duke, an aristocratic cabaret singer in black trousers, waistcoat and white shirt, needing only a skull to play Hamlet.

The tragic garb was well judged. As he dashed from persona to persona, station to station, so the worlds he pushed into became darker. Shaped by the threat of nuclear war, the cultural imagination took a catastrophic turn in the 1970s—one ever-present future was no future at all. Mr Bowie was there at the turning point; his song “Five Years” says more about impending annihilation than a shelf full of reports from the RAND Corporation. Spectacular levels of cocaine abuse also shaped this nihilistic trajectory. Settled in Los Angeles from 1975, he stayed up for days on end, sitting cross-legged behind black curtains, surrounding himself with black candles and painted pentagrams.

His diet was “red peppers, cocaine and milk”; always slender, he became skeletal. He would work madly on a song for a week, only to realise that he had got no further than four bars. Nicolas Roeg had originally been set on Peter O’Toole to play the titular alien in his film The Man Who Fell To Earth. But on seeing television footage of Mr Bowie sitting utterly isolated in the back of a limousine he knew he had his not-quite-man. Mr Bowie, true to form, remembered almost nothing of the filming. There is no alienation like drugged alienation, and perhaps no worse place to experience that than “the most repulsive wart on the backside of humanity”, as he described the City of Angels.•

In 1975, Bowie visits with Dinah Shore, Henry Winkler and Nancy Walker, performs “Stay,” acknowledges he’s a “great fan of Fonzie” and takes a karate lesson.

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“We Are At The Cusp Of The Industrial-Robot Revolution”

January 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In a Techcrunch piece, Vivek Wadhwa identifies 2016 as a technological inflection point, naming six fields which he believes will see significant progress, promising the next 12 months “will be the beginning of an even bigger revolution, one that will change the way we live, let us visit new worlds, and lead us into a jobless future.”

I don’t know for most of the areas he mentions that this year will be any more important than 2015 or 2017. Consider the example of space exploration. Perhaps in 2016 private companies or government will accomplish something more impressive than the Falcon 9 landing or maybe not. Even if they do, it will be part of an incremental process rather than a radical breakthrough. Life on Mars will get nearer every year.

Wadhwa’s best bet, I think, is in the area of driverless cars, which will likely move much closer to fruition based on tests done this year. The writer is more measured with robotics, believing the industrial kind is on the cusp of major advances, but personal assistants still have a ways to go. An excerpt:

The 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge required robots to navigate over an eight-task course simulating a disaster zone. It was almost comical to see them moving at the speed of molasses, freezing up, and falling over. Forget folding laundry and serving humans; these robots could hardly walk. As well, although we heard some three years ago that Foxconn would replace a million workers with robots in its Chinese factories, it never did so.

The breakthroughs may, however, be at hand. To begin with, a new generation of robots is being introduced by companies such as Switzerland’s ABB, Denmark’s Universal Robots, and Boston’s Rethink Robotics—robots dextrous enough to thread a needle and sensitive enough to work alongside humans. They can assemble circuits and pack boxes. We are at the cusp of the industrial-robot revolution.

Household robots are another matter. Household tasks may seem mundane, but they are incredibly difficult for machines to perform. Cleaning a room and folding laundry necessitate software algorithms that are more complex than those to land a man on the moon. But there have been many breakthroughs of late, largely driven by A.I., enabling robots to learn certain tasks by themselves and teach each other what they have learnt. And with the open source robotic operating system, ROS, thousands of developers worldwide are getting close to perfecting the algorithms.

Don’t be surprised when robots start showing up in supermarkets and malls—and in our homes.  Remember Rosie, the robotic housekeeper from the TV series The Jetsons?  I am expecting version 1 to begin shipping in the early 2020s.•

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“The Net Result Of The General Howl And Publicity Has Been To Obscure And Avoid The Real Issues”

January 14, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Nothing’s so useful in politics as boogeymen. Fixing an actual large-scale problem is hard, sometimes impossible, so attention is often diverted to a relatively miniscule one. There’s an added bonus: Frightened people are paralyzed, easy to manipulate. 

During the second half of the 1960s, when the American social fabric began to fray in a cultural revolution that no one could contain, motorcycle gangs became useful stooges as symbols of barbarians at the gates. In 1966, when a shocking report of a California crime made the Hell’s Angels Public Enemy No. 1, Hunter S. Thompson elucidated the disproportionate attention the unholy rollers were receiving in an article in the Nation. Of course, the following year he fed the myth himself with a book about his travels–and travails–with the club. An excerpt:

The California climate is perfect for motorcycles, as well as surfboards, swimming pools and convertibles. Most of the cyclists are harmless weekend types, members of the American Motorcycle Association, and no more dangerous than skiers or skin divers. But a few belong to what the others call “outlaw clubs,” and these are the ones who–especially on weekends and holidays–are likely to turn up almost anywhere in the state, looking for action. Despite everything the psychiatrists and Freudian casuists have to say about them, they are tough, mean and potentially as dangerous as a pack of wild boar. When push comes to shove, any leather fetishes or inadequacy feelings that may be involved are entirely beside the point, as anyone who has ever tangled with these boys will sadly testify. When you get in an argument with a group of outlaw motorcyclists, you can generally count your chances of emerging unmaimed by the number of heavy-handed allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and young fools. “I smashed his face,” one of them said to me of a man he’d never seen until the swinging started. “He got wise. He called me a punk. He must have been stupid.”

The most notorious of these outlaw groups is the Hell’s Angels, supposedly headquartered in San Bernardino, just east of Los Angeles, and with branches all over the state. As a result of the infamous “Labor Day gang rape,” the Attorney General of California has recently issued an official report on the Hell’s Angels. According to the report, they are easily identified:

The emblem of the Hell’s Angels, termed “colors,” consists of an embroidered patch of a winged skull wearing a motorcycle helmet. Just below the wing of the emblem are the letters “MC.” Over this is a band bearing the words “Hell’s Angels.” Below the emblem is another patch bearing the local chapter name, which is usually an abbreviation for the city or locality. These patches are sewn on the back of a usually sleeveless denim jacket. In addition, members have been observed wearing various types of Luftwaffe insignia and reproductions of German iron crosses.* (*Purely for decorative and shock effect. The Hell’s Angels are apolitical and no more racist than other ignorant young thugs.) Many affect beards and their hair is usually long and unkempt. Some wear a single earring in a pierced ear lobe. Frequently they have been observed to wear metal belts made of a length of polished motorcycle drive chain which can be unhooked and used as a flexible bludgeon… Probably the most universal common denominator in identification of Hell’s Angels is generally their filthy condition. Investigating officers consistently report these people, both club members and their female associates, seem badly in need of a bath. Fingerprints are a very effective means of identification because a high percentage of Hell’s Angels have criminal records.

In addition to the patches on the back of Hell’s Angel’s jackets, the “One Percenters” wear a patch reading “1%-er.” Another badge worn by some members bears the number “13.” It is reported to represent the 13th letter of the alphabet, “M,” which in turn stands for marijuana and indicates the wearer thereof is a user of the drug.

The Attorney General’s report was colorful, interesting, heavily biased and consistently alarming–just the sort of thing, in fact, to make a clanging good article for a national news magazine. Which it did; in both barrels. Newsweek led with a left hook titled “The Wild Ones,” Time crossed right, inevitably titled “The Wilder Ones.” The Hell’s Angels, cursing the implications of this new attack, retreated to the bar of the DePau Hotel near the San Francisco waterfront and planned a weekend beach party. I showed them the articles. Hell’s Angels do not normally read the news magazines. “I’d go nuts if I read that stuff all the time,” said one. “It’s all bullshit.”

Newsweek was relatively circumspect. It offered local color, flashy quotes and “evidence” carefully attributed to the official report but unaccountably said the report accused the Hell’s Angels of homosexuality, whereas the report said just the opposite. Time leaped into the fray with a flurry of blood, booze and semen-flecked wordage that amounted, in the end, to a classic of supercharged hokum: “Drug-induced stupors… no act is too degrading… swap girls, drugs and motorcycles with equal abandon… stealing forays… then ride off again to seek some new nadir in sordid behavior…”

Where does all this leave the Hell’s Angels and the thousands of shuddering Californians (according to Time) who are worried sick about them? Are these outlaws really going to be busted, routed and cooled, as the news magazines implied? Are California highways any safer as a result of this published uproar? Can honest merchants once again walk the streets in peace? The answer is that nothing has changed except that a few people calling themselves the Hell’s Angels have a new sense of identity and importance.

After two weeks of intensive dealings with the Hell’s Angels phenomenon, both in print and in person, I’m convinced the net result of the general howl and publicity has been to obscure and avoid the real issues by invoking a savage conspiracy of bogeymen and conning the public into thinking all will be “business as usual” once this fearsome snake is scotched, as it surely will be by hard and ready minions of the Establishment.•

 

“He Is Funny, Frightened, Confused, Weepy, Sexual, Evangelistic, And Overbearing”

January 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

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Talk-show host Stanley Siegel just died, and at one point that would have been huge news in New York City.

Before Howard Stern and Reality TV, venues that encourage emotionally damaged recruits to act out every last pathology to pump up the ratings, television host Siegel and his questionable taste and utter neuroses were considered controversial. During the 1970s, his raucous live morning show on the local ABC affiliate made his name as famous in New York as any politician, athlete or Broadway star.

Siegel invited his therapist to psychoanalyze him each week on the air, allowed a wasted Truman Capote to sit down as a guest when he was clearly in no condition to do so and angered a good number of politicos and entertainers with his brash, often-insulting questions. He was the anti-Carson, and it worked wonderfully well for a while.

In the 1977 New York magazine article, “Give Us a Kiss, Stanley,” which was written by journalist and playwright Jonathan Reynolds, Siegel was analyzed a little bit more, captured at the height of his entertaining narcissism. An excerpt:

Every day, Siegel wallows guiltlessly in his own persona, exulting in the dust, high jinx and cobwebs he reveals. He is funny, frightened, confused, weepy, sexual, evangelistic, and overbearing right in front of everybody’s eyes. In terms of emotional exhibitionism, Stanley Siegel makes Jack Paar look like Thomas Pynchon.

In the nearly two years he has been on WABC-TV at 9am, he has sextupled the ratings of his dreary predecessors, increased WABC’s rate card from $35 to $100 for every 30-second spot sold, knocked the venerable Not for Women Only and mega-venerable Concentration out of their time slots, and gained a host of admirers from Robert Evans to Eleanor Holmes Norton.

People tune in to the Stanley Siegel Show to see how Stanley feels–for if there is one predictable element in the program, it is that it will always be clear just how Stanley feels — for if there is one predictable element in the program, it is that it will always be clear just how Stanley feels. He has turned famous guests, WABC-TV’s employees and batches of stay-at-homes into an army of psychotherapists, and how can a psychotherapist not tune in to see how the patient is progressing–or deteriorating?•

________________________

Art Linkletter’s daughter Diane plunged to her death from a six-story window in 1969, perhaps influenced to suicide by LSD. Timothy Leary was, of course, the most famous proponent of the drug, so Siegel, that button-pusher, thought it a good idea in 1977 to have Linkletter and the guru speak by phone on live TV.

At the 4:30 mark a passage from one of the most infamous TV interviews ever, Siegel questioning a seriously inebriated Truman Capote in 1978, a time before the commodification of dysfunction was prevalent.

One of my favorite video clips of all time: Smartmouth Siegel interviews labia salesman Al Goldstein and comedian Jerry Lewis in 1976. When not busy composing the world’s finest beaver shots, Goldstein apparently had a newsletter about tech tools. He shows off a $3900 calculator watch and a $2200 portable phone. Lewis, easily the biggest tool on the stage, flaunts his wealth the way only a truly insecure man can.

“America Quickly Pulled Ahead Of The Rest Of The World In Almost Every New Technology”

January 13, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Northwestern economist Robert Gordon may be too bearish on the transformative powers of the Internet, but he does make a good case that the technological innovations of a century ago dwarf the impact of the information revolution. 

A well-written and sadly un-bylined Economist review of the academic’s new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, looks at how the wheels came off the U.S. locomotive in the 1970s, courtesy of the rise of global competition and OPEC along with increasing inequality on the homefront. Gordon is dour about the prospects of a new American century, believing technologists are offering thin gruel and that Moore’s Law is running aground. The reviewer thinks the economist is ultimately too dismissive of Silicon Valley.

An excerpt:

The technological revolutions of the late 19th century transformed the world. The life that Americans led before that is unrecognisable. Their idea of speed was defined by horses. The rhythm of their days was dictated by the rise and fall of the sun. The most basic daily tasks—getting water for a bath or washing clothes—were back-breaking chores. As Mr Gordon shows, a succession of revolutions transformed every aspect of life. The invention of electricity brought light in the evenings. The invention of the telephone killed distance. The invention of what General Electric called “electric servants” liberated women from domestic slavery. The speed of change was also remarkable. In the 30 years from 1870 to 1900 railway companies added 20 miles of track each day. By the turn of the century, Sears Roebuck, a mail-order company that was founded in 1893, was fulfilling 100,000 orders a day from a catalogue of 1,162 pages. The price of cars plummeted by 63% between 1912 and 1930, while the proportion of American households that had access to a car increased from just over 2% to 89.8%.

America quickly pulled ahead of the rest of the world in almost every new technology—a locomotive to Europe’s snail, as Andrew Carnegie put it. In 1900 Americans had four times as many telephones per person as the British, six times as many as the Germans and 20 times as many as the French. Almost one-sixth of the world’s railway traffic passed through a single American city, Chicago. Thirty years later Americans owned more than 78% of the world’s motor cars. It took the French until 1948 to have the same access to cars and electricity that America had in 1912.

The Great Depression did a little to slow America’s momentum. But the private sector continued to innovate. By some measures, the 1930s were the most productive decade in terms of the numbers of inventions and patents granted relative to the size of the economy. Franklin Roosevelt’s government invested in productive capacity with the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam.

The second world war demonstrated the astonishing power of America’s production machine. After 1945 America consolidated its global pre-eminence by constructing a new global order, with the Marshall Plan and the Bretton Woods institutions, and by pouring money into higher education. The 1950s and 1960s were a golden age of prosperity in which even people with no more than a high-school education could enjoy a steady job, a house in the suburbs and a safe retirement.

But Mr Gordon’s tone grows gloomy when he turns to the 1970s.•

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“Public Policy Can Play A Powerful Role In Curbing The Ill Effects Of Technological Disruption”

January 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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It’s not a done deal that technological employment will be widespread, that the “lights-out” factory will become the norm, but it’s possible to the extent that we should worry about such a scary situation now.

I doubt the answers will lie in somehow reigning in technology. Not to overly anthropomorphize robots, but they have a “life” of their own. If humans and machines can both do the same job, the work will ultimately become the domain of AI. The solutions, if needed, will have to emerge from policy. Not the kind that artificially limits machines, but the type that provides security derived from social safety nets. 

In an In These Times article, David Moberg writes that “much will depend on whether we humans leave robotization to the free market or whether we take deliberate steps to shape our future relationships with robots.” I disagree with his suggestion that perhaps we can design robots to merely augment human production. That’s implausible and at best an intermediary step, but the author writes intelligently on the topic.

An excerpt:

If we’re on the brink of a period of robotic upheaval, labor organizing will be more crucial than ever. Workers will need unions with the power to negotiate the needs of the displaced.

Another aspect of the disruption could be an exacerbation of economic inequality. MIT economist David Autor argues that the advent of computing in the late 1970s helped drive our current stratification. As demand increased for abstract labor (college-educated workers using computers) and decreased for manual, routine labor (service workers with few skilled tasks), he says, the pay for different occupations consequently became more polarized, fueling the rise of inequality.

But Lawrence Mishel and his Economic Policy Institute colleagues, along with Dean Baker, argue that this model of polarization misses important nuances of contemporary labor markets and ignores the primary driver of inequality: public policy, not robots. They point to a range of U.S. policies, including encouragement of financial sector growth and suppression of the minimum wage, as contributing to burgeoning inequality. 

No matter who is right, it’s indisputable that public policy, in addition to unions, can play a powerful role in curbing the ill effects of technological disruption.

Luckily, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.•

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“Consciousness Doesn’t Happen. It’s A Mistaken Construct.”

January 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In a piece that landed on Afflictor’s “50 Great 2015 Articles Online for Free” list, the Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano wrote of building an artificial brain, a process which would strip from gray matter its mysticism, arguing that consciousness was merely a sort of illusion perpetrated by the computers in our heads. Graziano furthers the discussion in a new Atlantic piece, suggesting that once we separate false narratives from explanations of consciousness, we may be able to hasten the creation of intelligent machines. An excerpt:

The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I’m a kangaroo rat. I know it’s true because, well, it’s true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, and unexplainable, because that packet of information in the brain is incoherent. It’s a quick sketch.

What’s it a sketch of? The brain processes information. It focuses its processing resources on this or that chunk of data. That’s the complex, mechanistic act of a massive computer. The brain also describes this act to itself. That description, shaped by millions of years of evolution, weird and quirky and stripped of details, depicts a “me” and a state of subjective consciousness.

This is why we can’t explain how the brain produces consciousness. It’s like explaining how white light gets purified of all colors. The answer is, it doesn’t. Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct.•

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“Small Drones Have Also Proven To Be Effective Tools Of Mischief”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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For every action, a reaction: Small drones, in addition to all the good they can do, can be used for illicit surveillance and delivering explosives and smuggling, among other nefarious deeds, so Michigan researchers created a concept prototype of an anti-drone tool called “robotic falconry,” which nets the interloping technology and commandeers it to a safe place. What will the countermeasure be when spy drones can fit on the head of a pin? There’ll be a market, so something will emerge.

From Marcia Goodrich at Michigan Tech News:

In January 2015, a Washington, DC, hobbyist accidentally flew his DJI Phantom quadcopter drone over the White House fence and crashed it on the lawn.

Two years earlier, a prankster sent his drone toward German prime minister Angela Merkel during a campaign rally.

Small drones have also proven to be effective tools of mischief that doesn’t make the national news, from spying to smuggling to hacking. So when Mo Rastgaar was watching World Cup soccer and heard about snipers protecting the crowd, he doubted that they’d fully understood a drone’s potential.

“I thought, ‘If the threat is a drone, you really don’t want to shoot it down—it might contain explosives and blow up. What you want to do is catch it and get it out of there.’”

Safe Drone Catcher

So Rastgaar, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University, began work on a drone catcher, which could pursue and capture rogue drones that might threaten military installations, air traffic, sporting events—even the White House.•

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“The Most Important Resource For Prospective Space Miners Is Water”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In her BBC article about asteroid mining, Sarah Cruddas asks a vital question: “Would it be worth it?” If we’re not placing any onerous timeframes on such prospecting, the answer, of course, is “yes.” Exploring and colonizing space will require us to build using resources gathered up there, since transporting them is prohibitively expensive. Even more vital than attaining iron for tools is securing a steady supply of H2O. As the author notes, the first water to be extracted from an asteroid will “mark the beginning of new era.” An excerpt:

The first thing to understand about space mining is that it is not only about mining asteroids, or even the Moon and then returning those resources back to Earth. “Instead, there is a lot of value in keeping the resources in space and using them to continue our exploration of the Solar System and beyond,” says Anderson. 

The most important resource for prospective space miners is water. The reason: travelling into space by current standards is the equivalent of taking a road trip across America, but having to bring all your fuel with you – only much worse. It takes more energy to escape the first 300 kilometres from Earth than the next 300 million kilometres. “Once in Earth’s orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System,” says Lewicki.

But if rocket fuel was sourced from space for space, that problem can be avoided. When water is broken into its constituents – hydrogen and oxygen – you have two of the most commonly used elements in rocket fuel. What is most exciting for those looking to mine space is that water is throughout our Solar System. It is on the Moon, Mars and asteroids, and that’s just the places we know about.

Asteroids are of particular interest to Planetary Resources. “We know asteroids have water because it has been found on meteorites which have landed on the surface of the Earth,” says Lewicki. “They also don’t need much energy to land on. It’s easier than a trip to the surface of the Moon.” These near-Earth asteroids could act as off-world ‘gas stations’.

And as humans venture beyond Earth orbit, water will be essential for life support and growing food.•

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“Look For The Most Frantic Person In The Lineup And You Can Bet They’re Working With An App”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Some people actually believe that those participating in the Gig Economy, that Libertarian wet dream, are mostly entrepreneurial souls gladly Ubering others just until they secure seed money for their startup. That’s preposterous.

Piecework employment isn’t good at all for Labor unless basic income in uncoupled from work, which isn’t the arrangement most citizens find themselves in. And if wages remain flat and too many people are reduced to rabbits with tasks but no benefits, we’re in a collective quandary.

Andrew Callaway has penned a Policy Alternatives article about his perplexing experiences in the so-called Sharing Economy. The writer ultimately doesn’t feel that such an arrangement is bad for everyone, but that most will not prosper within its new rules. The opening:

If you spend enough time in San Francisco, you’ll notice sharing economy workers everywhere. While you’re waiting to get some food, look for the most frantic person in the lineup and you can bet they’re working with an app. Some of them are colour-coded: workers in orange T-shirts are with Caviar, a food delivery app; those in green represent Instacart, an app for delivering groceries. The blue jackets riding Razor scooters are with Luxe—if you’re still driving yourself around this city, these app workers will park your car. 

In the Bay Area, there are thousands of such people running through the aisles, fidgeting in line and racing against the clock. They spend most of their time in cars, where it can be harder to spot them. Oftentimes they’re double-parked in the bike lane, picking up a burrito from inside an adjacent restaurant or waiting for a passenger to come down from the apartment on top. If you look closely, you’ll see a placard in the window that says Uber or a glowing pink moustache indicating they drive around Lyft’s passengers. Last summer, I was one of them.

Oh, Canada! I’m writing you from Berkeley, California to warn you about this thing called “the sharing economy.” Since no one is really sharing anything, many of us prefer the term “the exploitation economy,” but due to its prevalence many in the Bay Area simply think of it as “the economy.”•

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“It Felt Good To See The Blood Coming Out”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The novelist Jennifer Egan began penning occasional features for the New York Times Magazine in the 1990s. Her 1997 piece, “The Thin Red Line,” looked at the self-harming habit of cutting, in which (mostly) adolescent girls slice their skin to relieve pressure. Like drugs or alcohol, it’s a self-destructive coping mechanism, and similar to anorexia or anxiety, it’s a disorder that seems a consequence of us being mismatched to the modern world we’ve created. The article may have been the first time a lot of Americans understood the behavior. The opening:

One Saturday night in January, Jill McArdle went to a party some distance from her home in West Beverly, a fiercely Irish enclave on Chicago’s South Side. She was anxious before setting out; she’d been having a hard time in social situations — parties, especially. At 5 feet 10 inches with long blond hair, green eyes and an underbite that often makes her look as if she’s half-smiling, Jill cuts an imposing figure for 16; she is the sort of girl boys notice instantly and are sometimes afraid of. And the fear is mutual, despite her air of confidence.

Jill’s troubles begin with her own desire to make everyone happy, a guiding principle that yields mixed results in the flirtatious, beer-swilling atmosphere of teen-age parties. ”I feel I have to be all cute and sexy for these boys,” she says. ”And the next morning when I realize what a fool I looked like, it’s the worst feeling ever….’Oh God, what did I do? Was I flirting with that boy? Is his girlfriend in school tomorrow going to give me a hard time? Are they all going to hate me?’ ”

Watching Jill in action, you would never guess she was prone to this sort of self-scrutiny. Winner of her cheerleading squad’s coveted Spirit Award last year, she is part of a Catholic-school crowd consisting mostly of fellow cheerleaders and the male athletes they cheer for, clean-cut kids who congregate in basement rec rooms of spare, working-class houses where hockey sticks hang on the walls and a fish tank sometimes bubbles in one corner. Jill is a popular, even dominating presence at these parties; once she introduced a series of guys to me with the phrase, ”This is my boy,” her arm slung across the shoulders of some shy youth in a baseball cap, usually shorter than she, whose name invariably seemed to be Kevin or Patrick.

But in truth, the pressures of adolescence have wreaked extraordinary havoc in Jill’s life. ”Around my house there’s this park, and there used to be like a hundred kids hanging out up there,” she says, recalling her first year in high school, two years ago. ”And the boys would say stuff to me that was so disgusting … perverted stuff, and I’d just be so embarrassed. But the older girls assumed that I was a slut…. They’d give me dirty looks in school.” Blaming herself for having somehow provoked these reactions, Jill began to feel ashamed and isolated. Her unease spiraled into panic in the spring of that year, when a boy she’d trusted began spreading lies about her. ”He goes and tells all of his friends that I did all this sexual stuff with him, and I was just blown away. It made me feel dirty, like I was absolutely nothing.”

Jill, then 14, found herself moved to do something she had never done before. ”I was in the bathroom going completely crazy, just bawling my eyes out, and I think my mom was wallpapering — there was a wallpaper cutter there. I had so much anxiety, I couldn’t concentrate on anything until I somehow let that out, and not being able to let it out in words, I took the razor and started cutting my leg and I got excited about seeing my blood. It felt good to see the blood coming out, like that was my other pain leaving, too. It felt right and it felt good for me to let it out that way.”

Jill had made a galvanizing discovery: cutting herself could temporarily ease her emotional distress. It became a habit.•

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“Sounds Like A Sea Change To Me”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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It’s difficult to imagine anything as intractable as a Big Auto corporation with thousands of employees and shareholders, and they don’t get more venerable than Ford, birthplace of the Model T, brainchild of the namesake plutocrat who was sometimes a populist but just as often an employer of strike-breaking Pinkertons. It was Henry Ford, after all, who sold America its first set of wheels.

That legendary car maker is interested in reinventing itself as a “smart mobility” company, as Steven Levy learned while poking around the premises. In a smart Backchannel piece, Levy writes that old Hank’s great-grandson, William (Bill) Clay Ford, Jr., doesn’t fear Apple or Tesla, believing his own outfit can achieve bleeding-edge Digital Age greatness, that Detroit’s most famous name can compete with Silicon Valley and its EVs and ride-sharing and autonomous.

The opening:

Is the Ford Motor Company…pivoting?

Startups do it all the time, occasionally with seismic consequences. Android was originally conceived as an operating system for cameras. Slack began as a video game. Airbnb really was all about air mattresses. But none of these companies was a 113-year-old pillar of the economy, with 197,000 employees, billions of dollars spent on branding, and countless tons of metal emblazoned with the company logo rumbling along the world’s roadways. The mind reels at the notion that Ford — Ford! — would change directions like an angel-funded six-person SOMA venture switching gears after a failed app.

Yet that’s what the Ford Motor Company seems to be doing. Or at least that’s what I sensed when I attended a Ford media day in Dearborn, Michigan, last month. (It was a palate cleanser for 2016 events — CES, followed by this week’s giant Detroit Auto Show.) The point of the day was to emphasize Ford’s evolving strategy. Making cars will remain a big part of Ford, but the company is committed to an additional but vital business model, a high-tech effort based on “smart mobility.” This approach not only doesn’t focus on selling vehicles, but even embraces some instances where potential car owners might forgo a Ford, or any other vehicle, in their driveway. Part of the vision would even point people to public transit. Sounds like a sea change to me.

To confirm whether this is indeed an epochal moment, I tap the perfect source: William Clay Ford, Jr. He’s executive chairman (and a former CEO) of the company founded by his great-grandfather in 1903, and he’s altogether one the most intriguing figures in the auto industry; his weaves between anachronism and futurist qualify him for a cognitive DUI. Bill, I ask (Can I call you Bill?), is Ford attempting the biggest pivot of all time?•

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“This Was Shaping Up To Be The Most Surreal Year Of My Life”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

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I recall reading and loving Michael Idov’s “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” his strange 2011 GQ journalistic walkabout in which he reported from the insane Ukraine film set of certifiable auteur Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Several unforeseen WTF professional and geopolitical moments later, he found himself one of Russia’s top screenwriters, crafting successful TV shows and films during the chill of the Second Cold War, perhaps an astute social commentator or maybe an unwitting government stooge.

Idov’s written a piece about his unexpected life changes for the New York Times Magazine, which is the first excellent longform article I’ve read this new year (sorry, Sean Penn). A passage about how the magazine editor began to branch out from the news biz to show biz, which offered greater freedom from the Kremlin’s intentionally fuzzy censorship rules:

Russia and the United States had exchanged the first salvos in the new cold war. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, barring certain apparatchiks from entering the United States. In an asymmetric response, the Duma barred all Americans from adopting Russian children — a sudden jolt of direct discrimination, as my wife and I had been considering exactly that.

At work, too, not a week seemed to pass without a new law designed to curb free speech. Hastily adopted legislation basically made it illegal to offend any social group — though as wielded by the authorities, the new laws primarily seemed to protect the strong from the weak. Impugning the Soviet Union’s conduct in World War II was illegal. Disrespecting Russia’s ‘‘territorial integrity’’ was illegal. Mentioning drugs or suicide in a way that could be construed as ‘‘instructional’’ was illegal, and prosecutors could use an agency called Roskomnadzor to shut down any website for so much as an unruly user comment. A vile anti-gay law banned speech that ‘‘creates false equivalence between traditional and nontraditional lifestyle.’’ (This in a country whose pop stars’ wardrobes suggest that Russia’s biggest natural resource is rhinestones.) I had to fight Condé Nast’s in-house counsel for the right to publish a positive review of the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra; he objected to the use of the word ‘‘love’’ to describe a same-sex relationship.

The genius of all these laws was in their purposeful inconsistency, which ensured that almost anyone could be silenced at any time; they were designed to be implemented capriciously, to weed out undesirables. Editing a magazine became hazardous to your health — mental and otherwise. GQ’s political columnist, Andrew Ryvkin, was beaten up on the street by two pro-­Putin writers of some renown, Sergei Minaev and Eduard Bagirov. I myself ended up slapping a Tatler editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theater after he wrote anti-­Semitic diatribes about me. This was shaping up to be the most surreal year of my life.

One night, I called Ryvkin with a spur-­of-­the-­moment idea: ‘‘Let’s write Louie, but about me in Moscow.’’ Ryvkin had a similar background to mine (he spent his formative years in Boston) and similar comedic sensibilities; we both worshiped 30 Rock and Louis C.K. Three weeks, a few joints and several pizzas later, we had a pilot. The main character, a neurotic, blocked, broke Brooklyn novelist, comes to Moscow to promote his book, gets Jew-­baited on live TV by a glib Russian oligarch and reconnects with his childhood friend Roman, now an out-­of-­control photographer modeled on Terry Richardson. The friends spend most of the episode crafting an appropriate response to the slur and finally head over to the oligarch’s club to beat him up. When they get there, however, the offender offers the novelist a plum job in Moscow, forcing him to sell out on the spot.

The script was a mishmash of autobiography and anger, filled with profanity, drug use, gay jokes, Nazi jokes and weird structural hiccups. I was venting every frustration of my day job. In a good measure of how little I cared about the pilot’s suitability for Russian TV, I named its protagonist Matt Rushkin, ‘‘Rashka’’ being an émigré’s derogatory term for Russia itself.•

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“Oregon’s Founding Is Part Of The Forgotten History Of Racism In The American West”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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That wonderful Wallace Shawn gathered all his guilt into an indigestible lump to write, in 1996, The Designated Mourner, about intellect under siege as society goes up in flames. Not as good as Aunt Dan and Lemon or Marie and Bruce, but interesting stuff in the run-up to the new millennium. In retrospect, Shawn seemed to have misfired a bit. It wasn’t the top that was vanishing but the middle. 

Another thing we’ve lost besides the middle in our new normal is memory, that decidedly un-pliant thing. Even things from a few years ago seem like ancient history. Perhaps more than designated mourners what we need now are designated reminders, people who can point out that the world didn’t begin with downloads.

One of the most colorful of current reminders is Matt Novak, founder of Paleofuture. After moving that site at Gizmodo, Novak penned “Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia,” a post that seems very timely right now. Not that Oregonians are responsible for the Bundy brigade of anti-government interlopers, but it does speak to the history of regional resistance to authority. The opening:

When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon’s founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west.

Waddles Coffee Shop in Portland, Oregon was a popular restaurant in the 1950s for both locals and travelers alike. The drive-in catered to America’s postwar obsession with car culture, allowing people to get coffee and a slice of pie without even leaving their vehicle. But if you happened to be black, the owners of Waddles implored you to keep on driving. The restaurant had a sign outside with a very clear message: “White Trade Only — Please.”

It’s the kind of scene from the 1950s that’s so hard for many Americans to imagine happening outside of the Jim Crow South. How could a progressive, northern city like Portland have allowed a restaurant to exclude non-white patrons? This had to be an anomaly, right? In reality it was far too common in Oregon, a state that was explicitly founded as a kind of white utopia.•

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“The American Consciousness About Inequality Is Frozen In A Previous Era”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Life has always been, in some sense, a tale of two cities, those who have and those who have not–or at least much less. Even granting that, however, we’re living in a wildly unequal world. In a Factor-Tech piece, Lucy Ingham analyzes the conditions that have made it possible for the 1% to own most of the assets. She traces concentrated wealth in the U.S. back to the Ronald Reagan economic policies (tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, etc.) and a less sexy salvo, a change in law allowing companies to buy back large amounts of their own stock. The writer thinks financialization, more than automation, is the problem, and the result of a growing underclass has been a rising police state. An excerpt:

Inequality has always existed, and there is an argument to say it’s an inherent part of human society. However, the level of inequality is now far beyond what we perceive it to be, and that’s a big problem.

“The American consciousness about inequality is frozen in a previous era,” says [Les] Leopold, citing the US results of an international poll about the perceived gap between entry level workers’ and CEOs’ pay as an example.

In the poll, people from all walks of life and political affiliation were asked to state what they thought the average gap was between the lowest and highest earners at a typical company.

“By and large, no matter what their age or background or political affiliation was, it sort of came out to about 40:1 – for every one dollar to the entry-level worker, 40 to the CEO,” says Leopold. “That’s kind of what it was in 1970.”

The reality, according to The Labor Institute’s data about the top 100 CEOs, is 829:1, making the inequality gap around 20 times larger that people perceived it to be. In 2016 the Institute believes it will be worse still, projecting 859:1.

Yet when asked in the poll what the ratio should be, participants consistently said it should be even lower that the imagined rate of 40:1.

“Strong Republicans in this survey think it ought to be 12:1, strong Democrats say 5:1, the average is about 8:1,” adds Leopold.

So how have we not noticed that the reality is so very far from our perceptions?•

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“The Coming Together Of People I Find Obscene As A Principle. It Is Not Human.”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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So sad to hear of the death of David Bowie, one of the great creative minds of his era and a constant reader. Rolling Stone, the magazine that today publishes Sean Penn’s jungle flatulence, sat Bowie and William S. Burroughs down for a chat in 1974. The two artists may have arrived at a similar place, but they sure came to it from different angles, the rock star as the man who fell to Earth and the writer seemingly escaped from the planet’s core like a mole. In a section that begins with the Ziggy Stardust backstory, Bowie ultimately voices concerns about the Global Village in much the same way that Marshall McLuhan had. An excerpt:

William S. Burroughs:

Where did this Ziggy idea come from, and this five-year idea? Of course, exhaustion of natural resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the population by about three-quarters.

David Bowie:

Exactly. This does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage.

William S. Burroughs:

Yes, a black hole on stage would be an incredible expense. And it would be a continuing performance, first eating up Shaftesbury Avenue.

David Bowie:

Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman’, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch on to it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie the Infinite Fox.

Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song ‘Rock ‘n’ roll suicide’. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible. It is a science fiction fantasy of today and this is what literally blew my head off when I read Nova Express, which was written in 1961. Maybe we are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the seventies, Bill!

William S. Burroughs:

Yes, I can believe that. The parallels are definitely there, and it sounds good.

David Bowie:

I must have the total image of a stage show. It has to be total with me. I’m just not content writing songs, I want to make it three-dimensional. Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.

William S. Burroughs:

It’s the whole performance. It’s not like somebody sitting down at the piano and just playing a piece.

Bowie: A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out what they have gleaned from that.

William S. Burroughs:

The revolution will come from ignoring the others out of existence.

David Bowie:

Really. Now we have people who are making it happen on a level faster than ever. People who are into groups like Alice Cooper, The New York Dolls and Iggy Pop, who are denying totally and irrevocably the existence of people who are into The Stones and The Beatles. The gap has decreased from twenty years to ten years.

William S. Burroughs:

The escalating rate of change. The media are really responsible for most of this. Which produces an incalculable effect.

David Bowie:

Once upon a time, even when I was 13 or 14, for me it was between 14 and 40 that you were old. Basically. But now it is 18-year-olds and 26-year-olds – there can be incredible discrepancies, which is really quite alarming. We are not trying to bring people together, but to wonder how much longer we’ve got. It would be positively boring if minds were in tune. I’m more interested in whether the planet is going to survive.

William S. Burroughs:

Actually, the contrary is happening; people are getting further and further apart.

David Bowie:

The idea of getting minds together smacks of the flower power period to me. The coming together of people I find obscene as a principle. It is not human. It is not a natural thing as some people would have us believe.•

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“Did This Mean We Were Nearing The Man?”

January 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

seanpenn

Sean Penn screen performances often depend on quantity as much as quality–not the best acting, but the most acting–so it’s no surprise his attempt at gonzo journalism, a Rolling Stone feature he wrote about his facacta jungle interview of Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera (or “El Chapo” as he’s known to his business associates) is logorrheic. The short Q&A embedded within the long article is deeply unsatisfying and the piece as a whole is a mess, though not one without interest. It’s more fascinating, though, for allowing a close-up of the actor-director’s staccato brain droppings and the technological logistics of securing a clandestine meeting with Mexico’s most-wanted man than for any insight into the cartel kingpin. It only takes two paragraphs for Penn to describe his very own Oscar Zeta Acosta in this way: “Espinoza is the owl who flies among falcons.” Bless his editor.

Penn, unsurprisingly, has deep sympathy for El Chapo despite his beheadings of those he wanted to eliminate and murders of priests who refused extortion demands, arguing that American drug users are complicit in these crimes. In that case, Penn’s nose should be arrested for multiple homicide. Galling that the lightweight inquisition allows the subject to downplay his horrific violence and an odd way to protest the U.S. War on Drugs, which is an undoubtedly stupid thing. An excerpt:

It’s been about two hours of flight, when we descend from above the lush peaks to ward a sea-level field. The pilot, using his encrypted cellphone, talks to the ground. I sense that the military is beefing up operations in its search area. Our original landing zone has suddenly been deemed insecure. After quite a bit of chatter from ground to air, and some unnervingly low altitude circling, we find an alternate dirt patch where two SUVs wait in the shade of an adjacent tree line, and land. The flight had been just bumpy enough that each of us had taken a few swigs off a bottle of Honor tequila, a new brand that Kate is marketing. I step from plane to earth, ever so slightly sobering my bearings, and move toward the beckoning waves of waiting drivers. I throw my satchel into the open back of one of the SUVs, and lumber over to the tree line to take a piss. Dick in hand, I do consider it among my body parts vulnerable to the knives of irrational narco types, and take a fond last look, before tucking it back into my pants.

Espinoza had recently undergone back surgery. He stretched, readjusted his surgical corset, exposing it. It dawns on me that one of our greeters might mistake the corset for a device that contains a wire, a chip, a tracker. With all their eyes on him, Espinoza methodically adjusts the Velcro toward his belly, slowly looks up, sharing his trademark smile with the suspicious eyes around him. Then, “Cirugia de espalda [back surgery],” he says. Situation defused.

We embark into the dense, mountainous jungle in a two-truck convoy, crossing through river after river for seven long hours. Espinoza and El Alto, with a driver in the front vehicle, myself and Kate with Alonzo and Alfredo in the rear. At times the jungle opens up to farmland, then closes again into forest. As the elevation begins to climb, road signage announces approaching townships. And then, as it seems we are at the entrance of Oz, the highest peak visibly within reach, we arrive at a military checkpoint. Two uniformed government soldiers, weapons at the ready, approach our vehicle. Alfredo lowers his passenger window; the soldiers back away, looking embarrassed, and wave us through. Wow. So it is, the power of a Guzman face. And the corruption of an institution. Did this mean we were nearing the man?

It was still several hours into the jungle before any sign we were getting closer. Then, strangers appear as if from nowhere, onto the dirt track, checking in with our drivers and exchanging hand radios. We move on. Small villages materialize from the jungle; protective peasant eyes relax at the wave of a familiar driver. Cellphones are of no use here, so I imagine there are radio repeaters on topographical high points facilitating their internal communications.

We’d left Los Angeles at 7 a.m. By 9 p.m. on the dash clock we arrive at a clearing where several SUVs are parked. A small crew of men hover. On a knoll above, I see a few weathered bungalows. I get out of the truck, search the faces of the crew for approval that I may walk to the trunk to secure my bag. Nods follow. I move. And, when I do…there he is. Right beside the truck. The world’s most famous fugitive: El Chapo.•

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