Story: Will-e-books-ever-be-a-best-seller?
Amazon and Sony better hope Apple doesn't show up in this space, because the one tipping point feature that trumps price, killer "app-titude" or usability, i.e., “design cool" just ain't there. No eye appeal in either e-book package. These things are both butt ugly; they scream prototype even though they aren't.
Nobody reads 170 books at one time, so who cares, capacity is a non-starter at this point. Add to which they're way out of the price range of the one market they make the most sense for, the poor beleaguered students who have to cart dozens of monster textbooks around in their groaning backpacks. If my kids could replace all their textbooks with the one device they plug into their school's server or the net, I'd jump just to save them the backstrain and myself the doctors’ bills. But for now, fuggedaboudit!
Back to the drawing board kids, but don't take too long. Mark this. Apple will sit out a couple of cycles, then jump in with a sexy, far prettier face, toss in some of the cool interface doodads they do so well and we will all go oooh and aaah and cue up overnight at our nearest Apple Stores to buy the first ones.. Then they'll further solidify their market by giving them away to public schools along with Itunes textbook downloads and Steve Jobs will finally and irrevocably become William Randolph Hearst.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
E-books not near ready for prime time:
-@v@- wrote:
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
The Art Palace In My Front Yard
Inga Saffron is the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. While I find that on a whole that the quality of reportage, particularly international reportage has plummetted after the Inky was taken over by Philadelphia Media Holdings and its dark lord, Brian Tierney, Ms. Saffron's star remains undimmed. Ms. Saffron through her Changing Skylines column does what a big city daily should do, shed light and occasional heat on issues that affect urban life. Now as far as architecture goes, the closest thing to an education that I ever got was to hang out and get wasted with architect friends. That is until I made Ms. Saffron's article a weekly "must read" and began to take a proprietary interest in the skyline of my adopted City of Brotherly Love.
Even more inexplicable and you can see it from Mr. Bryant’s photo, are the uneven flashing, the ladder and rag, (if that’s what these are) sticking up from the top. Walking up 25th St. one eerie moonlight night, the glint of the ladder and the rag flapping in the wind caught my eye and sent a chill down my spine. I had to stop and stare down this grim trompe-l'œil for several minutes because it looked for all the world like the malevolent scarecrow in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. (It was a lot darker and creepier then, trust me.)
I can’t claim to always understand art, but I sometimes wonder if I understand architecture even less.
This particular piece of skyline is right out my front door and if proximity confers some sense of entitlement or ownership, then her most recent review, Art Palace is Right Fit with Philadelphia is a perfect fit for me.
My architect friends agree that in Ms. Saffron, that Philly has a worldclass observer of public spaces. As people who have lived with the Fidelity/Reliance cum Perelman for 23 years, Mrs. W and I have some history with the building and on the whole are thrilled with what it has become. Given that this structure is the second home of one of the nation’s premiere museums, it is right to hold it to a higher standard.
I must admit that when I first saw the concrete block of the new addition, I was dismayed. I imagined that somewhere, a building materials order got flummoxed and a suburban Walmart got our Perelman order and we got theirs. (Note the liberal use possessives.) But humble concrete can be a tabula rasa and when I saw the metal grid on the 25th street side with the climbing flowering vines, I had a little aha moment and walked away with a smile on my face.
I had another even more intense aesthetic experience after the construction barriers, trailers and fencing were cleared away to reveal a broadened gleaming pedestrian expanse along the Fairmount-PA Ave intersection. Because of its scale and lighting it is serving as a lively, impromptu community hot spot, where on one particular mid-summer evening, while chatting up the museum’s director of housekeeping, a neighbor, I observed Art Museum Director Anne d'Harnoncourt and a neighborhood mom confer on dog training strategies. This is a nexus where we neighbors regularly connect in little Jane Jacobian moments on our way to and from our errands and walks.
There is one sore spot on this lovely walkway and perhaps it takes a neighbor with a couple decades of walkby experience to point it out. Our new neighbors should know that in my 20+ years of observing, nothing has ever flourished in the little strip of earth that parallels the “moat” wall. The previous owners planted boxwoods which, try as they might, through multiple replantings, always withered after a couple of seasons. The same pretty vines that seem so happy on the 25th Street side are dying wretched deaths in that parched little strip of cursed earth along PA Avenue.
Most folks I talk to agree that the work of the landscapers has fallen far short of expectations. Even the streetside lot on 26th, which is a quantum improvement in terms of eye appeal, was poorly executed when it came to laying down an appropriate soil base and proper planting. One day it was a bare construction trash strewn network of pits and trenches. The next day it was planted. The plants there now struggle and show the ill-effects of rushed, slipshod planting techniques. Several cute little rhododendrons have already succumbed. We’re also a bit perplexed that the lovely honey locust and black locusts that were planted along 25th, Fairmount and PA Ave were not extended back along the Meredith St. expanse of the Perelman. What, just because it doesn’t face the more trafficked avenues, it isn’t worthy of modest finishing touches? The museum needs to call its landscapers on the carpet to remedy these oversights. What they’ve done, or more to the point, what they haven’t done, is unworthy of this public space.
The most glaring oversight is the “temporary” PECO pole that furnished power to the construction machines, but now stands, an ugly sore digit, disconnected from the grid and ready to be extracted. But it hasn’t been and nobody can tell me when it will be. I buttonholed the project manager and he asked me if I had any pull with PECO and we both laughed at the irony in his question. Perhaps Ms. d'Harnoncourt herself should get on the phone and work her way up the electric utility’s chain until this sore tooth is yanked. If you google my address, you’ll see why this particular piece of unfinished business is most galling to us. Before the construction, we had a beautiful, unobstructed view of the northwest face of the museum proper and its sycamores. The lot used to be a blacktop sea of cars, parked two or three to the space. We now have a lovely view of the locust trees and shrubbery of the lot. On the whole, a vast improvement. Then standing smack in the middle of our transom window is this bare ugly projection which resembles nothing so much as a rudely upthrust Brobdingnagian middle finger. It is a visual insult that we endured while it was needed and as it no longer serves any purpose, it has to go.
Finally, I chatted up Inky staff shutterbug Michael Bryant when he was taking his photos in preparation for Inga's article. His 7th picture (on the philly.com site) shows the interior view of the ventilation stack and I agree with Ms. Saffron's assertion that it is butt ugly and inexcusable. Imagine in its absence, the light and the view of that pretty brick, tree and sun-dappled piece of 25th St. looking out or the lovely view of the museum’s atrium looking in. It could have been a lively and enduring visual comment on how a cultural landmark and its resident neighbors interact and
instead it looks like an architectural mooning (and I’m not talking astronomy) to the genial neighborhood that has for the most part, endured the three years of construction with patience and good grace. The architect had the Perelman's huge interior space to work with that would have been invisible from the street. What WAS he thinking?
I must admit that when I first saw the concrete block of the new addition, I was dismayed. I imagined that somewhere, a building materials order got flummoxed and a suburban Walmart got our Perelman order and we got theirs. (Note the liberal use possessives.) But humble concrete can be a tabula rasa and when I saw the metal grid on the 25th street side with the climbing flowering vines, I had a little aha moment and walked away with a smile on my face.
I had another even more intense aesthetic experience after the construction barriers, trailers and fencing were cleared away to reveal a broadened gleaming pedestrian expanse along the Fairmount-PA Ave intersection. Because of its scale and lighting it is serving as a lively, impromptu community hot spot, where on one particular mid-summer evening, while chatting up the museum’s director of housekeeping, a neighbor, I observed Art Museum Director Anne d'Harnoncourt and a neighborhood mom confer on dog training strategies. This is a nexus where we neighbors regularly connect in little Jane Jacobian moments on our way to and from our errands and walks.
There is one sore spot on this lovely walkway and perhaps it takes a neighbor with a couple decades of walkby experience to point it out. Our new neighbors should know that in my 20+ years of observing, nothing has ever flourished in the little strip of earth that parallels the “moat” wall. The previous owners planted boxwoods which, try as they might, through multiple replantings, always withered after a couple of seasons. The same pretty vines that seem so happy on the 25th Street side are dying wretched deaths in that parched little strip of cursed earth along PA Avenue.
Most folks I talk to agree that the work of the landscapers has fallen far short of expectations. Even the streetside lot on 26th, which is a quantum improvement in terms of eye appeal, was poorly executed when it came to laying down an appropriate soil base and proper planting. One day it was a bare construction trash strewn network of pits and trenches. The next day it was planted. The plants there now struggle and show the ill-effects of rushed, slipshod planting techniques. Several cute little rhododendrons have already succumbed. We’re also a bit perplexed that the lovely honey locust and black locusts that were planted along 25th, Fairmount and PA Ave were not extended back along the Meredith St. expanse of the Perelman. What, just because it doesn’t face the more trafficked avenues, it isn’t worthy of modest finishing touches? The museum needs to call its landscapers on the carpet to remedy these oversights. What they’ve done, or more to the point, what they haven’t done, is unworthy of this public space.
The most glaring oversight is the “temporary” PECO pole that furnished power to the construction machines, but now stands, an ugly sore digit, disconnected from the grid and ready to be extracted. But it hasn’t been and nobody can tell me when it will be. I buttonholed the project manager and he asked me if I had any pull with PECO and we both laughed at the irony in his question. Perhaps Ms. d'Harnoncourt herself should get on the phone and work her way up the electric utility’s chain until this sore tooth is yanked. If you google my address, you’ll see why this particular piece of unfinished business is most galling to us. Before the construction, we had a beautiful, unobstructed view of the northwest face of the museum proper and its sycamores. The lot used to be a blacktop sea of cars, parked two or three to the space. We now have a lovely view of the locust trees and shrubbery of the lot. On the whole, a vast improvement. Then standing smack in the middle of our transom window is this bare ugly projection which resembles nothing so much as a rudely upthrust Brobdingnagian middle finger. It is a visual insult that we endured while it was needed and as it no longer serves any purpose, it has to go.
Finally, I chatted up Inky staff shutterbug Michael Bryant when he was taking his photos in preparation for Inga's article. His 7th picture (on the philly.com site) shows the interior view of the ventilation stack and I agree with Ms. Saffron's assertion that it is butt ugly and inexcusable. Imagine in its absence, the light and the view of that pretty brick, tree and sun-dappled piece of 25th St. looking out or the lovely view of the museum’s atrium looking in. It could have been a lively and enduring visual comment on how a cultural landmark and its resident neighbors interact and
instead it looks like an architectural mooning (and I’m not talking astronomy) to the genial neighborhood that has for the most part, endured the three years of construction with patience and good grace. The architect had the Perelman's huge interior space to work with that would have been invisible from the street. What WAS he thinking?Even more inexplicable and you can see it from Mr. Bryant’s photo, are the uneven flashing, the ladder and rag, (if that’s what these are) sticking up from the top. Walking up 25th St. one eerie moonlight night, the glint of the ladder and the rag flapping in the wind caught my eye and sent a chill down my spine. I had to stop and stare down this grim trompe-l'œil for several minutes because it looked for all the world like the malevolent scarecrow in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. (It was a lot darker and creepier then, trust me.)
I can’t claim to always understand art, but I sometimes wonder if I understand architecture even less.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
God's Scariest Little Army
B and I watched the movie Jesus Camp last Friday. He wanted me to record (ahem, I mean “time shift") it so that we could watch it again but I’d already returned it. So I put it in my Netflix queue and browsed some of the 624 flixters reviews of the movie. Yes, 624. It has to be a record. Obviously this doc really hit a legion of hot-buttons and one or two of my own, so it is the subject of today’s cultural vulturalism.
I found the reviews by the people who claim to be Fundamentalist or Evangelical Christians the most interesting and even unpredictable. One cautioned against letting children watch such potent material. I believe that this is a film parents should watch with kids and be prepared to spend hours discussing. Mine was vocally angry through most of it; his outrage at both the arrogance and manipulation of the budding televangelists were dead on.
He saved particular scorn for the poodle-coiffed, pied piper Becky Fisher and his BS detector pegged each time he recognized the way she used accusation, guilt and catharsis as tactics to break down her impressionable charges or her fast, easy dismissal of young people’s diversity and freedom of thought. I watched, without further comment, because I wanted to hear my son's perceptions uncolored by my own. I only broke my silence twice. The first time to answer his question, “Who are these enemies she’s talking about? I responded, me, you—anybody who doesn’t believe as they do.
I also felt inclined to point out Ted Haggard's sordid history/future after this film was edited. In light of his scandalous "fall from grace" the haggard one’s smarmy on-camera muggings and fatuous protest to the filmmakers seem particularly camp and grotesque, yet strangely reassuring. The dude was high on more than Jesus. Ted was the only person who appeared in the doc whose comportment and convictions seemed insincere from the first note. Gosh, how surprising. The other subjects, scary as we found them, do seem to be without artifice, while Mr. Walk Both Ways Haggard clearly loved his closeup above all.
Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18
Most gratifying for a parent, was my son's shrewd connection of all the military paraphenalia so rapturously embraced by these little soldiers of Christ and how their brand of fundamentalism was as raw and intolerant as anything coming out of the madrases of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These little crusaders, who are no doubt well-coached to say so, claim that they are spiritual warriors, but in their combat fatigues, fascist-stiff-
armed salutes, camouflage war paint and martial kick/punch dancing, seemed less about the beatitudes and more ready to strap on explosives and meet Jesus head on. Body language speaks volumes. So do words.
“There are two types of people – those who love Jesus and those who don’t."
Why would anybody want to make that distinction? Am I reading too much into this to believe that this is exactly the sort of stark duality that sets up two classes of people? Jews. Aryans. Heteros. Homos. Believers. Infidels. Intolerance is always served up two scoops at a time.
Equally chilling was the little girl who approached a couple of African American gentlemen and asked one of them, with barely a how’d do, if he thought he was going to heaven. When the puzzled man answered in the affirmative, she shot back quizzically, “Are you sure?”
Afterwards, she remarked to a friend, “I think he was a Muslim.”
As I said earlier, I was most interested in the responses from the Christian reviewers who expressed ‘that these people are not like us.’ It gives me some comfort to take them at their word, but I would caution them, as I do my moderate Muslim and Jewish friends, that the radical proselytizers and zealots have so thoroughly stolen their show that perhaps they bear some responsibility for rebalancing the scales. Jesus Camp shows just how far all moderates have to go to rebalance the equation of democracy and civil discourse in this country. B made the connection between this film and Stanley Kramer’s glorious Judgment at Nuremberg, which we watched about a month ago. I offered that both films showed that while philosophies of intolerance may begin with monsters, they can only be perpetuated by the bourgeois, respectable, ordinary folks.
As the credits rolled, I turned to my son and quoted Mr. Jefferson’s admonition that “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." He asked me to explain and I told him that this was his generation, that it's clear that the bright, articulate young people he saw in this film are not going to be satisfied preaching on street corners and megachurches, but will march their self-righteous intolerance into the halls of government and when they gain power, will trample on your civil liberties in the name of salvation and persecute anybody they believe to be ungodly. Though people of my generation have created these little mullahs, it will be people of his generation that would have to confront them.
Some of these sparkly eyed little charmers will grow haggard on pharmaceuticals and the
temptations of alternative lifestyles. Some of the brightest will succumb to the relentlessly moderating influence of education. But enough will get through the grid that you better be ready, I advised, with activism, knowledge, arguments and convictions just as compelling as theirs. If your generation isn’t up to it, you might end up living in a red white and blue Iranish theocracy and watching your own children say the Christian Pledge of Allegiance in compulsory Jesus Camps. We grew up checking for Reds under our beds. I’m nostalgic for them. Ms. Fisher’s little morality squad is much scarier.
Not that I wasn’t raised with some pretty traditional values--particularly regarding pledging allegiance. The nuns at St. Ursula told us that for an American to pledge allegiance to any but the American flag is treason. Simplistic, but the lesson stuck.
We’re renting Jesus Camp again, for more family viewing and discussion and I would encourage parents of all faiths to not to try to protect their children from such controversial viewing, but encourage it, the better to help their kids become critical thinkers.
The documentary style is as clean and unbiased as anything I’ve ever seen or studied and I thought the choice of Mike Papantonio to provide commentary and counterpoint was particularly well made. Jesus Camp opens a window on a world that people of moderate leanings would rather disavow. People of faith, be they Christians, Muslims or Jews, hurry to distance themselves from such zealotry, but if Jesus Camp teaches anything, it is that silent complicity in such radicalism is like ink in water. It spreads so quickly that before we know it, we’re all stained. The Net says that Jesus Camp has been shut down by its founder in the interest of protecting her young charges. I say this is a hydra, with more heads than you can possibly imagine.
Keep the faith.
-@V@-
I found the reviews by the people who claim to be Fundamentalist or Evangelical Christians the most interesting and even unpredictable. One cautioned against letting children watch such potent material. I believe that this is a film parents should watch with kids and be prepared to spend hours discussing. Mine was vocally angry through most of it; his outrage at both the arrogance and manipulation of the budding televangelists were dead on.
He saved particular scorn for the poodle-coiffed, pied piper Becky Fisher and his BS detector pegged each time he recognized the way she used accusation, guilt and catharsis as tactics to break down her impressionable charges or her fast, easy dismissal of young people’s diversity and freedom of thought. I watched, without further comment, because I wanted to hear my son's perceptions uncolored by my own. I only broke my silence twice. The first time to answer his question, “Who are these enemies she’s talking about? I responded, me, you—anybody who doesn’t believe as they do.
I also felt inclined to point out Ted Haggard's sordid history/future after this film was edited. In light of his scandalous "fall from grace" the haggard one’s smarmy on-camera muggings and fatuous protest to the filmmakers seem particularly camp and grotesque, yet strangely reassuring. The dude was high on more than Jesus. Ted was the only person who appeared in the doc whose comportment and convictions seemed insincere from the first note. Gosh, how surprising. The other subjects, scary as we found them, do seem to be without artifice, while Mr. Walk Both Ways Haggard clearly loved his closeup above all.
Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18
Most gratifying for a parent, was my son's shrewd connection of all the military paraphenalia so rapturously embraced by these little soldiers of Christ and how their brand of fundamentalism was as raw and intolerant as anything coming out of the madrases of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These little crusaders, who are no doubt well-coached to say so, claim that they are spiritual warriors, but in their combat fatigues, fascist-stiff-
armed salutes, camouflage war paint and martial kick/punch dancing, seemed less about the beatitudes and more ready to strap on explosives and meet Jesus head on. Body language speaks volumes. So do words.“There are two types of people – those who love Jesus and those who don’t."
Why would anybody want to make that distinction? Am I reading too much into this to believe that this is exactly the sort of stark duality that sets up two classes of people? Jews. Aryans. Heteros. Homos. Believers. Infidels. Intolerance is always served up two scoops at a time.
Equally chilling was the little girl who approached a couple of African American gentlemen and asked one of them, with barely a how’d do, if he thought he was going to heaven. When the puzzled man answered in the affirmative, she shot back quizzically, “Are you sure?”
Afterwards, she remarked to a friend, “I think he was a Muslim.”
As I said earlier, I was most interested in the responses from the Christian reviewers who expressed ‘that these people are not like us.’ It gives me some comfort to take them at their word, but I would caution them, as I do my moderate Muslim and Jewish friends, that the radical proselytizers and zealots have so thoroughly stolen their show that perhaps they bear some responsibility for rebalancing the scales. Jesus Camp shows just how far all moderates have to go to rebalance the equation of democracy and civil discourse in this country. B made the connection between this film and Stanley Kramer’s glorious Judgment at Nuremberg, which we watched about a month ago. I offered that both films showed that while philosophies of intolerance may begin with monsters, they can only be perpetuated by the bourgeois, respectable, ordinary folks.
As the credits rolled, I turned to my son and quoted Mr. Jefferson’s admonition that “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." He asked me to explain and I told him that this was his generation, that it's clear that the bright, articulate young people he saw in this film are not going to be satisfied preaching on street corners and megachurches, but will march their self-righteous intolerance into the halls of government and when they gain power, will trample on your civil liberties in the name of salvation and persecute anybody they believe to be ungodly. Though people of my generation have created these little mullahs, it will be people of his generation that would have to confront them.
Some of these sparkly eyed little charmers will grow haggard on pharmaceuticals and the
temptations of alternative lifestyles. Some of the brightest will succumb to the relentlessly moderating influence of education. But enough will get through the grid that you better be ready, I advised, with activism, knowledge, arguments and convictions just as compelling as theirs. If your generation isn’t up to it, you might end up living in a red white and blue Iranish theocracy and watching your own children say the Christian Pledge of Allegiance in compulsory Jesus Camps. We grew up checking for Reds under our beds. I’m nostalgic for them. Ms. Fisher’s little morality squad is much scarier.Not that I wasn’t raised with some pretty traditional values--particularly regarding pledging allegiance. The nuns at St. Ursula told us that for an American to pledge allegiance to any but the American flag is treason. Simplistic, but the lesson stuck.
We’re renting Jesus Camp again, for more family viewing and discussion and I would encourage parents of all faiths to not to try to protect their children from such controversial viewing, but encourage it, the better to help their kids become critical thinkers.
The documentary style is as clean and unbiased as anything I’ve ever seen or studied and I thought the choice of Mike Papantonio to provide commentary and counterpoint was particularly well made. Jesus Camp opens a window on a world that people of moderate leanings would rather disavow. People of faith, be they Christians, Muslims or Jews, hurry to distance themselves from such zealotry, but if Jesus Camp teaches anything, it is that silent complicity in such radicalism is like ink in water. It spreads so quickly that before we know it, we’re all stained. The Net says that Jesus Camp has been shut down by its founder in the interest of protecting her young charges. I say this is a hydra, with more heads than you can possibly imagine.
Keep the faith.
-@V@-
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Skating on the Superficial
Rescuing Masculinity for What It's Worth
I’m reading The Road with my 13 year old. We’re about two-thirds through it and I pretty much know how it’s going to end. My boy snuck a look at the ending and he says he also knows the outcome. But we press on—a chapter a night. There’s not a lot of plot, suspense or character arc here. This doesn’t bother me. Maybe it deserves a Pulitzer, maybe not. Maybe this isn’t the best book I’ve read, not even this year, but I’m glad to be reading it and glad to be reading it with my son. I certainly don’t think it deserved the round pounding it received from the Inky’s book critic.
I had my boy read the withering review to me early last week and I was kinda surprised when young Master W. agreed with Mr. Wilson’s critique of McCarthy’s narrative conventions, but not with his overall assessment of the book. Sure, of the short list of people who did it both first and best, McCarthy will never out-hem Hemingway, or fitz Fitzgerald, but The Road isn’t exactly the facile fast food sizzler of Love Story or Celestine Prophecy ilk, despite the fact that it’s being hawked at Oprah’s Book Club, right beneath a chastely voluptuous (but yummy) “Bras of Summer” banner ad.
Despite a million little pieces of egg on her face, a flyover the big O’s site reveals titles like As I Lay Dying, A Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina. Her O’ness seems almost self-consciously intent on steering her tube fed demographic toward big L literature. Years from now, inquiring minds may yet debate whether The Road deserves such a capital letter—whether it was oracular or just apocryphal goth. But it deserves whatever attention it gets, then or now, because The Road has grit.
I must confess I hadn’t know Cormac McCarthy’s work very well. I haven’t even google-imaged him yet because I’m savoring my precognitions. I want to see how my image of him jibes with the real deal. With celebrities, I find the reality mostly pales measured next to my preconceptions. I want a ruddy-headed, freckled David Caruso meets Charles Bukowski type. Craggy face. Pockmarks. A drinker's nose. Except that the title All the Pretty Horses is a bit of a discordant note. Kinda fem, more suited to a Dominique or an Emilie than a Cormac. I start all my journeys on the most superficial of terms. What do I know?
Ok, curiosity got the better of me. The last link didn’t exist before I wrote the previous sentence. And now I’m a little disappointed. The romanticized Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. is replaced with a www reality thumbnail. He looks a bit more clipped and buttoned down than I thought he would. Ex-USAF. He still doesn’t look like a “pretty horses” kinda guy, but it still makes sense. He makes sense. I understand his protagonist’s relationship with his son in this ghostly, monochromatic world they’re passing through. The dying man lives for only one thing. Love for the boy. The kind of love that kills without blinking to protect him. The kind of love that would die, with a song in its heart, rather than see the child hurt. It’s a fierce, joyful animal thing. It starts when you see them pulled out of their momma and placed before you on the warming table. It hasn’t diminished an iota in all these years. Twenty-first century life is overstuffed, supersized. It’s easy for the love between a father and a son to get lost in all the chromatic distractions of a life with so many choices.
With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
In pre-apocalyptic America, young men without models (from literature or real life) of how to be a man, turn to mass media and encounter two polar and equally loathsome caricatures—the neo-Neanderthal, misogynist, hip hop blingmeister and the emasculated, marginalized, post-modern milquetoast failure. Both leave one with the cheesy slide from masculinity to machismo to misomania. Alas in the 21st Century our spears have been beaten into laptops. Our questions of survival are more existential than literal. Men are still going off to the woods, beating on drums and trying to reconstitute their masculinity through metaphors. Masculinity’s virtues seem virtually, but not entirely extinct. Without actually going to war, we get precious few chances to be warriors. Save in the loving of our children. Cormac and I are together on that.
Wilson snipes at the scientific credibility of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic limbo. The Inquirer critic calls The Road “just the latest installment in the pornography of despair.” Possibly, because I’m reading it to a 13 year old, the phrase hit me with the impact of a slab of raw liver to the puss.
Master Weiss: What are we reading tonight, Dad?
Mister Weiss: I thought we’d indulge in some more of that pornography of despair, son.
Master Weiss: Gosh dad, aren’t I a little young for that?
Mister Weiss: No son, once you get acclimated to the harder stuff, you realize that Tolkien, Rowling, Twain, Lewis, Lessing, Lem and all the rest of the ones we’ve read over the years are just pantywaists and poofters. No more soft-core depression or Hollywood endings for you me bucko. Time to break out the Vonnegut. `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Master Weiss: Dad, your rant is cutting into my read time.
Mister Weiss: Okay.
Wilson utterly misses the point. Veracity, color and hope don’t live in landscapes, favorable outcomes or even in language, but in the relationship. Let’s pray it doesn’t take a cataclysm to make either the point or the men of my generation willing and holy warriors for our children. If we can’t do that, then we are not men. Happy 13th Birthday, B.
-@V@-
I’m reading The Road with my 13 year old. We’re about two-thirds through it and I pretty much know how it’s going to end. My boy snuck a look at the ending and he says he also knows the outcome. But we press on—a chapter a night. There’s not a lot of plot, suspense or character arc here. This doesn’t bother me. Maybe it deserves a Pulitzer, maybe not. Maybe this isn’t the best book I’ve read, not even this year, but I’m glad to be reading it and glad to be reading it with my son. I certainly don’t think it deserved the round pounding it received from the Inky’s book critic.
I had my boy read the withering review to me early last week and I was kinda surprised when young Master W. agreed with Mr. Wilson’s critique of McCarthy’s narrative conventions, but not with his overall assessment of the book. Sure, of the short list of people who did it both first and best, McCarthy will never out-hem Hemingway, or fitz Fitzgerald, but The Road isn’t exactly the facile fast food sizzler of Love Story or Celestine Prophecy ilk, despite the fact that it’s being hawked at Oprah’s Book Club, right beneath a chastely voluptuous (but yummy) “Bras of Summer” banner ad.
Despite a million little pieces of egg on her face, a flyover the big O’s site reveals titles like As I Lay Dying, A Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina. Her O’ness seems almost self-consciously intent on steering her tube fed demographic toward big L literature. Years from now, inquiring minds may yet debate whether The Road deserves such a capital letter—whether it was oracular or just apocryphal goth. But it deserves whatever attention it gets, then or now, because The Road has grit.
I must confess I hadn’t know Cormac McCarthy’s work very well. I haven’t even google-imaged him yet because I’m savoring my precognitions. I want to see how my image of him jibes with the real deal. With celebrities, I find the reality mostly pales measured next to my preconceptions. I want a ruddy-headed, freckled David Caruso meets Charles Bukowski type. Craggy face. Pockmarks. A drinker's nose. Except that the title All the Pretty Horses is a bit of a discordant note. Kinda fem, more suited to a Dominique or an Emilie than a Cormac. I start all my journeys on the most superficial of terms. What do I know?
Ok, curiosity got the better of me. The last link didn’t exist before I wrote the previous sentence. And now I’m a little disappointed. The romanticized Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. is replaced with a www reality thumbnail. He looks a bit more clipped and buttoned down than I thought he would. Ex-USAF. He still doesn’t look like a “pretty horses” kinda guy, but it still makes sense. He makes sense. I understand his protagonist’s relationship with his son in this ghostly, monochromatic world they’re passing through. The dying man lives for only one thing. Love for the boy. The kind of love that kills without blinking to protect him. The kind of love that would die, with a song in its heart, rather than see the child hurt. It’s a fierce, joyful animal thing. It starts when you see them pulled out of their momma and placed before you on the warming table. It hasn’t diminished an iota in all these years. Twenty-first century life is overstuffed, supersized. It’s easy for the love between a father and a son to get lost in all the chromatic distractions of a life with so many choices.
With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
In pre-apocalyptic America, young men without models (from literature or real life) of how to be a man, turn to mass media and encounter two polar and equally loathsome caricatures—the neo-Neanderthal, misogynist, hip hop blingmeister and the emasculated, marginalized, post-modern milquetoast failure. Both leave one with the cheesy slide from masculinity to machismo to misomania. Alas in the 21st Century our spears have been beaten into laptops. Our questions of survival are more existential than literal. Men are still going off to the woods, beating on drums and trying to reconstitute their masculinity through metaphors. Masculinity’s virtues seem virtually, but not entirely extinct. Without actually going to war, we get precious few chances to be warriors. Save in the loving of our children. Cormac and I are together on that.
Wilson snipes at the scientific credibility of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic limbo. The Inquirer critic calls The Road “just the latest installment in the pornography of despair.” Possibly, because I’m reading it to a 13 year old, the phrase hit me with the impact of a slab of raw liver to the puss.
Master Weiss: What are we reading tonight, Dad?
Mister Weiss: I thought we’d indulge in some more of that pornography of despair, son.
Master Weiss: Gosh dad, aren’t I a little young for that?
Mister Weiss: No son, once you get acclimated to the harder stuff, you realize that Tolkien, Rowling, Twain, Lewis, Lessing, Lem and all the rest of the ones we’ve read over the years are just pantywaists and poofters. No more soft-core depression or Hollywood endings for you me bucko. Time to break out the Vonnegut. `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Master Weiss: Dad, your rant is cutting into my read time.
Mister Weiss: Okay.
Wilson utterly misses the point. Veracity, color and hope don’t live in landscapes, favorable outcomes or even in language, but in the relationship. Let’s pray it doesn’t take a cataclysm to make either the point or the men of my generation willing and holy warriors for our children. If we can’t do that, then we are not men. Happy 13th Birthday, B.
-@V@-
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Notes on Brecht's Galileo and the Schism Between Science and Popular Culture
Philadelphia's innovative Wilma Theater is currently running a successful and critically acclaimed version of Berthold Brecht's classic Galileo. As somebody who has made a living interpreting the writings of scientists and technologists for wider audiences, I can attest that the divide this play illuminates is great. We children of the "Space Race" might tend to dismiss this as a contemporary phenomenon, the product of a science illiterate, short attention span society. Galileo affirms that the enmity is both longstanding and near intractable. I did see and in fact participated in creating the video design for an ambitious experimental production of the play by the Villanova players about 18 years ago. My younger brother, who was doing masters work there at the time was cast as the Furious Monk. Little did we know that the slow mill of the Church in the guise of Pope JP II would grind out an apology three hundred years in the making, a scant three years later. But it didn’t take long for the spin doctors to recast Galileo’s falling out with the Church as one of the scientist’s personal hubris rather than of repression of scientific inquiry and freedom of thought. Galileo was censured, not because he was right, but because he had the temerity to insist that he was right. Right?
If you're casting about for modern Galileos though, you needn't look any further than the discipline of climatology. It makes you wonder what tools of intimidation the 21st Century Church of Capitalism used to compel the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists to tone down/remove some of their more dire, graphic and perhaps most compelling global warming projections from their recent report. I heard a little blurb about it on the BBC about a month ago, then stone cold silence since. I’d like to see what they left off the May 2007 report. Why isn’t the public clamoring for the unexpurgated version? Maybe they even know where the bees are.
Even Edge.com which I’ve subscribed to for about a year doesn't have a lot about the subject, but do check out neurobiologist William Calvin’s short take on this unreported story, a piece of which I quote here:
Our ancestors lived through a lot of these abrupt climate changes, and some humans will survive the next one. It's our civilization that likely won't, just because the whiplashes happen so quickly that warfare over plummeting resources leaves a downsized world where everyone hates their neighbors for good reason.
Disturbed by the immorality and injustice of our current military adventurism? Just you wait. The future wars for water and food will make our dirty little “oil war” an Audie Murphy cakewalk in comparison.
In exactly this vein, my 13 year old son and I watched Children of Men together, arguably one of the most brilliant films I’ve seen in a decade, a film which greater thinkers than I take as allegory for nature’s revenge for the assault of humans. My B said that he wished I hadn’t showed it to him, that it was the scariest film he’d ever seen and that he found it deeply disturbing. His response saddened me. I’ve never felt more ashamed for our generation, the first generation that knows the score and still chooses to ignore it. Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) said it even better:
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap."
Is anything human going to be around in 300 years to issue a papal apologia for this generation’s collective crystal sphere orthodoxy? Will there be anybody to apologize to?
I recently had to write mini-bio video scripts for Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and John Young. Young, the modest mouse of the bunch, despite being punished for whistle blowing after the Challenger disaster, stumps tirelessly for NASA, for enhanced funding, because among other things he believes that when our ecosystem comes crashing down around our ears, that we’ll be looking to the rocket men and women to bail our asses outta here. He has continually stumped for NASA to "redo the risk statistics for civilization extinction events and get the word out on what we must do to save the human race over the short or long haul." He characterizes his vision as real science by the people, for the people.
Likely that future apologia will have to come long distance, from space stations or a terraformed Mars. To which my wise, beautiful boy queried, that if we screw this beautiful planet up, do we really deserve another chance? I was far too depressed to answer him but we are taking him and his brother out to Glacier National Park this summer while the glaciers are still there. We owe them at least that much and so much more.
There’s a damned good reason we muzzle our scientists. They’re far scarier than the most apocalyptic artists and writers. Add to which, they’re even harder to understand and just plain downers. And lord knows they’re bad for business. So it goes.
yours in words and ideas
-@v@-
If you're casting about for modern Galileos though, you needn't look any further than the discipline of climatology. It makes you wonder what tools of intimidation the 21st Century Church of Capitalism used to compel the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists to tone down/remove some of their more dire, graphic and perhaps most compelling global warming projections from their recent report. I heard a little blurb about it on the BBC about a month ago, then stone cold silence since. I’d like to see what they left off the May 2007 report. Why isn’t the public clamoring for the unexpurgated version? Maybe they even know where the bees are.
Even Edge.com which I’ve subscribed to for about a year doesn't have a lot about the subject, but do check out neurobiologist William Calvin’s short take on this unreported story, a piece of which I quote here:
Our ancestors lived through a lot of these abrupt climate changes, and some humans will survive the next one. It's our civilization that likely won't, just because the whiplashes happen so quickly that warfare over plummeting resources leaves a downsized world where everyone hates their neighbors for good reason.
Disturbed by the immorality and injustice of our current military adventurism? Just you wait. The future wars for water and food will make our dirty little “oil war” an Audie Murphy cakewalk in comparison.
In exactly this vein, my 13 year old son and I watched Children of Men together, arguably one of the most brilliant films I’ve seen in a decade, a film which greater thinkers than I take as allegory for nature’s revenge for the assault of humans. My B said that he wished I hadn’t showed it to him, that it was the scariest film he’d ever seen and that he found it deeply disturbing. His response saddened me. I’ve never felt more ashamed for our generation, the first generation that knows the score and still chooses to ignore it. Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) said it even better:
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap."
Is anything human going to be around in 300 years to issue a papal apologia for this generation’s collective crystal sphere orthodoxy? Will there be anybody to apologize to?
I recently had to write mini-bio video scripts for Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and John Young. Young, the modest mouse of the bunch, despite being punished for whistle blowing after the Challenger disaster, stumps tirelessly for NASA, for enhanced funding, because among other things he believes that when our ecosystem comes crashing down around our ears, that we’ll be looking to the rocket men and women to bail our asses outta here. He has continually stumped for NASA to "redo the risk statistics for civilization extinction events and get the word out on what we must do to save the human race over the short or long haul." He characterizes his vision as real science by the people, for the people.
Likely that future apologia will have to come long distance, from space stations or a terraformed Mars. To which my wise, beautiful boy queried, that if we screw this beautiful planet up, do we really deserve another chance? I was far too depressed to answer him but we are taking him and his brother out to Glacier National Park this summer while the glaciers are still there. We owe them at least that much and so much more.
There’s a damned good reason we muzzle our scientists. They’re far scarier than the most apocalyptic artists and writers. Add to which, they’re even harder to understand and just plain downers. And lord knows they’re bad for business. So it goes.
yours in words and ideas
-@v@-
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Bookend view of the week -- in quotes
Lots of food for thought in this “bookend view of the week” – e cito:
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap."
Proposed racial epitaph to be inscribed into the walls of the Grand Canyon.
Kurt Vonnegut
1922-2007
“So it goes.”
“The ether now has a memory.”
DAVID CARR, The Media Equation, NYTimes re Imus no longer in the morning
In the gray land of unintended consequences, in the newest circle of hell he now finds himself shuffling around in, muttering, I wonder if the Great Imus will watch Jon Corzine hobbling on his shattered leg for the next several months and contemplate his unintended but undeniable role in yet one more fellow human's pain? How do people get that stupid? Still, we have reason for pride.
The "hate speech social engineering emergency response system" worked almost almost flawlessly this time. Almost.
Step 1: A big mouthed self-important well-paid blowhard spews venom in a commercial/public venue
Step 2: Big-mouth's sponsors look at the numbers, do the business calculations and consider the ramifications of doing the right thing.
Step 3: Big mouth's celebrity pay and celebrity soap box are promptly removed. He or she is free to continue to speak or think as they do. Just as an ordinary plebe. You and I don't get to use the "public airwaves" as a toilet. Why should anybody?
Perhaps more important, the proud, scrappy young ladies of Rutgers have a teachable moment to pass on for all posterity, to their daughters and grand-daughters--showing future generations how "full-court ass-whup the misogynist cracker" is played. There's an equal opportunity lesson America, bright as a diamond, right out there for the next bigot, of any race or persuasion, to take pause before imploding so messily.
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap."
Proposed racial epitaph to be inscribed into the walls of the Grand Canyon.
Kurt Vonnegut
1922-2007
“So it goes.”
“The ether now has a memory.”
DAVID CARR, The Media Equation, NYTimes re Imus no longer in the morning
In the gray land of unintended consequences, in the newest circle of hell he now finds himself shuffling around in, muttering, I wonder if the Great Imus will watch Jon Corzine hobbling on his shattered leg for the next several months and contemplate his unintended but undeniable role in yet one more fellow human's pain? How do people get that stupid? Still, we have reason for pride.
The "hate speech social engineering emergency response system" worked almost almost flawlessly this time. Almost.
Step 1: A big mouthed self-important well-paid blowhard spews venom in a commercial/public venue
Step 2: Big-mouth's sponsors look at the numbers, do the business calculations and consider the ramifications of doing the right thing.
Step 3: Big mouth's celebrity pay and celebrity soap box are promptly removed. He or she is free to continue to speak or think as they do. Just as an ordinary plebe. You and I don't get to use the "public airwaves" as a toilet. Why should anybody?
Perhaps more important, the proud, scrappy young ladies of Rutgers have a teachable moment to pass on for all posterity, to their daughters and grand-daughters--showing future generations how "full-court ass-whup the misogynist cracker" is played. There's an equal opportunity lesson America, bright as a diamond, right out there for the next bigot, of any race or persuasion, to take pause before imploding so messily.
Still, if we could just lose Step 2 altogether, we'd be in even better shape. Nobody needed to pause half a week and run the numbers before canning that mullet-headed turkey. Good grief. Next time, just do it immediately. Do it 'cause it's right.
The best lesson I ever learned regarding the balance between free speech, tolerance and hate speech was drilled by my eighth-grade history teacher, Audrey (the Dragon Lady) Bourgeois who stood before class and often intoned, "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend with my life, your right to say so." Hers was a more muscular and more constitutionally accurate read of free speech than today's shock jockeying. Imagine, Rush, stoked on on phosphodiesterase inhibitors or Anne on whatever synthetics make her apple bob, defending, not just tolerating opposing views.
Defense of the right to speak disagreeably makes a grinding halt at tolerating public hate speech. Just as speech defines and precipitates action, hate speech is always the root of hateful action. Every genocide we've ignored in the last century began with a small number of people talking hate in hushed tones, watching beady eyed to see if they could get away with it and when they do, bold talk quickly becomes unspeakable action. All because they believe they can get away with it.
The best lesson I ever learned regarding the balance between free speech, tolerance and hate speech was drilled by my eighth-grade history teacher, Audrey (the Dragon Lady) Bourgeois who stood before class and often intoned, "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend with my life, your right to say so." Hers was a more muscular and more constitutionally accurate read of free speech than today's shock jockeying. Imagine, Rush, stoked on on phosphodiesterase inhibitors or Anne on whatever synthetics make her apple bob, defending, not just tolerating opposing views.
Defense of the right to speak disagreeably makes a grinding halt at tolerating public hate speech. Just as speech defines and precipitates action, hate speech is always the root of hateful action. Every genocide we've ignored in the last century began with a small number of people talking hate in hushed tones, watching beady eyed to see if they could get away with it and when they do, bold talk quickly becomes unspeakable action. All because they believe they can get away with it.
And when they get away with less hateful speech, a little less hateful action will happen. The world turns just a little smoother. So it goes. This week we learned hate speech isn't free. All in all, a good week. From your comfortable love nest on Tralfamadore, don't abandon us yet, Mr. Pilgrim. There's some small hope.
May I have the night canopy please?
May I have the night canopy please?
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Late to the gate?
Day 1. Take 2. I blog, therefore I am. After casting about for a more lightweight, contemporary version of my dormant digital zine, the blogging craze finally connected with the simian steno pool at Trident Central. From the beginning, I struggled with the layout, time and list management demands of the monthly newsletter model which ceased to make sense long ago even though friends and colleagues know I've always had plenty to write about life as a conspicuous consumer and producer of big and small M media.
Well c.010101 is back and marches right into the fray of politicos, eroticos, scribes and pharisees who blog away at the drop of whatever they're droppin'. I like the spontaneity, interactivity and sense of community the better blogs cultivate. Heck, in some countries, you can get five years in jail for doing this. There must be something to it. I promised many moons ago, with c.010101's maiden issue, never to bore faithful readers, a promise reiterated here, to those who reward this post with a click. To paraphrase a more self-important media outlet's tagline, (I don't have voiceclips so you'll have to imagine the velvet JE Jones VO here) -- you give me a handful of minutes and I'll give you the world. Or at least a piece of it that we both care about.
yours in the faith,
-@v@- rick
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