Forecasting Consequences of Technology

My reading of John Dewey's Art as Experience seems to have led me to Walter Benjamin, particularly "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility," but also other essays he wrote around the same time (1936) dealing with "art in a technological age." That last quote is a Section Heading provided by editors Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings in the third volume of the Belknap Press Selected Writings collection. It has been a while since I have dug into Benjamin's writings. I think the last time I did so was in January of 2001, when I found a copy of the Reflections collection in the Old Lahaina Book Emporium while my wife and I were taking some vacation time before the beginning of that year's Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. On the other hand it was about a year ago that I saw Clive James discussing his book, Cultural Amnesia, on Book TV; and it seemed as if, among all the many authors he had read, Benjamin was the one he disliked most intensely.

Reading "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility," it is not hard to see what drove James up the wall. The text rambles on with considerable verbiage, much of which is highly opaque; and, while each section is relatively small, it usually comes with a set of notes longer than the section itself, which abound with references that, while familiar to Benjamin and many of his contemporary readers, require explanation from the editors. Still, this essay at least, whose focus is primarily on cinema with some attention to photography, is an important complement to Dewey. For, while Dewey's lectures were delivered in 1932, he never recognized either of these two media in terms of the experiences they induce or the esthetic qualities of those experiences. For those who wonder what experiences would have been available to Dewey, bear in mind that Charlie Chaplin made City Lights in 1931. Also, Carl Theodor Dreyer made La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc in 1928, although I have no idea when or where it was first possible to see this cinematic masterpiece in the United States. Thus, it may well be that Dewey viewed Chaplin's work as too "popular" to merit serious esthetic consideration and may have had no exposure to Dreyer.

However, not only does Benjamin fill a gap that Dewey really should not have ignored; but also he has a keener (if more pessimistic) sense of the relationship between esthetic and other experiences. He thus comes off as chillingly prescient when, in one of his notes, he allows his thoughts about cinema to migrate into thoughts about politics:

The crisis of democracies can be understood as a crisis in the conditions governing the public presentation of politicians. Democracies exhibit the politician directly, in person, before elected representatives. The parliament is his public. But innovations in recording equipment now enable the speaker to be heard by an unlimited number of people while he is speaking, and to be seen by an unlimited number shortly afterward. This means that priority is given to presenting the politician before the recording equipment. Parliaments are becoming depopulated at the same time as theaters. Radio and film are changing not only the function of the professional actor but, equally, the function of those who, like the politician, present themselves before these media. The direction of this change is the same for the film actor and the politician, regardless of their different tasks. It tends toward the exhibition of controllable, transferable skills under certain social conditions, just as sports first called for such exhibition under certain natural conditions. This results in a new form of selection—selection before an apparatus—from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors.

In this case we need to engage a bit of historical context for Benjamin. While this essay first appeared in published form in 1936, he began work on it in Paris in the autumn of 1935. That is an important time if we consider that Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens was first released in Germany on March 28, 1935. There can be no doubt that the dictator who emerges as victor by virtue of "selection before an apparatus" is Adolf Hitler; and the "apparatus" is under Riefenstahl's control.

However, if the conscious connection to Hitler is chilling (which Benjamin probably intended it to be), the unintended forecasting of American political practices is even more so. In Benjamin's own time Franklin Roosevelt was already presenting himself before the medium of radio with his Fireside Chats, while in 1960 Richard Nixon learned the hard way that a televised "debate" was not about making points with successful argumentation but about how one presented oneself before the medium of television broadcasting. The most salient passage from the Benjamin quote, however, concerns the depopulation of legislative bodies due to the priority "given to presenting the politician before the recording equipment." Had I not written last week about Newt Gingrich delivering a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, which, at the time, was "depopulated" except for the C-SPAN cameras, these words might not have leapt out at me with quite so much impact. However, if Benjamin had Hitler in mind when, in his principal text, he wrote about how "the cult of the audience" could reinforce "the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses," then Gingrich's little stunt was "one small step" in the same direction for an American politician; and it is now a matter of record that, by the time he achieved a position of influence and power, Karl Rove had no trouble with a "giant leap" in the same direction!

There is a sad irony to all of this. Dewey saw the esthetic experience as enhancing our sense of reality, disclosing that which could not be revealed through positivist propositions. Perhaps he ignored the cinema because (by virtue of its being too popular?) he could not see it achieving such enhancements; so Benjamin "took up the slack," so to speak, and explored the capacity of the medium for corrupting that same sense of reality. However, another future that he could not have anticipated was that technology would simplify the use of the "apparatus" to such an extent that it would be far more democratized than it was when one could neither make nor distribute cinema without the support of some major (usually business) institution. The result of such democratization, as YouTube has demonstrated, has been (with a few notable exceptions) a trivialization of the content; and trivializing the content leads to blunting any impact that the content may have. In other words we no longer need agonize over whether democratized video enhances or corrupts our sense of reality, because there is too damned much of it to have much effect in either direction.

However, if Benjamin could not anticipate how technology could democratize an apparatus that had once been controlled by a privileged few, he also could not anticipate a culture that could become obsessed with technological innovation for its own sake. The innovator who disregards consequences may well conceive another "rough beast" that then "Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born;" and, if those consequences are directed towards our sense of reality, then it is our obligation to ponder whether the impact will be sharp or blunt before the beast gets anywhere near Bethlehem. On the other hand, as I continue to watch John Adams, I am reminded how much of the "civilized" world viewed American democracy as such a "rough beast;" so perhaps it is less important to worry about fending off consequences than it is being prepared to cope with them!

Giving Mozart his Due

It is almost exactly a year ago that I took San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman to task for a one-paragraph account of a performance of a Mozart piano concerto in the San Francisco Symphony season that ran the gamut from the dismissive to the vacuous. Last time the concerto was K. 482, the pianist was Emanuel Ax, and the conductor was Osmo Vänskä; and Kosman was clearly more interested in a Finnish conductor's approach to two Finnish composers, one familiar (Jean Sibelius) and one contemporary (Kalevi Aho). This time the "victim" was the earlier K. 456 B-flat major concerto, performed by Richard Goode under the baton of Alan Gilbert. As the recently appointed successor to Lorin Maazel in directing the New York Philharmonic, Gilbert has been attracting almost as much publicity as Gustavo Dudamel, who will soon be a permanent fixture at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Ironically, anyone who witnessed Dudamel bring the house down at Davies Symphony Hall with his interpretation of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird would probably be justified in asking, "Yes, but what can he do with Mozart?" In that respect Gilbert provided a broader palette of offerings to feed our prognostications, balancing the Mozart concerto with Carl Nielsen's second symphony (within five years of the "vintage" of the Sibelius symphony that Vänskä had conducted) and the first San Francisco Symphony performance of Steven Stucky's 1988 "Son et lumière" (complementing Vänskä's United States premiere of Aho's much more recent "Louhi").

It may just be that I have fallen under the influence of a city that has a Midsummer Music Festival, but I continue to believe that a performance of Mozart can still tell us a lot about what a conductor can (or cannot) do. Thus, however familiar the music itself may be, the performance of that music is as important as the performance of less familiar compositions. This time at least Kosman doubled the number of paragraphs devoted to this portion of Gilbert's program:

In between, Richard Goode was the soloist in a charming but tonally mismatched account of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-Flat, K. 456. The pleasure of Goode's playing is its ineffable lightness; even in the athletic passages of the opening movement or the dark minor harmonies of the slow movement, he kept things fleet and translucent.

But he and Gilbert didn't seem to be in accord on this point. The orchestral playing was much heavier and more emphatic, which - depending on where a listener's attention was focused - either produced a sense of bombast from the orchestra or made Goode sound like a lightweight.

Once again we, as readers, had to contend with relatively stock phrases, which, when confronted with the reality of last night's performance (as opposed to Wednesday night's), did not appear to hold very much weight.

Most important is a need to recognize the broad scope of diversity that cuts across the canon of Mozart piano concertos. Symphony regulars got another "dose" of K. 482 about a month ago, when Jonathan Biss performed it with Herbert Blomstedt on the podium; and, as I have previously suggested, this particular concerto is very youthful in spirit, even if it is chronologically more "mature" than K. 456. Particularly in its first movement, K. 456 is a fabric of many voices, not just those of a give-and-take between piano and orchestra but also within the piano itself. Readers may recall that, for me, the most memorable part of Goode's Berkeley recital (now almost two months ago) was his command of the "discourse" among the three voices of the Well-Tempered Clavier fugue he played at the beginning of his recital. Mozart could display a similar command of such discourse in his keyboard writing, and Goode is a perfect pianist for bringing our ears into the thick of that discourse. More significantly is that a meeting between the multiple voices within the piano and the multiple voices across the orchestra demands significant "accord" (to use Kosman's terminology) between soloist and conductor; and Gilbert had a keen sense of how to engage his multiple resources with those at Goode's fingertips.

A good framework for this kind of performance can be found in the script of Amadeus. There we find Mozart writing about wanting to compose an opera scene that begins as a duet and keeps bringing in more and more characters, thus building up the complexity of the dialog that ensues. This is how the finale to the second act of The Marriage of Figaro was eventually realized. Ironically, Mozart was working on this in the time frame of K. 482. It might not be too far-fetched to view K. 456 as a "rehearsal" of this kind of strategy for managing multiple voices; and that kind of "rehearsal" continues into the two remaining movements of the concerto (although there is also a definite sense of that "inner twenty-year old" in the final movement).

None of this should detract from the attention that Kosman paid to Gilbert's approach to the twentieth-century repertoire, early or late. This is not to say that I subscribe to Kosman's approach to Nielsen. The truth is that I did not give Nielsen much thought until I invested in the recordings of all six symphonies that Blomstedt made with the San Francisco Symphony almost twenty years ago. I remember when Leonard Bernstein promoted the fifth of these symphonies back when I was a student, but I also remember having my curiosity piqued in later years by occasional radio broadcasts. Unlike Kosman, I have never been particularly concerned with matters of "idiosyncratic rhetoric and edgy harmonies." Rather, I was more interested in the way in which Gilbert achieved a significant difference in sound quality in his move from Mozart to Nielsen, then same way that Vänskä had done in his move from Mozart to Sibelius; and, to be more specific, I was interested in how the San Francisco Symphony was engaged to make that move along with Gilbert. Once again, this all comes down to the question of how the program for the entire evening is conceived. Last Thursday I wrote about the "architecture" of a program, because Nikolaj Znaider's recital felt like it was organized around an a priori static structure; but, in contrast, Gilbert's program (like Vänskä's) felt more like a journey. (This was a particularly appropriate metaphor for the program the New York Philharmonic presented on their visit to Pyongyang.) After all, Nielsen's own approach to composition could be seen as a journey from his listening experiences as a student to those of an adult experimenting with synthesizing experiences of his own (possibly in the context of support he received from Ferruccio Busoni, whose own career involved a rather extensive journey).

The way in which Gilbert and the Symphony "made the move" had less to do with whether or not Nielsen's symphony, whose four movements were inspired by the four ancient "temperaments" of choler, phlegm, melancholy, and sanguinity, was more "programmatic" than Mozart's concerto and more to do with a different strategy in how energy was being deployed. Nielsen may be less nuanced than Mozart; but Gilbert and the Symphony could make a virtue out of his more expansive (to invoke an adjective from his third symphony) sense of sound, which has as much emotional depth in its silences as it has when everyone is playing in full force. We could thus leave Davies with a sense of a journey worth making without worrying about whether or not one stop along that journey was, in any way, "better" than another.

This brings us to the "beginning" of this journey, Stucky's "Son et lumière," which was very much a high-energy affair. I have to say that I think that the title was a bit unfair, since it was named for those tourist-trap affairs that cover the world from the Egyptian pyramids to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, plagued by tendentious narration on top of orchestral forces putting out Hollywood sprawl at its worst. Stucky, on the other hand, was probably thinking about the relationship between sound and light in terms of the extent to which an orchestra could be applied as a palette of colors. There was no mention of Olivier Messiaen in the notes that Thomas May provided for this piece; but it was interesting to be able to listen to Stucky's composition in the context of having heard Messiaen's "L'Ascension" at the beginning of this year. In a manner that may be more consistent with Messiaen's mysticism than with Stucky's more cerebral bent, the latter's work seems to have less to do with "sound and light" than with "sound as light" (a position that is reinforced by some of Stucky's own remarks about the work). In that respect the journey began very much the way the Messiaen-to-Mahler journey had begun. This is an orchestra that knows how to be one of those palettes of colors, and Gilbert knew how to use them to deploy those colors.

To my ears, however, those colors came less from Messiaen and more from that earlier colorist, Richard Strauss. The opening (and also closing) gesture sounded to me, for all the world, like a percussion-only interpretation of the opening gesture of the latter's Elektra opera. This is not to say that Stucky's composition was an homage to either Strauss or that particular opera. However, it may have been why I came away dissatisfied with Stucky's choice of title, since I have always found sitting through an evening of Sophocles (even when tarted up by Strauss' orchestra excesses) far more satisfying that watching colored lights shining on the Parthenon!

Linguistic Legerdemain

I seem to have had another experience of Jungian synchronicity this morning while reading Charles Simic's New York Review piece, "The Troubled Birth of Kosovo," against the background of the deteriorating situation in Basra. One particular sentence by Simic leapt out at me:

At some point in 1998, or perhaps earlier, the State Department decided to take the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army—whose members were being armed from Albania, where the US already had a military and CIA presence—off the US list of terrorist groups, and to describe its forces instead as an insurgency.

While on the surface this seemed like a rather low level of nit-picking over criteria for category membership, the following sentences in Simic's paragraph made it clear that our policy was framed in such a way that appropriate actions were defined on the basis of such category membership. This, in itself, is not particularly distressing, particularly in light of Gerald Edelman's hypothesis that the very nature of consciousness (including the sense of self) can be traced back to a capacity for forming categories and recognizing members of those categories. However, one of the beauties of consciousness is that those categories are never rigidly defined; and one has to wonder just how flexible we have been (or can be) where critical matters, such as foreign policies involving hostile agents, are concerned.

Today, almost ten years after the Kosovo decision, the very idea of an opposition between terrorist and insurgency has an absurdist ring to it, particularly since we now tend to refer to Iraqi militias that oppose our presence in their country, such as the one organized by Muqtada al-Sadr that is flexing its muscles in Basra, as "insurgents" (not to mention the recent finding that there was "no direct link between Saddam Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network" of terrorism). To invoke another piece of terminology from the Balkans, it is clear that al-Sadr sees his Mahdi Army as a "Liberation Army;" but I doubt that we shall see this analogy explored by the mainstream media. Rather, our media continue to invoke the language of stability and point to the role that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is playing in achieving or restoring (depending on how pessimistic or optimistic the report is) that stability. On the other hand, when we read Al Jazeera English, we get a somewhat different perspective on stability:

Meanwhile, fighters loyal to the Shia leader [al-Sadr] rejected the prime minister's call to disarm.

"Sadr has told us not to surrender our arms except to a state that can throw out the occupation," Haider al-Jabari, a member of the Sadr movement's political bureau, said.

On Thursday al-Maliki said that Basra residents would receive a "reward" if they handed in "heavy and medium-size weapons".

However, in Baghdad an official from al-Sadr's movement said Iraqi soldiers had attempted to hand their weapons over to him.

"We told them they should keep their arms. We gave them a Koran and they went back," Salman al-Afraiji said.

This is all a bit reminiscent of the neoconservative reality-is-what-we-say-it-is premise. Neoconservatism of course was predicated on the assumption that the "we" was the United States; and "we" could dictate reality by virtue (sic) of being the only superpower. In other words "we" have forgotten that having more guns did not entitle us to dictate reality in Vietnam any more than it entitled the Russians to do so in Afghanistan. By all rights it is time for us to stop dictating reality and start perceiving it and, more importantly, perceiving it in terms of categories that are more flexible than those we have been trying to engage over the last ten years. After all, human consciousness has the power to synthesize new categories when the available repertoire is inadequate; but it may be asking too much for the workings of national governing bodies to have the same "cerebral capabilities" as those of the human brain!

Vindicated by John Dewey!

As I probably anticipated, my recent attempt to take a semiotic approach to listening to the blues met with resistance. Since my post here had grown out of a comment I had submitted to Truthdig, the resistance came in the form of another Truthdig comment by one Greg Todd. Here is Todd's reaction:

I suggest this entire area of academia—critics criticizing critics - be depth-charged, funding cut off, so people can get back to studying science or history and LISTENING to the blues, from Bessie Smith (if you like) to Robert Johnson to Washboard Sam to Sonny Boy W. and Little Walter…

While I appreciate the aggravation expressed in this text, my guess is that Todd does not appreciate (or care to appreciate?) the distinction that Stravinsky tried to draw between hearing and listening; and it is only through the recognition of that distinction that we can take on the sorts of arguments that Marybeth Hamilton set out in her In Search of the Blues book and that Anthony Heilbut brought to bear in his review of that book.

Now I can understand that there are those who would take umbrage at Stravinsky for suggesting that we lack a "natural talent" for listening; but that is where the speciousness of Todd's position lies. Our genetic code endows us with "natural" capacities for sensation; but the capacity for perception is up there in the cerebral cortex. It begins to develop in neonates, but that development can continue into adult life if the variety of our experiences is rich enough. So there really is more to listening than just letting the sounds pour into your ears.

This then raises the question of whether or not poor souls like me should labor over writing about that development or whether we should just allow it to happen "naturally" among those who hear. In that respect it appears that, once again, I have an ally in John Dewey in the text of his Art as Experience:

The function of criticism is the reëducation of perception of works of art; it is an auxiliary in the process, a difficult process, of learning to see and hear. The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task. The moral office of criticism is performed indirectly. The individual who has an enlarged and quickened experience is one who should make for himself his own appraisal. The way to help him is through the expansion of his own experience by the work of art to which criticism is subsidiary. The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. The critic’s office is to further this work, performed by the object of art.

I suppose that some (possibly including Todd) would see this as academic arrogance. However, having been immersed in Dewey for about a month, I feel justified in saying that, while he can often be opaque, he never comes off as arrogant (quite the contrary)! Indeed, it was precisely that problem of perfecting "the power to perceive" that occupied my writing yesterday about Nikolaj Znaider's violin recital; and it is why I shall continue to indulge in my right to listen to the blues!

A Problem of Rhythm

Were one to assess the merits of Nikolaj Znaider's San Francisco Performances debut violin recital last night at Herbst Theatre solely from the architecture of his program, there would be little doubt of his keen musical perception. The concert was framed by two sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven from opposite ends of his canon of violin sonatas. It began with the third of his Opus 12 sonatas, his first venture into this particular form, and concluded with the Opus 96, the last of those ventures. Between these two sonatas was the D minor partita by Johann Sebastian Bach for unaccompanied violin (BWV 1004, with its concluding chaconne movement) and Arnold Schoenberg's "Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment" (Opus 47). As Znaider put it in his opening remarks to the audience, the former was chosen for inspiring Beethoven and the latter for drawing upon Beethoven as a source of inspiration.

If, as I continue to argue, we go to concerts to become better listeners, then Znaider definitely engaged an interesting strategy for getting our attention. One might even forgive him for being a bit raggedy on the details. As I had written when I was dealing with András Schiff's decision to play an entire Bach keyboard partita as an encore to the second concert in his cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas, we have it "on record" that Beethoven had a high opinion of Bach; but that same "record" indicated that he had a higher opinion of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as well as George Frideric Handel! If we are really interested in orienting the Opus 12 sonatas around their "inspirational roots," we are more likely to be informed by Mozart than by Bach. In Schoenberg's case we need to draw the distinction between what he composed and what he taught about composition, particularly in the material compiled by Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein into the book, Fundamentals of Musical Composition. In the latter case the influence of Beethoven is particularly strong: One really cannot make sense of Schoenberg's expository approach without a pretty thorough internalization of the full cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas. Other Beethoven compositions are cited, but primarily as auxiliary reminders that Beethoven wrote more than piano sonatas; and the only violin sonata that appears is Opus 30, Number 2, in the "Scherzo" chapter. As to the former case, I would say that a "Beethoven connection" to any of Schoenberg's own work, particularly this "Phantasy," is pretty remote; and it would be more than frustrating to try to draw upon any of Beethoven's work for purposes of orientation.

So Znaider's strategy was, at best, a good intention; and we all know what they say about roads paved with good intentions! Therein lies the rub. I would not go so far as to say that Znaider was leading us, as listeners, down the road to Hell; but I would say that he was not leading us very well in any direction. I would then add that this "disorientation" was also present in his performance. In this respect I should say at the outset that my own listening experience was heavily influenced by the attention I was paying to matters of rhythm last week, particularly with regard to some of Joel Krosnick's remarks about the relationship between harmonic rhythm and metric pulse. From my point of view, the "bottom line" of Znaider's recital was that he usually had a strong command of the latter and did not seem to attach enough significance to the former.

Schoenberg "Phantasy" thus probably came out better than any of the other works on the program. On one of my summers in Santa Fe, I had the good fortune to turn pages for Ursula Oppens when she rehearsed this work with violinist György Pauk. This gave me an appreciation for how meticulous Schoenberg had been in his notation and an even greater appreciation for how Pauk and Oppens could still find the right "joints to flex" in order to express their interpretation of the score. However, this is a complex work; and, without a score to follow, I was at a greater disadvantage last night. At best I could say that I was aware of the radical mood swings that play out in this composition and the way in which Znaider and his accompanist, Robert Kulek, maintained sharp boundaries between those moods; but the individual characters of each of those moods were not particularly well-drawn, so to speak. Thus, while I remember Pauk saying, "Now we dance!" during the rehearsal with Oppens, listening to Znaider I could not, for the life of me, recall which passage had prompted him to say that! Thus, I am afraid that this was another one of those dog-walking-on-hind-legs performances. The work is performed so seldom that we have to be thankful that it was given even a passable reading; but I am afraid it was not the sort of reading that might lead us to become better (and more accepting) listeners of Schoenberg's music.

This brings us to the rest of the program. Krosnick had invoked the concept of harmonic rhythm in teaching San Francisco Conservatory students about the performance of Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms. Both of these composers were heavily influenced by Beethoven; and, while I am not sure about Schubert, I know that Brahms was also indebted to Bach. I suspect it would be fair to say that a command of harmonic rhythm would account for a good part of the debt for both of these latter composers. To some extent harmonic rhythm drives the overall structure of a composition, and that drive becomes more important as the durational scale gets longer and longer. Schubert was one of the first to attempt to augment Beethoven's scale, and Brahms took Schubert's directions at greater length and with greater confidence.

Meanwhile, the Opus 12 violin sonatas fit squarely in the time frame of Schiff's second concert in his piano sonata cycle. This was, for Beethoven, a time of early experimentation with both overall duration and the musical forms that would fill those extended durations. So, while that concert took place last October, those who remember it had the perfect frame of mind to bring to a performance of Opus 12, Number 3. What is particularly interesting is the way in which that device of harmonic rhythm is engaged to create deceptive anticipations of closure (not unlike the deceptive cadences we study in harmony); just when you are about to let the music "settle into closure," it turns on a dime and explores a new set of compositional gestures. Beethoven became very good at this, to the point that it was second nature to his compositional language when he was working on the Opus 96 sonata; but I have to say that I was not convinced that Znaider heard any of this in either of these scores. Thus, while we had plenty of dutiful technique and even some colorful bowing, it was as if the composition was there only to showcase these surface features; and, while his audience was, for the most part, enthusiastic about those features, I found myself disappointed with the "whole package."

This approach to "playing with closure" can also be found in Bach. I have previously written about this in the framework of Bach as a master improviser, the likes of which never really surfaced on such an extensive scale until John Coltrane came along to stretch our expectations regarding the durations of jazz improvisation. What these two shared was a gift for being able to say, "and another thing," and go on without sounding in any way boring or tedious. Bach does this gently in each of the dance movements of the BWV 1004 partita; and, by adapting our ears to it on the small scale of those four dances, he prepares for the radically larger scale of the chaconne, whose duration is approximately that of the first four movements. Znaider spoke about this to the audience in terms of a synthesis of sermon and impassioned monologue; but, having played (or tried to play) the two piano arrangements by Brahms and Ferruccio Busoni, I would have to say that Znaider is far from the mark. The chaconne is an extended improvisation on a simple foundation that has a lot more do to with Coltrane's prolonged explorations of "My Favorite Things" than it does with sermons and monologues (both of which often send us looking at our watches and getting restless in our seats).

Here, again, was where Znaider was disappointing. Whether or not he was playing notes from a score, the feeling of improvisation was absent; and, as a result, the listening was all about surface features and little more. The chaconne was more of an athletic accomplishment than a musical statement. All this leads me to wonder what will happen next season, when Znaider returns to perform the Brahms violin concerto with the San Francisco Symphony under Herbert Blomstedt. He has already recorded the Brahms sonatas with Yefim Bronfman, who is one of my favorite pianists; and I am almost always pleased with the shape that Blomstedt brings to his performances (although I have yet to hear him perform Brahms). Perhaps Znaider "plays better with others" than when he is on his own; so I shall be very curious to hear what sort of performance of Brahms emerges next season.

"Skilled" Labor?

Last January I accused Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, of "telling a story" at the Davos World Economic Forum in order to convince himself "of propositions without bothering over whether or not they are true." Last night Reuters filed a report of the latest story Stephenson is telling:

The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

"We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company's headquarters is located.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.

What are the propositions in this case, and how likely are they to be true?

Perhaps the most important concerns the "skill set" (scare quotes intended) for those customer service jobs. It is hardly a secret that most customer service engagements are handled by a representative who does little more than read from a script through a process that is usually enabled by current CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology. Thus the necessary skills come down to using the technology to find the right script and then following it by delivering the lines in a clear voice that the customer understands. Not only is this not a very demanding skill set; but also it almost seems to be designed to anticipate a time when voice-recognition and speech-synthesis technologies have improved to the point that humans will no longer be necessary to do the job.

Having established, then, that "skilled" may be a euphemistic adjective, we come to the more important proposition behind Stephenson's story:

Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as AT&T's repatriation of service positions and education grants, he added.

These propositions may well be true, and they certainly demand examination. My guess is that candidates for those customer service jobs are tested for both script selection and script delivery. If they are failing on the minimal comprehension required to identify a script and on reading text in a clear voice, then this may be some of the most painful evidence we have of how pathetic our education system is. On the other hand, if we are also celebrating the skills with which high school students now communicate through the Internet, then something is out of whack, because these two observations are inconsistent.

The inconsistency may have to do with that euphemistic use of the adjective "skilled." Internet-savvy high school graduates are, indeed, highly skilled and thus may be too skilled for what AT&T expects for a customer service job, which is more of a "McJob" (to invoke that entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary that so offended McDonald's). The question then becomes one of how AT&T is recruiting its candidates and how it screens the recruits. Perhaps they should own up to their euphemism, set a lower bar, and then select candidates who can be trained in script selection of clear reading. They probably would not even need high school graduates to make such a strategy work. This would not solve the education problem; but it might solve a broader problem, which is the risk of so many young people in this country going to waste as such young ages. This might then serve to realign our "sense of reality" about the institution of education; and, informed by that sense of reality, we might be better informed to do something about the underlying problems.

The New Adults

Jon Stewart got it right last week. The most salient feature of Barack Obama's speech was his decision to address the American public as if they were adults. However, beneath the surface of this glib gag (however accurate it may be) is the more interesting question of just whom is being addressed and how. This was the basic topic of "Welcome to the age of the sound blast," yesterday's Politico blog post by Micah L. Sifry and Andrew Rasiej. Here is their thesis sentence:

If 1960 was the year that TV displaced radio as the main platform for political persuasion, then the 2008 primary fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton may go down in history as the moment when the Internet ended the dominance of television.

However, we have to wade through a fair amount of expository text before we get to the interesting data points, which then build up to the punch line of the post:

So far, Obama's videos have been viewed more than 33 million times on YouTube.com — and that's not counting partial views, since YouTube only reports a full viewing as a “view.” His campaign has uploaded more than 800 video clips, and adds several more a day.

If you just look at his ten most viewed videos, here are some astonishing facts:

• The average number of views for these top ten is currently more than 1.1 million (nearly double the average from a month ago!)
• The average length of these ten videos is 13.3 minutes.
• There have been nearly 3.9 million views of the longest of Obama's most popular videos, his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race in America.

By contrast, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s YouTube numbers are nowhere as impressive as Obama's — a sign of her failure to understand and embrace the new medium than anything else. She’s garnered about 10.5 million views, but the average length of her top ten most viewed clips is only two minutes. Several of her top ten videos are actually 30-second TV ads, in fact.

Viewed in this context, it becomes clearer how important Obama's speech on race has been to his continued lead in the Democratic race.

In a pre-Internet era, the manifold replayings on television of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sound bites denouncing America would probably have deeply damaged Obama's candidacy. But millions of voters have been flocking to the web to watch his 37-minute response to the controversy, and observers across the spectrum — from Peggy Noonan to Andrew Sullivan to Jon Stewart — have praised Obama for speaking from the heart and appealing to people's intelligence.

The sound-biting of politics isn’t dead. Not yet. But welcome to the age of the sound blast. The weather is changing.

In other words the answer to the "how" question seems to involve the use of the Internet to get at "source material" that has not been "pre" or "post" processed by the editing and commentary of the traditional mass media, even when that source material requires an attention span of more than half an hour. However, as Craig Newmark pointed out in his own Huffington Post blog post early this morning, this is only part of the story. In terms of my own reasoning, the "whom" question still remains; and, in addressing it, we learn more about the "how."

This part of the story emerges in Brian Stelter piece for The New York Times this morning, "Finding Political News Online." Stelter's thesis is that those most inclined to use the Internet for their "source material," the answer to the "whom" question, are the younger generation. However, his thesis also elaborates further on the "how" question:

It is not news that young politically minded viewers are turning to alternative sources like YouTube, Facebook and late-night comedy shows like “The Daily Show.” But that is only the beginning of how they process information.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

What we may be witnessing is the next phase in an ideological battle that originated between Tip O'Neill and Newt Gingrich. O'Neill is remembered by many for both preaching and practicing the premise that "All Politics Is Local." Gingrich defied this premise by delivering a speech to an empty floor on the House of Representatives, knowing full well that it would be picked up and broadcast by C-SPAN. O'Neill retaliated by using his Speaker's position as a bully pulpit from which he castigated Gingrich, but the fight was just beginning. Gingrich ultimately made his point by releasing his "Contract with [on?] America" document, which basically turned local contests for seats in the House in 1994 into a national movement. Many saw the resulting Republican majority in the House as the death-knell for O'Neill's "politics is local" philosophy.

Ironically, Gingrich has also been a champion of information technology, which is now an area of concentration for him at the American Enterprise Institute. The reason this is ironic is that the Internet may be returning the conduct of politics to a more local level, but with a curious kink in the semantics of "locality." Stelter cites Jane Buckingham, the founder of the Intelligence Group, a market research company, as observing that the social filtering process through which news is distributed by the "YouTube generation" is nothing more than word-of-mouth practices escalated to the scale of personal social networks on the Internet. Put another way, word-of-mouth is no longer about conversations over the water cooler at work or at the corner bar after work; it is about the MySpace "friends" with whom the younger generation communicates and the Facebook networks of a slightly older set.

Here are some of the data points that Stelter invokes:

A December survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press looked broadly at how media were being consumed this campaign. In the most striking finding, half of respondents over the age of 50 and 39 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds reported watching local television news regularly for campaign news, while only 25 percent of people under 30 said they did.

Fully two-thirds of Web users under 30 say they use social networking sites, while fewer than 20 percent of older users do. MySpace and Facebook create a sense of connection to the candidates. Between the two sites, Mr. Obama has about one million “friends,” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, has roughly 330,000, and Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, has more than 140,000. Four out of 10 young people have watched candidate speeches, interviews, commercials or debates online, according to Pew, substantially more than people 30 and older.

In other words those who seem to have responded most to being treated like adults are under 30, which is probably the demographic sector most aware of how conventional media can manipulate their audiences, most skeptical of those media sources, and best equipped to use the Internet to seek out more reliable sources.

Politics has become local again, but the locality of those under 30 is not the locality of a Congressional district. Rather, it is the locality of the personal social network one has formed through the Internet. Obama has recognized this premise and applied it to his advantage, while Clinton is still strategizing under O'Neill's old rules. This does not necessarily make Obama the better candidate; but it illustrates that he has a better grasp of how we communicate (particularly when communication is a prerequisite of an important action, such as voting) than Clinton does. If that grasp can scale from the national to the global level, then it may be the "secret sauce" required for restoring the reputation of the United States in the eyes of the rest of the world (and depriving those seeds of anger, which can grow into terrorism, of the nutrition they require). This could well make him the best choice for the next President of the United States; but that scale-up question remains a big "if."

The divisiveness of the Democratic primary campaigns has, for better or worse, given us an opportunity to observe both Clinton and Obama under pressure. If the future of our country depends upon effective communicative actions, then perhaps one of our best assessment indicators will be how each of these candidates communicates under pressure. My own opinion is that Obama has been doing a much better job in both "presentation of self" and keeping "on message" over the points that matter most, while Clinton has applied her own communicative actions to winning primaries "by any means necessary" (which is, itself, another fundamental principle of old-school politics). If nothing else this is an indicator that Obama's commitment to change is more than rhetorical; and, if he really has that commitment, then the way it has sustained him through a major national challenge could well sustain him should he subsequently be confronted with global challenges. This may be what is registering most strongly with those no longer content to rely on old-school media sources for old-school news about old-school politics.

Blaming the Victim (Again)

Henry Blodget's latest blog post on The Huffington Post, "US Homeowners Still Living in Dreamland," may well be living in a dreamland of its own. It is short enough to be reproduced in its entirety to make sure that its argument is fairly analyzed:

When will our economy begin to recover? Not until US homeowners wake up and realize that their houses are worth what all assets are worth: what someone will pay for them.

The NYT's David Leonhardt chronicles the dreamworld inhabited by most US homeowners, a bright cartoon-land in which the value of their neighbor's house has dropped by 30% but theirs is still worth more than they paid for it at the 2006 bubble peak. These homeowners refuse to move or sell until they can "at least break even," which means they'll stay in their depreciating assets for years while skyrocketing inflation reduces the value of whatever they eventually get by about 4% a year.

Of course, those who inhabit only the digital world shouldn't cackle too loudly: As Fabrice Grinda observes on Silicon Alley Insider, start-up owners behave just the same way--refusing to sell a dollar of equity as prices drop...right up until they run out of cash.

In any event, our economy won't truly recover until house prices adjust. And in the housing market, at least, price-to-income and price-to-rent ratios suggest that that "adjustment" is likely to be down.

As often seems to be the case with my analyses, I would assert that the best way to uncover the flaw in Blodget's reasoning is through a scrupulous examination of his text. The problem in this case is that his argument trips over a conflation of two separate motives for "investing" (by which I mean the commitment of financial resources, whether "hard" or "soft," as in loaned or otherwise promised). The simpler motive is "acquisition for use;" and the other is "speculation." Most of us buy real estate because we want to live in it. Some of us can even afford a second property for use. (While living in Palo Alto, we purchased a condominium in San Francisco for weekend use, primarily for its proximity to three of the major performing arts spaces in the City. We also saw it as a good retirement residence, which is what it became when we sold the Palo Alto property.) My point, however, is that "acquisition for use" has been normative probably since the end of World War II, when having your own place became a fixture in the American dream.

Speculative investing is another matter, since it is basically a gamble on Blodget's fundamental premise: assets are worth "what someone will pay for them." Think of it as a "gamble on the future tense," which means that it is just like any other gamble, whether it involves which horse wins the race or what the price of Google will be at the end of the calendar year. Most gambles thrive on the premise that "anyone can play;" and those who run the gambles profit because, when anyone plays, most of them are going to lose. In other words investing in real estate for its future value is no different than buying stock for its "anticipated growth." It is risky, but it is promoted by those who do everything they can to get you to ignore the risk.

Whether or not homeowners are "still living in dreamland" is not the real issue. The real problem is that their dreamworld was imposed upon them by predatory lenders, who forced them into a speculative investment to support acquisition-for-use. When the speculation went south (as most speculations do), the victims no longer had what they thought they had acquired for use. The current response of our Administration appears to be that these victims should have remembered the caveat emptor rule; but to what extent can this rule be imposed upon those who have been force-fed under pressure with deceptive information? I suspect that economic recovery is going to depend less upon a readjustment of housing prices and more on a general readjustment of the "rules of the game" under which the majority of our population can engage in acquisition for use.

A Scholar's Guide to JOHN ADAMS

I am not much of a fan of The New Republic; but I requested electronic mail notification of their arts reporting, just because good arts reporting is so hard to come by these days. However, their approach to reviewing the HBO John Adams series goes far beyond any expectations of "good arts reporting," particularly in the way in which it is giving "equal time" to substance and style. Basically, TNR has organized a mini-symposium, whose participants are historian John Patrick Diggins (the primary authority on substance), author Steven Waldman (the voice for style), and Kirk Ellis (the voice "from the inside," who served as both co-executive producer and writer for the series). The only real flaw is that the TNR Web site leaves more than a bit to be desired, particularly in its installation of hyperlinks. Therefore, for the benefit of those (like myself) whose interest in the series borders on rabid, here are the links of the contributions to the symposium in the order in which they first appeared:

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=d0ec9cce-6bb9-4780-9bf8-43164578e791
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2c63e332-d8df-4944-bb71-5046a224f0d5
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4b007e75-ccee-466a-8400-34b4fc163f5d
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a00875f3-8e4a-4d0c-8cd6-93f63d052b94
http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=861e0079-e8ef-4b1c-9e06-3b398bab65c4

I am not sure that HBO has ever before triggered such a level of scholarly discussion (even for their Addiction series). What is at least a bit more surprising is that the enthusiasm for this series is not restricted to those of us desperate for scholarly stimulation. According to a post yesterday on the Vulture blog, maintained by Dan Kois and Lane Brown on the New York Magazine Web site:

… John Adams is getting the best ratings for any HBO mini-series in years.

Predation (and Perdition?) with Chutzpah

Early this month I ran a post entitled "Predatory Practices on the Internet," which concerned the plight of those so traumatized by (usually unexpected) unemployment that they become easy victims of so-called "business opportunity marketers." Like most of my posts, this did not receive much attention until this morning when I received electronic mail notifying me that "Sunny" had left a comment. Well, it turns out that the text of the comment was one of these business opportunity "pitches" that the post had attacked! Needless to say, I rejected the comment (since the post already had enough examples to make my point and had no need for potentially dangerous hyperlinks). Note, however, that I did leave Sunny's hyperlink intact, since it points to a really minimal profile (which, in turn, points to a blog with no entries). My guess is that the comment was automatically-generated spam triggered by something in the text of the post, such as that phrase "business opportunity;" and whether or not Sunny has a Blogger profile probably does not signify. However, since this seems to be a slow week, Sunny probably deserves the Chutzpah of the Week award for the blind use of a piece of software that directed potentially fraudulent spam to a blog post that was explicitly warning about such fraudulent practices! Caveat lector!

I Got a Right to Listen to the Blues

Some interesting conversation is taking place over at Truthdig around Anthony Heilbut's review of In Search of the Blues, by Marybeth Hamilton. I first learned of this book through an ad in The New York Review with the following paragraph:

Historian Marybeth Hamilton tracks the origins of the Delta blues legend to discover that the story as we know it—of tormented drifters and the devil at the crossroads—is largely a myth created by white pilgrims, seekers and propagandists who headed deep into America's South in search of an "authentic" black voice of rage and redemption.

Unfortunately, this turns out to be a book that has more to do with politics and exploitation than with music; and, if the author fails to "get the music right" (as I fear Hamilton may have done), then the music is demeaned by being reduced to a "prop" for propaganda. This is why I appreciated a comment by "SamSnedegar" to bring the discussion down to earth with the assertion that "blues can be identified by hearing it, not by claims from the players."

My only quibble with this turn of phrase is that, in the context of my own discussions, it misses out on Igor Stravinsky's distinction between hearing and listening. Now, even if applying his words to the blues might send that old Russian spinning in his Venetian grave, I think they are still worth repeating: "Others let the ears be present and they don’t make an effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also." The irony behind all this is that approaching the question of what listening actually is in terms of the blues may be more informative than approaching it in terms of listening to Stravinsky. In order to do this, I shall appeal to a variety of sources that may not make for a particularly compatible mix; but I do this with the usual disclaimer, which is that this is nothing more than a "rehearsal of ideas." I figure that if I can get the story out "in rough," I can worry about details after further deliberation.

Having said all that, let us consider the act of listening in terms of Charles Sanders Peirce's three layers of representation:

1. There is the ground layer of an underlying text. This can be just about anything, from "The Star-Spangled Banner" through "Jesus Wants me for a Sunbeam" to "That's When I'll Come Back to You." For the most part it serves for little other than hanging a name on the performance.
2. Performance is the next layer, the actions you decide to take in rendering that text. (This does not fit Peirce as well as the other two layers, because Peirce was more occupied with objects than with actions. However, appealing to his framework with verbs instead of nouns is not a big stretch.)
3. Listening is the final layer, which Peirce called the layer of interpretants. In John Dewey's language it is the act of experiencing the performance. Dewey explained this better in terms of poetry. However, his words are still useful: "A new poem is created by every one who reads poetically—not that its raw material is original for, after all, we live in the same old world, but that every individual brings with him, when he exercises his individuality, a way of seeing and feeling that in its interaction with old material creates something new, something previously not existing in experience." In other words listening without synthesizing is just hearing. Quack.

My guess (on the basis of my now having read Heilbut's extensive review) is that Hamilton missed out on most of this. One reason may have been that, like just about all of us, she was stuck with doing her best to listen (giving her the benefit of the doubt) to recordings. A recording is rarely anything other than a reproduction of a performance, rather than a real performance (which gets us into Walter Benjamin territory). A good listener may come up with good hypotheses about how Louis Armstrong performed on the basis of the recordings now available (particularly the early ones); but those hypotheses can be neither affirmed nor refuted. At best they allow us to have conversations about those three Peircian layers (which can provide helpful preparation for experiencing one of those "real" experiences of listening to the blues).

Unpleasant Parallels

Zhao Ziyang was general secretary of the Communist Party in China at the time of the 1989 demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. By openly advocating "democracy and the rule of law," he became a hero of the demonstrators, which made him a threat to the prevailing authoritarianism of Premier Li Peng and state chairman Deng Xiaoping. (Deng's titles may have been modest, but he was the one who ordered the troops to surround Beijing and attack the demonstrators.) After the massacre that dispersed the demonstrators, Zhao was charged with "splitting the Party" and "supporting chaos;" and, as a result, spent the rest of his life under house arrest (at the rather auspicious address of Number 6, Wealth and Power Alley, Beijing).

Perry Link has provided this background in the latest issue of The New York Review as a prologue to reviewing a book recently published (only in Chinese) by Zong Fengming, which documents conversation he had with Zhao between 1991 and 2004. (Zhao died on January 17, 2005.) The book was published in Hong Kong and, as might be imagined, is banned in China. However, Link's review is less interesting for throwing a critical light on China when current circumstances have made that light pretty critical already. Rather, it is interesting because, from his position of exile, Zhao managed to transcend the questions of power and return to his original expertise, which was economics.

Zhao's rise to power had much to do with his efforts to advance the Chinese economy, particularly in the period from 1980 to 1987. Thus the value of this book lies in his perspective of that economy at the time when it was growing most prodigiously. From that point of view I would like to reproduce several paragraphs of Link's text (which include translations of passages from Zong's book) as a reflection of the current conditions of the economy, not just in China but also globally:

He [Zhao] comes to see, for example, that democracy is not just an attractive luxury that a modern nation ought to want for its own sake but an indispensable condition for the survival of a healthy economy as well. He told Zong that, during the 1980s,

I thought that as long as we get economic reform right and the economy develops, the people will be satisfied and society will be stable.

But by 1991 he felt that

political reform must go forward in tandem with economic reform … [otherwise] a lot of social and political problems will appear.

"Democratic supervision" is necessary. By 2004 he had concluded that "a market economy under a one-party system inevitably produces corruption" and that China's economic growth was now "deformed."

Zhao's analysis of how China's growth came to be distorted is very close to that of He Qinglian, whose 1998 book China's Pitfall Zhao read in captivity. In Zhao's words,

people who hold political power use that power to control resources and to turn the wealth of society into their own private wealth.

This happened inside a "black box," beyond public supervision, and on "an enormous" scale. On September 18, 1998, Zhao tells Zong:

As the market economy grows, it leads to the marketization of power and the fungibility of money and power, which leads to large-scale swallowing up of state resources, chaotic capital formation, extortion, and blackmail. This, in turn, makes popular opinion boil and leads to the formation of a privileged class, a growing gap between rich and poor, and other social problems that only get worse the more they pile up.

Five years later Zhao observes:

The government seizes land from the people, pushing the price down to a minimum, then hands it over to developers who sell it at a huge mark-up. It also manipulates stocks and figures out how to siphon off society's monetary resources—like the savings accounts of ordinary people—using the funds for public construction that stimulates internal demand and keeps growth high. … If people were free to shift their savings out of state banks, the savings would flow overseas and growth would end. There could be a rush on withdrawals and banks would be in crisis.

And where were China's intellectual gadflies as this went on? The voices that had been so eloquent in the late 1980s? By 2004 Zhao Ziyang saw the intellectual elite as having been co-opted:

Economic reform has produced a tightly knit interest group that is now joined by students who have been educated in democratic countries of the West. These people have succumbed to power, and what we now have is a tripartite group in which the political elite, the economic elite, and the intellectual elite are fused. This power elite blocks China's further reform and steers the nation's policies toward service of itself.

Zhao concludes that "socialism with Chinese characteristics' has produced "power-elite capitalism," which is "capitalism of the worst kind." He reflects that he had once accepted the argument that free speech is a luxury when people have empty stomachs, but now (in 1998) sees that the two are connected: without free speech, one gets a "deformed economy."

This is heavy stuff, but much of the weight comes from its potential for generalization. I would not be at all surprised if those references to elitism could not be traced by to the insights of C. Wright Mills, who began to examine elite concentrations of power in American society after the Second World War and by 1956 had collected his insights into the book The Power Elite. We can read Mills today as one of the most insightful of oracles to anticipate the current dire state of our economy; and, assuming that he was in a position to get his hands of Mills' writings, it is likely that Zhao read him the same way. However, even if Zhao was not able to draw upon Mills directly, his analysis of a "deformed economy" should be enough to awaken us to the extent to which the United States has been going down a path not that different from the one in China. The primary difference is that, while China has tended to deal with voices of dissent through brute force, the power elite of the United States has co-opted the capacity of the media to distribute information, thus "lowering the amplitude" of those voices to virtual inaudibility. So, while Zhao may have been talking about China in his conversations from exile, that exile may have deprived him of the opportunity to recognize the extent to which China was becoming the new model of an economic superpower; and, in the context of China's investment in our own debt, that model can only become more and more influential, whatever our cultural differences may be.

Too Many Crises?

This morning's New York Times column by Paul Krugman, which I happen to read at SPIEGEL ONLINE because I have come to find them a more informed source than the Times often is, has the headline, "Financial Crisis Should Be at Center of Election Debate." This may well be the case; but, back when I was worrying about how I would vote on Super Tuesday, it seemed as if Krugman was putting the health care crisis as the center of the debate with his meticulous analysis of the differences between the plans being proposed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Then, speaking of the Times, there was this morning's article by Richard Pérez-Peña about the "crisis" status of the war in Iraq at a time when the American death toll has passed the 4000 mark:

Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The drop in coverage parallels — and may be explained by — a decline in public interest. Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that more than 50 percent of Americans said they followed events in Iraq “very closely” in the months just before and after the war began, but that slid to an average of 40 percent in 2006, and has been running below 30 percent since last fall.

The 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded to The Age of Anxiety, a long poem by W. H. Auden that sought to dig into the souls of ordinary people in a time of crisis (the crisis in this case being the Second World War and the people being patrons of a bar in New York City). Auden's poetic analysis, however, had the literary advantage of being able to confine itself to one crisis at a time. Today's "age of anxiety" is one in which crises are coming at us from every conceivable direction. Not only is it too much for any of us to sort out in any sensible way, but it seems as if those who would lead us are no better off. Our current leadership holds to a faith-based optimism, which seems to lack all sense of reality; and, while there was enough substance in the proposals for health care to warrant the depth of analysis that Krugman provided, the discussion of Iraq has been top-heavy with good intentions and, as Krugman pointed out in his column today, all of the candidates have been depressingly weak in their efforts to address economic matters.

What is lacking is nothing less than sheer cowardice in the face of an intimidating pile of problems, each of which is of crisis proportions. I attribute it to what I have called our "cultural fear" of thinking in terms of worst-case scenarios. The prevailing wisdom is that one cannot get elected by talking about how bad things are, even when the ultimate message is one of how to make them better. In other words the demands of politics outweigh the demands for clear and analytic thinking applied to crisis management. The reason is summed up in one simple precept: You can't solve any problems unless you get elected. However, one of the more important general lessons that we could take from the final season of The Wire was that, even after you are elected, you may still not be able to do anything about those problems, particularly if your "political future" counts for more than the problems of the present. Personally, I suspect that the real liability in talking about how bad things are is that most of the people who hear you know this already and are just plain reluctant to believe in any solutions you have to offer. They certainly are skeptical about any solution grounded in "theory."

This brings us back to the Great Depression. The debate over whether or not the New Deal programs actually ended that economic crisis is less important than the fact that those programs dealt with practice, rather than theory. They provided people with things to do at a time when they were deep in the psychological depression of helplessness. They are also a product of a mentality that accepted a significant pragmatic principle, as articulated by Franklin Roosevelt:

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.

It is not that we are drowning in more crises than we could have conceived but that we all seem to feel as if nothing can be done about them. Unless voters start hearing more about practice, they may be too (psychologically) depressed by November to have much will to vote at all; and that would really be a worst-case scenario!

A Feast of Young Blood

There was so much attention to Gustavo Dudamel making his debut conducting the San Francisco Symphony this week at Davies Symphony Hall that piano soloist Kirill Gerstein ran a risk of almost total neglect. In the San Francisco Chronicle Joshua Kosman banished him to his two final paragraphs, which may have been there to fill out the remaining space allotted for his review:

The first half of the program was devoted to Rachmaninoff's First Piano Concerto, a crudely sketchy approximation of the Romantic concerto tradition that the composer would master much more persuasively in his later works.

Pianist Kirill Gerstein, appearing for the first time on a Symphony subscription program after a 2005 debut on the Summer in the City series, made an impressive showing, romping nimbly through the piece's passagework and collaborating with Dudamel in a briskly rhythmic account of the two outer movements. I'd be eager to hear him again in a repertoire worthy of his talents.

This left Kosman with plenty more room to wax over how Dudamel had turned his audience "into a mass of starry-eyed teenagers, awestruck at the sight of a celebrity idol;" and, indeed, celebrity status may have had a lot to do with why all three of this week's concerts enjoyed sold-out capacity. Nevertheless, what both Gerstein and Dudamel did with one of Sergei Rachmaninoff's earliest attempts at composition (from his student period with opus number 1) was far more important than the tyro status of the composition. Yes, anyone could fill up many inches of column space waxing over Dudamel's intricate control of all the details of Igor Stravinsky's complete score for the Firebird ballet with its orchestral resources that Stravinsky himself later called "wastefully large;" and there is no question that this score, particularly when expanded beyond the excerpts performed as a suite, deserves a major place in any "repertoire worthy of the talents" of a serious conductor, if only, for no other reason, because it deserves to be rescued from the inadequate resources it usually receives when in the orchestra pit at a ballet performance. However, as I have previously written, the real test of performance skill comes when one needs to deliver a work that is not "up there" among the recognized masterpieces.

Rachmaninoff's score is neither crude nor sketchy, but also it is not particularly imaginative. It serves as little more than a platform for a dazzling display of keyboard technique, making it another example of the sort of composition that Johannes Brahms would dismiss as "Lisztich." As I observed about a month ago, the primary factor that rescues Piotr Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto from this adjective is his sense of orchestral sound; and, while Rachmaninoff came up with more color than most of Franz Liszt's orchestral efforts, he still fell far short of Tchaikovsky. This poses an interesting question: Confronted with all the known limitations, are soloist and conductor obliged to find a way to make lemonade from this lemon?

I think the answer is a definite "yes!" Once a commitment has been made to perform a work, then that commitment carries the obligation of performing it in such a way that the audience will not feel they have been wasting their time listening to it. (I should point out that I know of at least one conductor who has disagreed with me on at least one occasion. I shall not name any names, but the work in question happened to be Rachmaninoff's third symphony.) Listening to the way in which Gerstein and Dudamel approach this concerto did not feel like a waste of time at all. Most importantly, Gerstein had a perfectly composed approach to all the technical demands that Rachmaninoff piled onto this score. He was the exact opposite of Nikolai Lugansky, who, when performing the Tchaikovsky concerto last month, could not let a note sound without banging the hell out of it. Gerstein could not only play every note with the right touch, but his touch was informed by a keen understanding of how to sort out all those notes in Rachmaninoff's pile into successive layers of embellishment. That understanding was clearly shared by Dudamel, who worked with Gerstein to deploy the (admittedly weak) orchestral score to reinforce Gerstein's conception of how the composition "worked;" and, if Rachmaninoff tended to be weak on coloration, Dudamel knew how to bring the colors up to a level where they enhanced our listening experience. The result was far more of a treat than one would have anticipated (particularly if one had been unfortunate enough to have read Kosman's dismissive remarks); and, if the audience came for Dudamel, they were just as appreciative of Gerstein.

Indeed, they were so appreciative as to encourage his decision to take a solo encore. This was an arrangement of George Gershwin's "Embraceable You," probably from Gerstein's debut recording, in which case the arrangement was by Earl Wild. Wild is one of my favorite pianists, particularly after I heard his Art of the Transcription recital many years ago at Carnegie Hall. Wild has a keen understanding of Liszt and has long been interested in performing the many transcriptions that Liszt prepared. He also has a long history as a "working" pianist, having served as "staff pianist" for the ABC television network. This provides him with a good "show-biz" take on Gershwin; but this particular transcription was more informed by Liszt's compositional approach. Gerstein's encore was thus in a totally different league from the arrangements we find in George Gershwin's Song Book (which, incidentally, do not include "Embraceable You").

All this attention to Gerstein is not meant to deny the spotlight from Dudamel; but I do not particularly like writing texts that say little more than "Me, too!" I have no major disagreements with the way in which Kosman called things in his review of the Thursday night performance of the Firebird score. However, having written many dance reviews earlier in my life, I have to observe that even Tamara Karsavina (the original Firebird) would have risked twisting an ankle trying to dance to Dudamel's tempo for the "Dance of the Firebird" section. I am not sure why he chose such a demanding tempo; but, since he was not working with dancers, he certainly had more flexibility in the choices he made. By most standards this is a rather long ballet, and the plot tends to be pretty opaque to anyone not familiar with Russian folklore. Without having to worry about a stage full of dancers, elaborate costumes, and colorful scenery, Dudamel was in a position to keep things moving along at a clip that did not necessarily honor the underlying scenario; and I was pretty happy with how he did this. As far as the rest of the audience was concerned, Kosman already said his piece about that!

One Giant Leap for Opera Video

Any misgivings I had about last week's HDLive telecast from the Metropolitan Opera were dispatched en masse when I returned for today's telecast of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. This was in spite of the illness that prevented Ben Heppner from singing Tristan and led to Deborah Voigt (who also had a smaller bout with illness) having to sing Isolde opposite four different Heldentenors. Today's Tristan was Robert Dean Smith, who has sung Tristan many times in Europe but was making his first American appearance in the role. He was definitely worth both hearing and seeing. Not only did he have the quality of voice and Wagner-scale endurance for the music; but also he had a keen sense of drama that held up well under the not-always-complimentary eye of the video camera. Voigt made an excellent partner for him, which was particularly impressive since she confessed to Susan Graham during her intermission interview that there had been no time for the two of them to come together for any rehearsals.

However, the real star of the telecast itself was video director Barbara Willis Sweete. If she was responsible for all the things that displeased me about last week's telecast of Peter Grimes (and the general problem of video broadcasts of music performances), then she has now gone a long way towards redeeming herself. The reason was that, for this production, she decided to experiment with how video technology could add to the opera experience; and her decision was apparently encouraged (if not incited) by general manager Peter Gelb. The two of them also made the bold move of not saying anything about the experiment until the intermission after the first act.

Nevertheless, it did not take long to discover that this was not the video equivalent of point-and-click. Our very first image from the stage was a reduced-scale view in the center of the screen, which gradually expanded to fill the screen during the opening sailor's song. As the act progressed Sweete deployed different strategies for partitioning the screen, allowing us to see a broad view of the entire stage alongside close-ups. Done the wrong way, this would have come off as gimmickry that did little more than interfere with attempts to watch the opera as if we were actually sitting in the Met; but her strategies were clearly well informed by the dramatic strategy of the libretto. Every "move" she executed made sense as a coherent vision of Dieter Dorn's approach to staging this opera.

The result was not only one of the best visualizations of Tristan but also perhaps the best way to introduce a novice to what many (myself included?) would regard as the most important opera of Wagner's career. Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk philosophy meant that he was as responsible for the libretto as he was for the music and stage directions; and, as I remarked about the San Francisco Opera production of Tannhäuser, his literary skills were usually the weakest link in his chain. Thus, while the music has a firm hand on how the story unfolds, the text, whether in the original German or in English titles, does not always enhance that unfolding. To a great extent Sweete's video work compensated for Wagner's greatest shortcoming, following the motivational leads of the music while using her camera strategies to lend a bit more credibility to the flow of the text.

Needless to say, the production designer makes the most important decisions about how the text is to be interpreted, which is why I credited Sweete for producing "a coherent vision" for Dorn's staging; but, because her cameras could do things that the singers could not do, she used that vision as a point of departure and ultimately delivered it with far greater impact. Perhaps her most effective move came in the third act, just before Isolde's "Mild und leise" aria. At this point in the story, except for Isolde, Brangäne (Michelle DeYoung) and King Marke (Matti Salminen) are the only characters still alive, sorting out all the fatal consequences of Brangäne's decision to substitute a love potion for a death potion in the first act. Sweete chose to give each of these characters a "personal window" on the screen. While Brangäne and Marke vent their grief on either side, Isolde occupies the center silently with the sort of blank stare that makes it clear that she has already separated herself from the world of the living. On the stage this would have been harder to appreciate because of the physical distance between the singers. On the screen the effect was somewhat like that of a triptych that provides three perspectives on a common theme.

The other requirement for making a video like this work is the "video presence" of each of the singers. While the Peter Grimes video tended to make its points through gestural quirks that revealed underlying character traits, Tristan relied more on overall postural composition. Thus, every singer had to be as expressive with his/her body for video close-ups as with his/her voice. In this respect I cannot fault any of them, including Smith who probably had not previously had to work with this particular medium in mind. However, the singer who seems to have benefitted the most from this approach was Salminen, who in the second act had to cope with Wagner's text at its most long-winded and convince us that the real message was in the music. Salminen's Marke was anything but incidental to the story, and his performance under the eye of Sweete's cameras gave us a far deeper appreciation of his situation than many performances do.

Finally, the impression I got from Sweete's intermission conversation with Gelb was that this was very much a "live" (but well-rehearsed) performance on her part. She clearly had worked out what needed to be done; but the shots still had to be called in "real time," as they would in any "live" performance. If so, then, in the long-view history of video production, she may be the first director who deserves to be declared a "descendent" of Jordan Whitelaw, who did so much to enhance the experience of watching the Boston Symphony Orchestra on television. She has moved the Whitelaw strategy from the concert hall to the opera stage and now has one success to her name. Nevertheless, I suspect that her creativity is very much a product of her not being afraid to experiment; and, as we all know, not all experiments turn out the way we would like. So, since Gelb seems to have a major stake in the role she is playing in "delivering" the Met to a larger audience, she has my fondest wishes for a strong learning curve!

The Sound of a Sextet

I sometimes feel at a disadvantage for not being able to play any instrument in the string family. (No, I do not count the washtub bass that I played during my brief engagement with a bluegrass group.) There is something about the rich diversity of sound one can evoke from just one of these instruments that compounds in such remarkable ways as the ensemble grows. One could hear this in the concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music that featured three members of the violin faculty, and one heard it last night in the Chamber Music Masters concert at the Conservatory that featured cellist Joel Krosnick. The first of these concerts progressed from duos to a trio; the second culminated in a sextet.

I have to confess that I am a real sucker for the sound of a string sextet with its equal pairings of violins, violas, and cellos. I think I got "hooked" many years ago, when Jaime Laredo organized a concert at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, which consisted entirely of the two Brahms sextets, each one played on either side of the intermission. I have a similar weakness when Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" is played in its intended sextet form. However, the ultimate in that sextet sound has to be Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht." When I wrote about the performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 515 string quintet that took place during Robert Mann's visit to the Conservatory, I described listening to it as being "a bit like eavesdropping on a very intimate and highly amicable social conversation." In "Verklärte Nacht" every instrument also has the personality of a unique voice, but the effect is more one of drama than of social conversation. Nevertheless, Schoenberg's approach to drama is rather unique; and this is what makes the listening experience so interesting.

One way to explain this would be through the terminology of Kenneth Burke, which seems appropriate, since the sextet is based on a highly narrative poem (of the same name) by Richard Dehmel. At its highest level of abstraction, the poem is a dialog between two agents: A woman confesses, and a man forgives. (This is not to reductively oversimplify the poem but, from a narratological point of view, to sort out the story from the discourse.) However, Schoenberg was not interested in the traditional approach of program music to illustrate the core story; and, as a result, he shifted his attention to the scene in which the story takes place. This is the "night" of the title, which is the focus of Dehmel's first stanza, briefly appears in the third stanza (which stands between the woman's confession and the man's reply), and serve to wrap up the final line, which characterizes the "transfiguration." In some ways the listener might to better to put aside the poem (which Schoenberg himself had suggested) and turn (which he had not suggested) instead to some of his landscape paintings (which I had the good fortune to see at the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan late in 1984. These canvasses are less interested in objects than in the play of color and light; and Schoenberg's approach to Dehmel's night and the critical role played by the moon (which may or may not anticipate the "moon views" of Pierrot Lunaire). From this point of view, the individuality of the instrumental voices almost constitutes an embodiment of brushwork in auditory form.

Now all this may be a ploy on my part. "Verklärte Nacht" is a rather long piece of uninterrupted music; and, while it may have five large sections corresponding to Dehmel's five stanzas, I still have trouble finding my way around its expanse of time. (This is probably why I leap at any opportunity to hear a concert performance. I can negotiate Gustav Mahler's longest symphony movements, but my ears still need more exposure to "Verklärte Nacht!") In this respect the Conservatory performers (Ian Swenson and student Daniel Jang on violin, Paul Hersh and student Alexa Beattie on viola, and Joel Krosnick and Jennifer Culp on cello) honored the seamlessness of Schoenberg's texture, consistent with his avoidance of sharp object boundaries in his landscape paintings. More importantly, though, they were sensitive to all the gradations of color in the sonorities, which is why I feel that the metaphor of brushwork contributes to the listening experience.

This sextet was sharply contrasted by the worked which preceded it just before the intermission, the Opus 7 duo for violin and cello by Hanns Eisler. Eisler studied with Schoenberg but is probably better known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. This duo (which paired Krosnick with violinist Axel Strauss) had a much sharper sense of "objects," cast in rather traditional forms but rendered with an extremely free chromaticism.

This Eisler-Schoenberg axis was complemented by the opening of the concert, which was the Opus 1, Number 1 piano trio of Ludwig van Beethoven. It is interesting to compare the Opus 1 trios with the Opus 2 sonatas that opened András Schiff's performance of the complete cycle of piano sonatas last October. They both begin with an energetic ascending arpeggio line, they are both rich in wit, and they both involve what, in writing about the Schiff recital, I called "the rhetorical impact of the rest." Thus, once again the case was made that, even in his Opus 1, Beethoven was exploring how to stray from the beaten path, setting examples that would later be followed by Schoenberg and Eisler. For this performance Strauss and Krosnick were accompanied by piano student Kevin Korth; and as a group they knew exactly how to honor both the impact of the silences and the wit that makes the listening such a treat.

All this set me to thinking back to Krosnick's comments on Tuesday evening about not performing the notes too "factually." Each of these three compositions had much to communicate to the listener; but none of them communicated through "factual" means. To go back to the narratological framework, everything was in the discourse; and the "story" was incidental. Once this was accepted, it was easy to let the music speak for itself.

Euphemism or Trivialization?

I received a rather strongly-worded comment from Doug Brooks in response to yesterday's post about contractors in Iraq. I was originally going to reply in the Comment area, but I realized that this was not an issue to be resolved by a piece of text on the scale of a comment. Rather, the comment I received was opening a door for further discussion; and I would like to use this post to go through that door.

For those (like myself) who read the comment and did not immediately recognize "IPOA" in the Signature, a Google search quickly revealed that it stands for the International Peace Operations Association. I suspect I am not the only one who has not heard of this organization before. Therefore, I think the best way to put Doug's remarks in context (particularly since his blogger profile is not sharable) would be to reproduce the IPOA Mission statement in its entirety (so as not to be accused to selective editing). Here is the text:

The International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) is a trade association whose mission is to promote high operational and ethical standards of firms active in the Peace and Stability Industry; to engage in a constructive dialogue with policy-makers about the growing and positive contribution of these firms to the enhancement of international peace, development, and human security; and to inform the concerned public about the activities and role of the industry.

IPOA is committed to raising the standards of the Peace and Stability Industry to ensure sound and ethical professionalism and transparency in the conduct of peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction activities. In this respect, all of our member companies subscribe to the IPOA Code of Conduct. The IPOA Code of Conduct represents a constructive effort towards better regulating private sector operations in conflict and post-conflict environments, and reflects our belief that high standards will both benefit the industry and serve the greater causes of peace, development, and human security.

Innocent civilians form an overwhelming majority of the victims in low-intensity conflicts around the world. Alleviating their suffering and bringing long-lasting solutions to these conflicts is one of the most serious challenges facing the international community in the 21st century. IPOA believes private companies and organizations specializing in peace operations can make a major contribution to this effort by providing fast, successful and cost effective solutions.

As a forward thinking organization at the forefront of the debate on the Peace and Stability Industry and its role in contemporary conflict, IPOA welcomes comments and criticisms from those concerned about the role of the private sector in conflict and post-conflict environments, be they from the government, NGOs, the media, or academia. IPOA is a dynamic organization open to debate and dialogue, and welcomes constructive feedback.

I suspect that the best way to read both Doug's comment and the text to which he is objecting is in the context of what I would take to be the primary sentence of this Mission statement: "IPOA is committed to raising the standards of the Peace and Stability Industry to ensure sound and ethical professionalism and transparency in the conduct of peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction activities." If Doug wants to go after someone like Scahill, then he would need to do it by refuting Scahill's questioning the "sound and ethical professionalism and transparency" of Blackwater, rather than accusing those, like Bromwich, who focus on a word like "mercenary," of trivializing a serious issue. Doug should also make it clear whether or not "the management of electrical systems at facilities in Iraq" falls within the IPOA scope of "Peace Operations;" and, if so, whether, in the interests of "sound and ethical professionalism and transparency," they will commit themselves to a fair and equitable examination of the best interests of Staff Sgt. Maseth's family and act accordingly.

I suspect that, were Bromwich to read Doug's comment, he would take it as just another layer of euphemisms. Since I have no ax to grind in this matter, I am willing to withhold my opinion pending further investigation. By way of a personal disclaimer, however, I should note that I have a lot of problems with that word "industry" in "Peace and Stability Industry," since the usual connotation of "industry" is grounded in a profit motive behind the provision of a product or service; and I do not find that connotation particularly compatible with, for example, seeing to the needs of "victims of low-intensity conflicts around the world." Nevertheless, if Doug's comment was an "official" statement on behalf of IPOA, then, bearing in mind my own perspective, I would prefer to see how that organization will apply its Mission statement to the Maseth case rather than read further diatribe against the use of the word "mercenary!"

Investigative Chutzpah

Last year the ABC News Blotter site often inspired my posts, including one Chutzpah of the Week award; so it is with both surprise and regret that I have to announce that this week's award (with full negative connotations) will go to Brian Ross and the ABC News Investigative Unit for yesterday's Blotter post. As we probably all know by now, there has been considerable interest in the official record of Hillary Clinton's activities while she served as First Lady. However, it has not occurred to me that Blotter investigations were primarily interested in these records for the mother of all bottom-feeding:

Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives.

An initial review by ABC News of the 17,481 pages of Sen. Hillary Clinton's schedule as first lady, released today by the National Archives, also finds significant gaps in time and many days containing only "private meetings" at the White House with unnamed individuals.

I can only see this as a full-court press by ABC News to avoid getting scooped by Fox on the sort of stuff that passes for news on their rival network. Yes, we know that we can no longer count on either print or broadcast journalism for any informative discourse leading up to the decision that will ultimately be made at the Democratic National Convention; but did ABC News really want to be so blatant about its trade in tabloid content? Of course, "blatant" is the sort of adjective that earns a Chutzpah of the Week award; and those who are interested in consequences may be happy to observe that I have removed my Blotter link from my What I Read list in the right-hand column of this blog!

Free Market Follies on the Internet

Hopefully, those who still evangelize over the virtues of free markets on a global scale enabled by Internet connectivity will find an object lesson in a report that Associated Press Technology Writer Peter Svensson filed yesterday:

Now and then, Internet companies indulge in what Zmijewski calls playing "chicken." If they're fighting over a contract, they disconnect each other, and wait to see who blinks first. The number of irate customers each company faces will probably determine who does.

David Schaeffer, chief executive of Washington-based Cogent, said the two companies had a "peering" contract, under which they exchanged traffic from each other's customers, with neither company paying the other for access. But TeliaSonera continuously breached the terms of the contract by not exchanging traffic in certain locations, and refusing to upgrade connections that were saturated, Schaeffer said.

That forced Cogent traffic to take long detours, according to Schaeffer. For instance, it sometimes had to carry data from a Cogent customer in Europe across the Atlantic to the U.S., then hand it over to TeliaSonera, which carried it back across the Atlantic to its European destination.

Cogent cut its direct links to TeliaSonera on March 13. For a while, customers of the two companies were still able to connect indirectly, through intermediaries connected to Cogent and TeliaSonera, but that possibility disappeared on Friday, according to Renesys

Schaeffer said the loss of alternate routes had nothing to do with Cogent, and speculated that TeliaSonera has refused to pay other providers for traffic destined for Cogent.

TeliaSonera did not comment on that allegation. Spokeswoman Maria Hillborg said the companies were trying to work out an agreement, and that a "requisite for that agreement is that TeliaSonera receives the compensation Cogent owes us."

Schaeffer denied that the companies were in negotiations.

The most important lesson that James Burke taught in his Connections programs for Public Television is that the systems we rely on the most are usually far more vulnerable than we think. Every now and then those systems drop us a little reminder: The first one I took seriously came when I experienced the Great Northeast Power Failure as an undergraduate in the Boston/Cambridge area. The Internet is one of those systems; and this is not the first "little reminder." There was, after all, a major connectivity breakdown at the end of January, which impacted the heart of the outsourcing industry in India. However, as far as we can tell, that problem was an unfortunate accident, while this one is a consequence of a dispute between two businesses that would rather play "chicken" than resolve their differences ("like adults," as some of my grade school teachers would probably have said). So much for those evangelists who preach that the Internet is "above" such matters as questions of conduct and governance!

We Have Nothing to Fear Except Our Own Contractors!

Associated Press Writer Ramesh Santanam may have hit on the perfect story to launch the fifth year of our military presence in Iraq:

A U.S. House committee chairman has begun an investigation into the electrocutions of at least 12 service members in Iraq, including that of a Pittsburgh soldier killed in January by a jolt of electricity while showering.

Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said Wednesday he has asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates to hand over documents relating to the management of electrical systems at facilities in Iraq.

Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, died Jan. 2 of cardiac arrest after being electrocuted while showering at his barracks in Baghdad.

Also Wednesday, Maseth's parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Allegheny County Court against KBR Inc., the Houston-based contractor responsible for maintaining Maseth's barracks.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages and costs, alleges that KBR allowed U.S. troops to continue using electrical systems "which KBR knew to be dangerous and knew had caused prior instances of electrocution."

There certainly has been more than enough to keep Waxman busy lately, and once again it all seems to be coming down to what our "contractors" are doing and how well they are doing it. At least these guys are not being called "contractors" as a euphemism for "mercenaries!"

I make this point having just read David Bromwich's excellent essay, "Euphemism and American Violence," in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. Bromwich is far from the first to explore how those in power cover up their cruelties with euphemisms. This was one of the major points made in George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language;" but Bromwich traces acknowledgement of the practice all the way back to Tacitus. (I cannot resist an essay that invokes ancient Greece or Rome in its first sentence!) Needless to say, the specific "American Violence" that Bromwich has in mind involves our presence in Iraq. His two paragraphs about "contractors" provide some of the most penetrating analysis of the mentality that got us into this mess in the first place:

A far more consequential euphemism, in the conduct of the Iraq war— and a usage adopted without demur until recently, by journalists, lawmakers, and army officers—speaks of mercenary soldiers as contractors or security (the last now a singular-plural like the basketball teams called Magic and Jazz). The Blackwater killings in Baghdad's Nissour Square on September 16, 2007, brought this euphemism, and the extraordinary innovation it hides, suddenly to public view. Yet the armed Blackwater guards who did the shooting, though now less often described as mere "contractors," are referred to as employees—a neutral designation that repels further attention. The point about mercenaries is that you employ them when your army is inadequate to the job assigned. This has been the case from the start in Iraq. But the fact that the mercenaries have been continuously augmented until they now outnumber American troops suggests a truth about the war that falls open to inspection only when we use the accurate word. It was always known to the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Defense that the conventional forces they deployed were smaller than would be required to maintain order in Iraq. That is why they hired the extracurricular forces.

Reflect on the prevalence of the mercenaries and the falsifying descriptions offered of their work, and you are made to wonder how much the architects of the war actually wanted a state of order in Iraq. Was this as important to them as, say, the assurance that "contracting" of all kinds in Iraq would become a major part of the American economy following the invasion? We now know that the separate bookkeeping and accountability devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and similar outfits was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice-president and the stewards of his policies in various departments and agencies. To have much of the work of this war parceled out to private companies, who are unaccountable to army rules or military justice, meant, among its other advantages, that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond all detection. What is a contractor? Someone contracted to do a job by the proper authority. Who that hears the word "contractor" has ever asked what the contract is for?

Presumably, one answer to that final question is Representative Waxman; and more power to him in getting at that answer! If he has read Santanam's story, he will probably have the presence of mind to invite Maseth's mother, Cheryl Harris to testify. Presumably, she will feel just as strongly about telling the Congress the same thing she told the Associated Press:

"I expected that if I lost one of my sons (in the war), it would be due to an IED or firefight," Maseth's mother, Cheryl Harris, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "I never expected to hear he would be electrocuted, that something so senseless happened to him."

More importantly, however, I hope that she informs Waxman's committee of her first hand experience with being a "victim of euphemism:"

Harris said the military initially did not tell her that her son was electrocuted, and then told her he died "with a small electrical appliance in the shower." Only later did she learn the truth, she said.

John McCain, if you are reading this, I hope it will give you an appreciation that "straight talk" needs to be more than the name of a campaign bus!

Musical "Facts"

Joel Krosnick, cellist for the Julliard String Quartet, invoked an interesting word usage a couple of times during the master class he gave at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As I recall, the way he put it was that notes should not be performed too "factually." He applied this usage to both Johannes Brahms (for the C minor Opus 60 piano quartet) and Franz Schubert (for the E-flat major D. 929 piano trio). The point he seemed to be making for both composers was that the underlying harmonic rhythm was more important than the metric durations assigned to the individual notes. In both of these compositions, the students were working on the slow movement (the Andante from the Brahms and the Andante con moto from the Schubert). Ironically, the third work he heard was the opening Allegro movement of the Schubert D minor D. 810 string quartet, usually called "Death and the Maiden;" and his primary suggestion was that the students try taking the pace a bit slower for the benefit of the resulting sound. I took this to mean that this music has harmonic rhythm, too; and performers have to find a tempo that is appropriate to the pace of that harmonic rhythm.

This approach reinforced my primary impression of how Lorin Maazel conducted the New York Philharmonic during their visit to North Korea. As I previously suggested, much of his approach seemed to focus on teaching the concept of "espressivo" to a culture whose esthetic was heavily rooted in the precision of mass synchronized events. However, while it was clear that he was encouraging the solo passages in Antonín Dvořák's "New World" symphony to "linger" and "twist around" the background of the ensemble, there was also that sense of a harmonic rhythm driving each of the four movements of the symphony whose "breath" was not ruled by any metronome beat.

These two sets of impressions, in turn, reflect back on what I have been learning through my reading of John Dewey. I already talked about Dewey's approach to rhythm in my thoughts about William Schuman's violin concerto. However, since this approach keeps popping up in my listening experience, I figure it is time to let Dewey speak for himself. Here is a passage from "The Natural History of Form," the seventh chapter of Art as Experience, in which he offers and discusses a "short definition" of rhythm:

It is ordered variation of changes. When there is a uniformly even flow, with no variations of intensity or speed, there is no rhythm. There is stagnation even though it be the stagnation of unvarying motion. Equally there is no rhythm when variations are not placed. There is a wealth of suggestion in the phrase "takes place."

Both Schubert and Brahms had at least an intuitive understanding of that "wealth of suggestion;" and much of what Krosnick was telling the Conservatory students could be interpreted as an invitation to dig into just what it means for a performance of one of these compositions to "take place."

That meaning ultimately comes down to whether or not the performance is doing anything more than filling a particular interval of time. After all, unless one is performing one of John Cage's compositions that is explicitly "about" one or more specific durations of time, there has to be more to a performance than its duration. What that "more" is rarely amounts to some fixed set of qualities. Rather the "more" is discovered through the activity of preparing the performance; it reveals itself or evolves so that it may then serve somewhat like a spinal chord. Furthermore, in the spirit of this biological metaphor, the evolution may be a response to either endogenous (i.e. from the music itself) or exogenous (external to the music) events. Thus, while Krosnick noted several times about the heartbreaking quality of the principle theme of the Brahms movement, he neglected to consider this quality as an autobiographical reflection on the heartbreak of unrequited love in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which Brahms had explicitly invoked by referring to Werther's "signature" yellow vest in one of his letters.

There is also an exogenous connection to the Schubert trio, but it goes in the other direction. Schubert began work on his D. 944 ("Great") C major symphony shortly after completing this trio; and, as Krosnick observed, both of the compositions have a slow movement marked "Andante con moto." However, they share a deeper connection in that the "moto" factor in each of these movements reveals at least a faint suggestion of a march (which was a music form that Schubert seemed to enjoy). That suggestion is a bit stronger due to the use of brass in the symphony. However, it is still there in the piano trio, although it is interrupted by one of Schubert's "storms" (as Krosnick calls them), which may be the basis for a forward-looking exogenous connection to the sorts of mood swings we would later encounter in compositions by Gustav Mahler.

Looking back on what I have just written, I realized that I approached this particular writing task with a bit of trepidation. Having entitled one of my previous reports of a master class, "Learning to Listen to Elliott Carter," I realized how familiar I was with all three of the works presented last night to Krosnick; and I started asking myself, "What did I learn this time?" However, I think Krosnick has helped me with the answer, because it lies in applying that first observation I cited in a broader context: What one learns from a listening experience is not always (if ever) "factual!"

Continuing to Flog the "Greek Drama" Metaphor

Yesterday Huffington Post readers were treated to an analysis of Wall Street as "A Modern-Day Greek Tragedy." Today, in a blog post by Jeremy Zogby, the metaphor has passed to Bush. Yesterday, I argued that the metaphor was "nothing more than a rhetorical ploy of attracting attention through pretension." Today I find myself thinking in different terms: If Bush were a character in a Greek drama (or, for that matter, any literary narrative), who would he be? After considerable thought, I think I finally found a satisfactory answer: Pentheus, the king of Thebes who inherited the throne upon the abdication of his grandfather Cadmus. In Euripides' play, The Bacchae, Pentheus bans all worship of Dionysus (son of Zeus and born in Thebes), because his personal morality does not tolerate the orgiastic rituals (celebrated by the Bacchae), which constitute that worship. The play is basically about Dionysus' revenge; and, as can be expected, Pentheus comes to a really bad end!

Yesterday I observed that most of the Greek tragedies involve αγών (antagonism) between two nobles (Antigone versus Creon, for example). However, Dionysus is less an individual than a representative of a prevailing culture. It is not that Pentheus is defying a god (or demi-god) but that he is defying the life style of a sizeable number of his subjects. That is where I see the answer to my question, but Bush has acted on a scale that dwarfs that of Pentheus. If Pentheus defied the accepted practices of a single city-state, Bush escalated his defiance beyond the boundaries of his own "realm" in his formation of his "coalition of the willing" (sic).

Needless to say, the author of a drama has a much better job of resolving matters than those of us who are stuck with the consequences of bad decisions in "real life." Nevertheless, I find it interesting that in The Bacchae the final words (translated by William Arrowsmith) of the Chorus can easily be read as a recrimination of the sort of "faith-based" reasoning that Bush shared with Pentheus:

The gods have many shapes.
The gods bring many things
to their accomplishment.
And what was most expected
has not been accomplished.
But god has found his way
for what no man expected.
So ends the play.

If that "way" is the way of statecraft (as in the title of Dennis Ross' book), then our country may get over the problem that "what was most expected has not been accomplished" and relegate the memory of Pentheus/Bush to a bad dream best applied to another screenplay!

The "Greek Drama" on Wall Street: Misreading Aristotle

It is only natural that we cast the events we read about in the news in a dramatic framework. Television has so saturated us with narrative that there are probably many who can only grasp a text if it is delivered in narrative form. However, once we get beyond the simplicity of network television, we discover narratives that are fraught with subtleties that cannot be explained away with straightforward answers to direct questions. If the life-world in which we are embedded is to be rendered in narrative, then the narratives will be those that display intricacy in both the tale and the way in which the tale is told, rather than those painfully predictable stories that do little more than draw viewers to advertisements for cars and pharmaceuticals.

The narrative currently unfolding on Wall Street is definitely such a life-world narrative, and its complexity seems to bring out the worst in our pundits. They value the metaphor but then inflate their words by hitching it to intimidating concepts that they do not understand; and the most incomprehensible of those concepts is usually the products of ancient Greek theater. Thus, we are likely to encounter a fair amount of ink spilled in commentary, which, as Loretta Napoleoni did in her Huffington Post blog post this morning, appealed to the spirit of "Modern-Day Greek Tragedy." As an author of bestselling books on such topics and the financing of terrorism, Napoleoni can hardly be called a slouch in the area of narrative; but invoking Greek source material that one does not understand is nothing more than a rhetorical ploy of attracting attention through pretension. So it might make sense to clear the air by going back to Aristotle, because the old guy may have a thing or two to tell us about how we should be viewing an ongoing situation that certainly deserves to be called "dramatic."

We cannot invoke the ancient Greeks without first grasping the concept of "tragedy," which happens to be a major focal point of Aristotle's "Poetics." We tend to deal with the opposition of tragedy and comedy in terms of simplistic formulas:

• Comedy makes you glad; tragedy makes you sad.
• Comedy ends in marriage; comedy ends in death.

Some might even try to convince you that these formulas can be traced back to Aristotle, but nothing would be further from the truth. In addressing the difference between comedy and tragedy, Leon Golden's translation of "Poetics" says that "the former takes as its goal the representation of men as worse, the latter as better, than the norm." Furthermore, the entirety of "Poetics" is essentially about the nature of "imitation." From this point of view, Aristotle's argument then unfolds into the principle that tragedy is concerned with noble men, while comedy "is an imitation of baser men." Both these perspectives, the opposition of noble and base and the relation to the norm, need to be examined if we are to attempt to view Wall Street through a "dramatic lens."

These two perspectives are, of course, related. The very adjective "base" has a connotation of being lower, which would mean lower than some normative standard. Indeed, the word Golden chose is actually Latin in origin; but the actual word in Aristotle is φαϋλος, which, when applied to persons, can mean "low in rank." Similarly, "noble" is based on Latin; and the actual word that Aristotle uses is σπουδαϊος, which is used to denote earnestness but with an "above average" connotation. However, some good examples are likely to be far more informative than Greek lexemics!

The best place to look for "baser men" is in Aristophanes. My favorite example is the two dung collectors whom we encounter at the beginning of Peace. Their task as about as far from the norm as you can get; and, if you are to apply a directional metaphor, it is certainly "down" to earth! Their task is also clearly reflected in the way they talk. Not only do they talk directly about the subject matter of their work, but they tend to apply those same words to other topics of discourse. They are, in a very clear sense, a perfect example of how we "live by" our metaphors according to principles outlined in the now-famous book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

Aristotle's sense of nobility, on the other hand, has nothing to do with lineage; but it usually has to do with rank. For example, Oedipus rules over Thebes, not because he is of royal birth (although the whole plot turns around the question of his lineage) but because he has saved the city from the terror of the Sphinx. On the other hand, just to emphasize my use of "usually," Antigone's nobility comes from her allegiance to her family line, while Creon's comes from his position as ruler (regardless of the circumstances under which he acquired that position). Thus, Antigone is about the αγών (antagonism) between two nobles, rather than a conflict between a woman of "noble sentiments" and a "basely unsympathetic" ruler.

How, then, are we to view the dramatis personae in the events currently unfolding on Wall Street? This is clearly a matter of personal opinion, so all I can do is give my own. Personally, I find it interesting to look at how some other authors have chosen to view such characters. For example all of the principal characters in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross definitely fall into the "base" category in both their speech (that great Mamet calling-card) and their deeds. Similarly, while Gordon Gekko may be treated nobly by the audience that listens to his sermon in praise of greed, it is pretty clear that authors Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone saw him as base as the real estate dealers in Glengarry Glen Ross. In other words both of these authors see their respective situations as fundamentally comedic; and Mamet's script even falls back on one of those "simplistic formulas" by conjuring up some real belly-laugh moments (although when I saw the play on Broadway I was acutely aware that the man sitting next to me never laughed once, which I took as an indication of what he did for a living).

So is there any justification for viewing the current Wall Street events as tragedy? Since Napoleoni got me thinking about this question in the first place, let's see what she has to say:

For the ancient Greeks the roots of all tragedies lie in men's uncontrollable passions: love, hate, power and greed. Carlyle Capital's and Bear Stearns' destinies confirm this belief. Bear and Carlyle are deeply intertwined because they both jumped on the easy credit bandwagon to make money. In other words, greed motivated them. Both had reputations of being highly aggressive and competitive-ruthless, many in Wall Street would add. But these characteristics are common in globalized finance where the old fashioned rules of the game are ignored or simply forgotten. What brought down Carlyle Capital and crippled Bear Stearns was not their business behavior but the sub-prime house of cards they contributed to building. Their fall was an event that was bound to happen but that none of them was willing to consider. And in the best Greek tragedies, those who fall are given the chance to avoid disaster.

Unfortunately, I would see this as a misreading of the tragedy texts that would complement her apparent unawareness of Aristotle's theoretical insights. I suppose there are some who would call Antigone's passion for her slain brother "uncontrollable;" but the texts that Sophocles gives her strike me as closer to the rational arguments that Socrates invoked to plead his case in the trial that would lead to his death than to "uncontrollable passions." I'm not sure I would even attribute the death of Laius at the hand of Oedipus to be an act of "uncontrollable passion," rather than the sort of fight that would break out between strangers with a fatal consequence. In any event the "root" of Oedipus Rex lies in Oedipus' determination to save the city of Thebes from a curse that has brought on a plague; and he does this through his persistence in revealing the events that brought on that curse. For all the pain that the truth brings, it is clear from Oedipus at Colonus that Sophocles sees him emerging from the experience as "better than the norm." It is not disaster that Oedipus is given chances to avoid but the revelation of a truth that must be revealed for the benefit of Thebes, regardless of its impact on Oedipus. This is a radical departure from normative behavior in any setting; and, when he leaves the stage at the end of Oedipus Rex, the Chorus has nothing but sympathy for him.

This brings us back to how we view our current situation in terms of normative behavior. Perhaps the real dramatic question behind this situation has less to do with whether or not the characters are better or worse than the norm and more to do with whether that norm has been changing. When Gordon Gekko captivates his audience by sermonizing on the virtues of greed, is he changing a normative standard of behavior or recognizing that the standard has already changed and advocating that we embrace that change? If we return to John Kenneth Galbraith's perspective on economic history, which I applied yesterday to my analysis of Bush's remarks on the economic crisis, it would be fair to say that the normative standard has never been particularly high. For that matter, while the script for John Adams did not mention that John Hancock was the richest delegate to the Continental Congress, it did make it clear that he acquired his wealth through smuggling; so a low normative standard is part of the very origins of the United States of America!

This probably tells us about what really matters as current events unfold. An elevated standard of normative behavior is little more than a myth that gets taught in the course of an undergraduate education to students who probably spend most of their time in that particular classroom asleep or daydreaming. The "standard that matters" is not behavioral; it is the standard of the individual's net worth. Horatio Alger's stories are not so much about being a better person as they are about securing one's proper place in society; and that place is deemed "proper" by virtue of the fact that the individual is not financially dependent on others. In the period following the Second World War, a similar logic was applied to entire countries on the basis of the ability of the Gross National Product to support the population; and, while the language around such thinking has evolved, the basic thoughts are still with us (and now in more countries than we could have anticipated).

Needless to say, Aristotle did not have such a norm in mind in his "Poetics;" and, personally, I would find it ludicrous to view drama in terms of acts that either raise or lower the net worth of the characters. However, if we want to talk about real norms, then I suspect that mine is the opinion of a pathetically dwindling minority. Indeed, what would be the objective of a War Against the Poor if not the further lowering of the net worth of those for whom it is already significantly low? If that is the case, then we are not in the domain of the narratives of ancient Greek tragedy. Rather, we are in the realm of the siege mentality, which is the foundation of Homer's Iliad; and we are watching the pursuit of individual forays of that siege every day. I have to wonder, though, whether those who emerge from that siege (assuming anyone is left to emerge) will be left in a world without poets and dramatists, in which case any arguments we have today over the validity of the metaphor of "Greek tragedy" are likely to be futile!

The JOHN ADAMS Experience

Having just invoked Abigail Adams in my last post, it should go without saying that the HBO broadcast of the first two episodes of John Adams last night had a strong and positive effect on me. I feel it is important to say this, because, prior to beginning the first episode, I had been exposed to a fair amount of "professional criticism" directed at both the general product and the specific lead performance by Paul Giamatti. As far as I am concerned, those critics missed the point; and I think that the overt enthusiasm exhibited by David McCullough for the entire project in the making-of preview far outweighs the opinions of those who may be good critics of television without necessarily having much appreciation for the specific content. It is no mean feat to translate a history book, even one with a Pulitzer Prize to its name, into television and make such a clear positive impression on the author at the same time. Once again HBO has demonstrated that they can make non-fiction as compelling as good fiction; and, if they did not push the right buttons to impress the television critics, then so much the worse for those critics!

I have one other negative perspective to get out of the way before dwelling on the positives. While the credits were rolling between the two parts that were broadcast last night, I remarked to my wife, "This is the anti-Ken Burns." As I have previously written, I agree with Chalmers Johnson when it comes to the element of narcissism in Burns' work. If that stuff really does get more people to give generously to their PBS stations (which I am inclined to doubt since, in this period of economic crisis, pledge weeks seem to be getting longer and longer), then they have every right to do what works; but I have every right to change my channel over to HBO! There is only so much of Burns' self-indulgent twaddle that I can take; and that "so much" usually comes to much less than fifteen minutes! McCullough, on the other hand, does not write self-indulgent twaddle; and HBO seems to have assembled the perfect team to keep that twaddle from infecting their treatment of McCullough's text.

On the positive side I feel I should begin by writing those few words in praise of Paul Giamatti than no one else seems to have recorded. I suspect that many were influenced by all those nebbishy roles in which Giamatti has been typecast for at least a decade. He sometimes would come across as early Woody Allen taken over by the Dark Side of the Force, just not quite as ridiculous as Rick Moranis' portrayal of Dark Helmet for Mel Brooks. The problem is that we do not like to see our principal Founding Fathers as nebbishes, even if Adams was the sort of man who just was never that all comfortable in his own skin. He had a brilliant mind; but, when it came to what Erving Goffman called "the presentation of self in everyday life," he was a complete and utter klutz. The good news was that he had a strong bond to his wife who labored long and hard to get him over his social impediments and, for the most part, succeeded. We see this very early in Part 1, and it should inform us as the longer scale of this history unfolds.

This is not all we see in Part 1. The first major episode of HBO's version of the narrative concerns the trial of the British soldiers (the officer and those under his command) for the deaths of civilians in the Boston Massacre. Adams argued for the defense of the British in this trial; and he presents a case of air-tight logic (thereby risking his personal standing with fellow citizens of Boston just beginning to embrace the cause of independence, primarily due to the rhetoric of his cousin Sam). The summation of the prosecution, on the other hand, basically asks the jury to decide on the criteria of good and evil, rather on the basis of evidence and testimony. The opposition of these two tactics of argumentation should ring a bell with just about anyone who has been following the activities of the Bush Administration, particularly in the wake of 9/11! I have no idea whether or not McCullough intended this opposition to be so important, but I think he wanted us to remember that one of our greatest patriots was a man who recognized that our country would rise or fall on the basis of its ability to honor the obligation to be a society of laws. HBO deserves credit for not shying away from this particular message.

Similarly, Part 2 is important for the way in which it reveals the deep disagreements that had to be resolved before the approval of the Declaration of Independence. In that respect perhaps the most important actor was Zeljko Ivanek, who used to be Ed Danvers on Homicide and appears to have crossed the Mason-Dixon line to portray John Dickinson, one of the representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania in the Continental Congress. As leader of the delegation, Dickinson argued passionately for reconciliation instead of revolution; and his arguments with Adams often substituted ad hominem attacks for logic. Nevertheless, he respected Adams' argument that the Declaration of Independence needed to be passed without opposition. As a result, he abstained from the final vote, allowing Benjamin Franklin to represent Pennsylvania in support of the Declaration. Again, the reflection into a present in which political debate has been virtually overwhelmed by the ad hominem should encourage us all to reflect on our origins.

I suppose this also illustrates how even the actors we know best have succeeded in losing themselves in the characters they are portraying. This was easier for some than for others. Franklin was so flamboyant that he was practically an actor already, and Tom Wilkinson had no trouble figuring out just how far over the top he could take his portrayal. However, going back to my previous acknowledgment, the actress who really wins us all over is Laura Linney. So much of what any of us know about John Adams emerges from the voluminous correspondence he conducted with his wife, particularly when he was serving in the Continental Congress leaving her to run the family farm in Quincy (close enough to Boston to afford a distant view of the Battle of Bunker Hill). Historians thus have a very rich picture of Abigail, and Linney seems to have assimilated all of that richness. When we examine the roles she has played in her resume, we cannot help but be impressed by the diversity of character types; but I hope that this one will stand out in the broad view of her career for its sensitivity to historical record well matched to its solid grounding in acting technique.

One last thought has to do with a sort of sub-conscious sense of continuity that sets in when one follows all these projects that HBO deploys. The result is that the different works "talk to each other" across the distances of both time and space. This struck me during the scene in which Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence is being reviewed by Adams and Franklin. This scene reminds us that Franklin was a newspaperman early in his life; and, even if it was accidental, the whole tone of the scene became a reflection on all of those editing conversations that we had heard in the Baltimore Sun scenes of The Wire! This is not to say that Franklin was channeling Gus Haynes but that the scene reminded us that what is left of today's newspaper culture that still values every word in print was already alive and well in the culture that led to our country's independence.

Beginning the Week with Bush-Speak

Technically speaking, this week did not begin with President George W. Bush facing the press. It began last night with ample time for the news to appear on the front page of this morning's San Francisco Chronicle and to occupy pride of place on most morning radio news reports. Of course, in this era of downsized newspaper staffs depicted so dramatically on The Wire, the Chronicle had to rely on the Washington Post for its front-page report:

The Federal Reserve took dramatic action on multiple fronts Sunday night to avert a crisis of the global financial system, backing the acquisition of wounded investment firm Bear Stearns and increasing the flow of money to other banks squeezed for credit.

After a weekend of negotiations in New York and Washington, the central bank undertook a broad effort to prevent key financial players from failing, including the unprecedented offer of short-term loans to investment banks and an unexpected cut in a special bank interest rate.

As part of the deal, JPMorgan Chase, a major Wall Street bank, will buy Bear Stearns for a bargain-basement price, paying $236.2 million - roughly 1 percent of what the investment bank was worth just 16 days ago - for a venerable institution that still plays a central role in executing financial transactions.

The President then met with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other senior economic advisers early this morning, after which he reported on this meeting to the press. As usual, it is useful to examine the language behind such a briefing, beginning with quotes provided by Ben Feller in his report for the Associated Press. Let's begin with the quote that initiates Feller's story:

One thing is for certain, we're in challenging times. But another thing is for certain: We've taken strong, decisive action.

The first thing that stands out is that the emphasis on optimism is not longer front and center, although it is unclear whether or not Bush appreciates that a phrase like "challenging times" could constitute one translation of an ancient Chinese curse. More important, however, is that Bush is now endorsing the first stage of the approach that President Franklin Roosevelt took in the face of the Great Depression; as Roosevelt put it, "take a method and try it." As I like to put it, something is always better than nothing. My concern, however, is that Bush may ignore the second stage of Roosevelt's advice, which, if ignored, practically invalidates the first part: "It if fails, admit it frankly and try another." Bush has not been one to admit failure, frankly or otherwise; and this is no time for denial.

On the other hand the decisions to which Bush has held most steadfastly have come from the "wisdom" of his faith-based heart. Those decisions have, for the most part, been concerned with the Manichaean dualism that reduces all actions to a conflict between good and evil; and this may be a situation in which his heart as not been able to inform him about which of the many players are on which side. Thus, the "strong, decisive action" he is endorsing comes not from his heart but from the Federal Reserve, presumably through their interactions with Treasury Secretary Paulson; and this point was subsequently emphasized in remarks by White House Press Secretary Dana Perino. These may then be the agents upon which we shall have to depend for the wisdom to recognize failure, the strength to admit it, and the cognitive skills to come up with another method.

Once we get beyond these basic precepts, the rest of Bush's remarks amount to a "virtual gingerbread." When he says that "our financial institutions are strong," it is hard to imagine that he has given much thought to what constitutes the strength of a financial institution. These are the words of a parent trying to comfort scared children, a parent who lacks the gumption to answer a painful question with a hard truth that can be softened only by the strength of hope (as those of us saw last night on John Adams, when Abigail Adams had to comfort her children frightened by the sound of guns that were not particular distant). Similarly, Bush may not have been in error when he said that "our capital markets are functioning efficiently and effectively" (probably echoing his advisors); but there is no end of dispute over the mathematical models for how markets function at all, let alone what those models say about efficiency and effectiveness.

Bush's greatest slip (and I suspect that any reporters versed in economic history, if they still exist, will jump all over it) came towards the end of Feller's report:

In the long run, our economy is going to be fine.

I would be surprised if anyone with even a smattering of education in economics would have been unaware of one of the most notorious comments by John Maynard Keynes:

In the long run, we're all dead.

Keynes understood the need for striking the right balance between short-term and long-term problem solving. Of course, as John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out in his man-in-the-street book on economics, The Age of Uncertainty, Keynes relationship with Roosevelt was not particularly productive:

Each man was puzzled by the face-to-face encounter. The President thought Keynes some kind of "a mathematician rather than a political economist." Keynes was depressed; he had "supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking."

This reminds me of Donald Francis Tovey's account of a meeting between Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner. Schumann thought Wager talked too much, and Wagner thought Schumann had nothing to say! The BBC team that produced the televised version of The Age of Uncertainty (which was also aired on PBS) had their own musical take on Roosevelt and Keynes: When Galbraith discussed this meeting, they selected, for background music, the gunfight scene from Aaron Copland's "Billy the Kid" ballet!

Nevertheless, those who are feeling most of the pain of the current economic crisis are unlikely to care very much about the wisdom of either Roosevelt or Keynes. They are still the "scared children" that matter and could have done with a bit more of the backbone that made Abigail Adams so memorable (and such an excellent character for dramatization). All Bush really did was leave the scary stuff in the hands of Perino:

She also said the administration was taking action to help individual homeowners suffering from higher mortgage defaults, and that there is "a responsibility on the part of the media to really explain" that assistance.

It is unclear just what was meant by that snipe. As I pointed out at the end of last week, the concrete actions we have observed (which the media have dutifully reported) have been blatantly concerned more with the "suffering" of financial institutions than with any "individual homeowners." If those homeowners are to take any comfort at all, it will come from actions by the Congress and only if the President does not apply his veto power to those actions!

Life Imitates Art in Journalism

Towards the end of January, I wrote a post entitled "Proximity to the News." It was triggered with the news that Rupert Murdoch was planning to move The Wall Street Journal out of the Manhattan financial district; but, like many of my posts, it was inspired by an episode from The Wire. Here were my first two paragraphs:

There was a telling episode in the first episode of the current season of The Wire. The scene is the conference room where the "budget meetings" are held, which determine which stories are going to appear in the following morning's paper. Several of the mid-level staff are staring out the window at a large plume of black smoke. Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) comes in to ask what's happening; and someone shows him the smoke and says that there is a fire across town. His immediate reaction is, "Who's covering it?," which is met with blank stares.

Proximity to the news used to matter. If a reporter was sitting in his/her office and saw smoke out the window or heard sirens coming from the street, (s)he (or someone else) would run outside to find out what the story was. The very name "The Wall Street Journal" connoted an institution of journalism that would provide the most up-to-date and reliable "word on The Street" because it was "on The Street."

Last Friday night CNN did not have to worry about looking out the window at a large plume of black smoke. Something more serious descended upon their headquarters building. Nevertheless, at least according to David Bauder's report for the Associated Press, with the news figuratively at their doorstep (and, apparently, literally on their rooftop), there was a business-as-usual reaction that could have been written by David Simon:

CNN switched to its scheduled taped programming early Saturday even though a major story _ downtown Atlanta's first recorded tornado _ had literally blown right through its news headquarters.

The storm shattered windows in the CNN.com newsroom and the network's library late Friday. A computer was missing after it was apparently sucked through a window. No one at CNN was hurt, a spokeswoman said.

The storm caused damage and injuries, but no fatalities in the Atlanta area.

CNN started covering the story on its doorstep shortly before 10:30 p.m., but at midnight switched to tape of Larry King interviewing Tori Spelling for its normal overnight schedule, until resuming news live at 7 a.m. Saturday.

"This is an important story and we gave it appropriate coverage," CNN spokeswoman Christa Robinson said. "We fully covered the storm and the extent of the damage within our regularly scheduled programming. There was no need for pre-emption."

Rival MSNBC also showed taped programming during the overnight hours, but did occasional live reports about the storm.

CNN monitored the story during the night, then sent reporters Cal Perry and T.J. Holmes onto the streets early Saturday to report on the damage. Anchor Betty Nguyen held up a piece of debris that she said was part of the building's roof.

CNN spent considerably more time on the story Saturday morning than the other networks did. When CNN covered a briefing of Atlanta officials, Fox News Channel was on a financial news program and MSNBC showed a tape of Keith Olbermann's "Countdown."

CNN briefly switched to taped programming again at noon Saturday because of new storms in the area. The network didn't want to risk being knocked off the air while in live programming, Robinson said.

This is not to suggest that television news reporters should be ambulance-chasers; but it carries at least a whiff of a priority system that places the latest activities of a celebrity ahead of the impact of a storm in your home town that was major enough to make the national news on other networks. Indeed, reading Bauder's account of their programming decisions in the context of my own recent criticism of CNN, it may be about time for them to change their middle initial, replacing the "N" (for "news") with an "S" (for "schmooze")! On the general question of priorities, however, it seems as if there were things more important than CNN in Atlanta on Friday night. Since I do not get my usual BBC World Service Television fix on Saturday's, I decided to check out the BBC NEWS Web site to see how the storm was covered there. Their priorities were revealed in the final four paragraphs of their report:

As officials priced the damage from Friday's twister at up to $200m (£99m), Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue declared it a "disaster".

Basketball fans watching a game in Atlanta's Georgia Dome had scrambled for cover as the stadium roof rippled and debris rained down.

The nearby Philips Arena, where the Atlanta Hawks were playing the Los Angeles Clippers, was also hit.

And the headquarters of news network CNN in the city was left with damaged ceilings and windows after being battered by Friday's storm.

In other words CNN placed third behind two basketball games, which were not mentioned in Bauder's story, leading me to wonder if those games had been ignored by the CNN sports crew. So there you have it, folks: When disaster hits Atlanta, you can now expect better coverage from the BBC. Would this be enough to convince Comcast that it is time for them to allocate one of their channels to a full-time BBC World Service feed?

Telecasting "Live" Performances of Music

Over the last 24 hours I have experienced two major telecasts of "live" musical performances. I just returned home from the Westfield Shopping Centre in downtown San Francisco (where shoppers are apparently lured by British spelling), where I saw the HDLive telecast of this afternoon's performance of Peter Grimes at the Metropolitan Opera; and last night I finally got around to watching the DVR recording I made of the New York Philharmonic performance in North Korea. Let me begin with the one generalization that cuts across both of these broadcasts: The days of the expert skill in camera direction that was pioneered by Jordan Whitelaw (and cited in an earlier post) seems to be dead and gone; and we all are losers for that. This was more problematic for the Philharmonic, since, at the Met, if the camera controllers seemed at loose ends during the musical interludes, they at least provided an effective account of the drama up on stage. The Philharmonic camera work was, for the most part, a mish-mash of long, slow pans across the audience (most of whom showed no expression at all), almost-as-long periods dwelling on conductor Lorin Maazel, and attempts to "track" the principal performers in the orchestra, which inevitably looked in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is not to say that the Met telecast was free of problems. The most understandable problem is the opposition between close-ups that clarify the drama (and can be particularly valuable for a plot like that of Peter Grimes) and the almost bizarre image that such a close-up presents. I am far from the first to have noted this opposition, but this was the first time I experienced it directly. The good news was that this particular staging of Peter Grimes, by John Doyle, depends heavily on an abundance of broad views of the entire stage. The opera, after all, is not so much about Grimes himself as it is about his relationship with the borough where he lives. (The source text is The Borough, a cycle of poems by George Crabbe rather in the vein of Spoon River Anthology. Crabbe, incidentally, is one of the residents of this particular borough. He does not have a singing part; but Doyle has endowed him with a distinct personality, particularly in the third act which begins outside Auntie's "house of ill repute.") Because these broad views are so important, this opera is definitely well-served by HD technology.

At this point it is worth observing that Doyle's conception of this opera, particularly involving his work with set designer Scott Pask, has not been without controversy. We see this in the first four paragraphs of the review that Anthony Tommasini wrote for The New York Times:

The Metropolitan Opera’s landmark 1967 production of Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” directed by Tyrone Guthrie and mounted for the colossal tenor Jon Vickers, was bound to be a tough act to follow. But the time had come for a new roster of artists to take a fresh look at this work, among the true operatic masterpieces of the 20th century. So there were high expectations on Thursday night when the Met presented a new staging by the noted director John Doyle, in his company debut.

That the impact of Mr. Doyle’s production was not fully compelling is hard to explain, since many elements seemed so right, starting with the breakthrough portrayal of the title role by the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, an elegant singer and courageous actor long overdue for a starring role at the Met. In recent seasons he has sung Peter Grimes to acclaim in Santa Fe, N.M., and Paris and at the Glyndebourne Festival in England.

The entire cast was strong. The veteran conductor Donald Runnicles drew a richly colorful and impassioned account of the score from the orchestra. And in an opera in which the chorus — portraying the small-minded and easily threatened citizens of the Borough, a little fishing town on the east coast of England around 1830 — is essentially the other major character, the Met’s choristers excelled. Donald Polumbo, the chorus master, continues to do impressive work.

But one aspect of Mr. Doyle’s production was a problem: the set, by Scott Pask. It is dominated by a proscenium-filling wall that evokes the rough wooden buildings and sheds of an English fishing town, turned grayish-brown from salty air and sea mists. For long stretches of the opera the wall faces the audience, close to the edge of the stage. There are five levels of doors on this ominous wall, which pop open to reveal characters, allowing for some surreal staging touches.

Needless to say, it was impossible to ignore this set. Indeed, during the backstage interviews provided to fill intermission time, it was hard to miss how little of the entire stage was being used due to the design of the set. On the other hand one of those interviews was with Pask himself; and his explanation of wanting to convey just how confining and suffocating this borough was, particularly as experienced by Grimes himself, made all the sense in the world. My guess is that those who go to the Metropolitan Opera House regularly were taken aback by Pask's minimal approach to stage use and became more obsessed with biting his finger, rather than looking where he was pointing. From the receiving end of an HD camera, on the other hand, Pask's intentions were pretty obvious and effective. At the very least the Doyle-Pask collaboration made a hell of a lot more sense than Robert Carsen's staging last season of Eugene Onegin, where, for the waltz at the beginning of the second act, he had the entire cast dancing while crammed within a tight rectangle in the center of the large stage!

Aside from the staging question, I have little disagreement with Tommassini. I have seen this opera at the San Francisco Opera with Runnicles on the podium; and I really enjoy his understanding of the musical architecture of the three acts, particularly when it comes to the roles of five critical orchestral interludes (which are frequently performed in a concert setting and well deserve as many listenings as they can get). I should also point out that, once I got used to the large images of the close-up shots, I did not feel as if any of the roles suffered for that kind of camera work. Every performer was so "into" his/her character that the close-up shots did not "break the magic" by disclosing an actor trying to "be in character." The only real weakness was that Anthony Michaels-More came off as far too young for Balstrode, whose part only makes sense as one of those "old salts" who is now too old to deal with the vicissitudes of the sea and can only observe and comment. Since his final comment is critical to the resolution of the entire plot, it was a bit deflated by coming from a body that had not been sufficiently eroded by hard experiences.

Finally, according to the Met's Web site, there will be an "encore" screening of this video tomorrow in at least some of the participating movie theaters; so I would enthusiastically recommend that anyone reading this post today take advantage of the opportunity, if it presents itself.

Regarding the Philharmonic concert, I have already written about how The New York Times covered that event. The primary problem with the telecast was that there were too many distractions from the concert itself. Now, since I began by criticizing the camera work during the concert, this may sound a little bit like one of the jokes that Woody Allen tells in Annie Hall:

Two old ladies are eating at a resort in the Catskills. The first one says, "The food here is terrible."

The second replies, "Yes, and the portions are so small!"

However, something was clearly wrong with a recorded document that missed out on what Daniel J. Wakin felt was the most important event in the concert:

As the New York Philharmonic played the opening notes of “Arirang,” a beloved Korean folk song, a murmur rippled through the audience. Many of the staid spectators at this historic concert Tuesday night perched forward in their seats.

The piccolo sang a long, plaintive melody, cymbals crashed, harp runs flew up, the violins soared. And tears began forming in the eyes of the sober audience, row upon row of men in dark suits and women in colorful traditional dresses, all of them wearing pins of Kim Il-sung, the nation’s founding leader.

None of this profundity came across in the telecast.

If anything the telecast provided a different perspective on the whole idea that this was a propaganda event. When we were not watching the Philharmonic, we were watching a lot of "background footage" about North Korea; and this footage gave a lot of attention to those mass synchronized events, which have been pretty much all anyone ever gets to see of North Korea. However, these made for a major contrast with the Philharmonic performance. Maazel made it a point to keep his rhythms flexible in total opposition to the clockwork synchrony of those North Korean spectacles. It was hard to tell, though, if his approach to performance had any impact on the audience. The closest thing to an audience reaction that I saw was a few hints of smiles poking through during some of the more outrageous sounds that George Gershwin had summoned in "An American in Paris," almost a grudging recognition that Gershwin wanted his audience to have as much fun with this music as the orchestra was having.

Whatever the flaws may be, it is still good to know that we now have video documents of both of these events. The latter clearly has historic significance; and, for all I know, the CIA is pouring over all those audience shots even as I am typing this. The former, however, affirmed for me that the Met's experiment with reaching a larger audience through movie houses is definitely a move in the right direction. I have no idea what the impact has been on the numbers that the bean counters examine. I hope they are good. I tend not to follow the radio broadcasts because the timing is just not that good on the West Coast but also because those shows just don't seem to feel as good as they were back in the "old days" when they were supported by Texaco. Seeing, is another matter, though, particularly when I get to see faces that have become familiar as a result of the operas I can see here in San Francisco!

How a Hit Single is Made!

I may have to rethink that question about how parents might react if Ashley Alexandra Dupré were invited to participate in a high school "Career Night." At least that was my initial reaction after reading the first paragraph of Rachel Sklar's latest Eat the Press column for The Huffington Post this morning:

When do you go from an aspiring singer to a successful one? Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the high-priced call girl at the center of the scandal that felled New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, may just have crossed that threshold — if the answer is "when you make a million dollars off your music." Since her identity was revealed on the New York Times website on Wednesday evening, the singer/lady-of-the-night formerly known as "Kristen" has seen her two singles downloaded off the internet music site Amie Street Music reportedly over two million times — which means that she's pulled in approximately $1.4 million in two days off her two songs, thanks to the Amie Street business model, which nets artists 70% of their online proceeds. That nets her 69 cents per sale. Yes, really.

Nevertheless, while there is no doubt that Dupré has suddenly been very successful (there is more in Sklar's column) and I am willing to grant that she is a singer, this does not necessarily qualify her for the noun phrase "successful singer!" Those singles are being downloaded more in the spirit of the dog walking on its hind legs. In the wake of the ballyhoo that the media have revved up over the fall of Spitzer, any "artifact" (to invoke anthropology-speak) related to this "affair" (to invoke a double entendre) has value; and I am not surprised that there are two million folks out there for which the one-buck price of a download would be a "steal" for acquiring this particular valuable artifact. Indeed, ever since Apple ran those "What have you got on your PowerBook?" ads in the Nineties, we have become a culture more fascinated by an artifact stored in a digital memory than we used to be with Eskimo carvings on the coffee table.

It is interesting to view this "success story" through the lens of Andy Warhol's too-often-quoted adage. Dupré has now had her fifteen minutes of fame. What Warhol could not have anticipated was that there would be an Internet through which she could net $1.4 million during those fifteen minutes! With proper financial management, Dupré will not have to worry about fame any more!

Softening the Damage?

Apparently, not too long after President George W. Bush tried to assure the Economic Club of New York about the soundness of the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke addressed the annual meeting of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Here is the lead from the report filed by Glenn Somerville for Reuters:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday pledged the U.S. central bank will make every effort to soften the damage from a wave of home foreclosures, which he said stem partly from reckless lending.

However, if Bernanke was trying to be more specific than Bush, we have to try to tease out even more specificity: What damage and to whom? Those who would think this is too nit-picking should consider Somerville's account of that Bernanke actually said:

"Far too much of the lending in recent years was neither responsible nor prudent," he said, but he felt lending to less creditworthy borrowers had been beneficial in the past and will be again at some future point.

The way I read this, the damage that Bernanke wants to soften is the damage to the lending institutions, rather than to those victimized by those institutions. Indeed, he seems to be saying that the predatory practices that brought this mess on in the first place may rise again after the economy has recovered! Unlike Senator Christopher Dodd, Bernanke seems to have lost touch (assuming he ever had it) with the real victims whom the government is supposed to support in times of crisis. Having recently invoked the metaphor of generals in the War Against the Poor, Bernanke's position throws a new light on just what our Commander in Chief is commanding and who his chief aide is!

The Return of the Hooverville

This morning, according to a recently filed BBC NEWS report, President George W. Bush tried to assure his audience at the Economic Club of New York that the economy is "basically sound" (quote from the BBC report, not necessarily the words of the President). Was it an editorial comment that the column of related links on the Web page featured a photograph of former Republican President Herbert Hoover? Bush seemed to know better than to echo Hoover's motto that "prosperity is just around the corner;" but I was less interested in his words than I was in a BBC video report, which I saw yesterday through my PBS feed, featuring a tent city in Ontario, California, built by those who had lost their homes as a result of the consequences of the mortgage crisis. I remembered that my father had told me about similar camps that had formed during Hoover's Great Depression. He said they were called "Hoovervilles;" so I was glad to see that there was a "Hooverville" entry in Wikipedia. Here is the basic description from that entry:

A Hooverville was the popular name for a shanty town, examples of which were found in many United States communities during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The word "Hooverville" derives from the name of the President of the United States at the beginning of the Depression, Herbert Hoover. They used Hoover's name because they were frustrated and disappointed with his involvement in the relief effort for the Depression.

These settlements were often formed in unpleasant neighborhoods or desolate areas and consisted of dozens or hundreds of shacks and tents that were temporary residences of those left unemployed and homeless by the Depression. People slept in anything from open piano crates to the ground. Authorities did not officially recognize these Hoovervilles and occasionally removed the occupants for technically trespassing on private lands, but they were frequently tolerated out of necessity.

Some of the men who were made to live in these conditions possessed building skills and were able to build their houses out of stone. Most people, however, resorted to building their residences out of box wood, cardboard, and any scraps of metal they could find. Some individuals even lived in sewer mains.

For the record the word also has an entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as "a shanty town."

Things are somewhat different this time, at least in Ontario. Andrea Bennett, Staff Writer for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin created an article for the newspaper's Web site last night (only a few hours after I saw the BBC video) that has dignified the camp with a proper noun: Tent City. Furthermore, that "grammatical escalation" is being accompanied by some degree of institutionalization by the city of Ontario:

A plan to control and secure Tent City, a homeless encampment that began with two dozen locals last summer and has since grown to about 400 people, was made public Thursday by city officials.

Mayor Paul Leon told homeless providers and volunteers that those who have ties to Ontario may stay at the camp, but all others must leave by Monday.

That's also when the homeless staying in tents or trailers on the city-owned site by L.A./Ontario International Airport will be divided into three groups: those known to be from the city, those who claim to be and everyone else.

Wristbands will be issued accordingly, said City Manager Greg Devereaux.

The last group has one week to go and will be provided transportation, if needed, to their cities of origin.

What struck me the most about the BBC video, however, was their focus on camp dwellers who could still take the camera crew back to show them the suburban house they used to own but could no longer keep because of escalating mortgage payments. Not all of them were victims of foreclosure. Some effected their own sale, but it was the loss sustained by that sale that meant that they were now living in a tent. (There were also those fortunate enough to be living out of a mobile home, but one such woman still declared that she did not want other members of her family to see how she was now living.)

That suburban culture had not yet emerged in the days of the Great Depression. Indeed, we have basically deluded ourselves into believing that homelessness is strictly an urban phenomenon, whether it involves the down-and-out living in a cardboard box over a heating outlet near Grand Central Station or families victimized by Hurricane Katrina. This demographic shift has transformed the Hooverville into the "Bushburb," the American suburban dream now turned into a nightmare by the greed-centered financial mismanagement of the current Administration. (I found the epithet "Bushville" through a Google search; but that search directed me to the blog run by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee. In that context I would prefer to stick to my own terminology!)

Will our President take the time to visit Tent City and see what is happening there without the mediation of a television camera? Will his parents pay such a visit, as they did to the New Orleans Superdome after the Katrina disaster? If so, I suspect it will be harder for Barbara to come out with another callous remark like that one about conditions for the Katrina victims being better than those they had at home! After all, these are suburbanites who used to be counted as part of the "base" for the Republican Party. Let us hope that, for all of the flaws that Bennett reported about it, the institutionalization of Tent City will include provisions for its residents to vote in November. If our electoral process is supposed to be, at least in spirit, about every voice being heard, then the State of California is obliged to make sure that those voices are not neglected!

Bubble Talk about Semantics

While most of the business world seems focused on the corporate fate of Yahoo!, BBC NEWS decided that this might be a good time to report on some of their recent attempts to advance on the technology front:

Yahoo has announced its adoption of some of the key standards of the "semantic web".

The technology is widely seen as the next step for the world wide web and it involves a much richer understanding of the masses of data placed online.

The company said it would start to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo search.

The move could mean a big boost for semantic web technologies which have struggled to win a big audience.

Before addressing any details, it would be a good idea to dwell on that last sentence. Why has that "audience" for the Semantic Web been so much weaker than its champions assumed it would be? I suspect that the primary reason has to do with the never-ending opposition between simplicity and complexity. Whatever complex computations may lie behind the Google machinery for page ranking, simplicity from the user's point of view has always been the highest priority. When coupled with speed, simplicity is one of the best ways to "win a big audience:" if Google does not give you what you want on the first try, it's so fast that there is no hassle in trying a second, or even third, time. Google has become one of the undisputed masters of what many take as the primary law of user-centered design: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!).

Therein lies the problem. There is nothing simple about "a much richer understanding of the masses of data placed online." Indeed, because it straddles the objective, subjective, and social worlds, there is nothing simple about understanding, itself. To reduce the argument to the bluntest of terms, how well do any of you out there really understand your mother? How many of you really understand any electronic mail or voice mail that she leaves for you? All kidding aside, if you are still struggling to understand your communications with the one person you have known longer than any other, just how much progress do you expect to make with those "masses of data placed online?" Put another way, it took Jürgen Habermas some 900-odd pages to work out a viable theory of understanding in The Theory of Communicative Action; and the reader who follows him persistently to the very end of this magnum opus may well find himself/herself "as befogged as before" (as Anna Russell put it so well)!

Once we confront these hard truths, we can see why, while the very nature of understanding can be very appealing in academic circles, there is a broad gulf between what we have learned from an abundance of academic exercises and what can actually be done in the real world. Since Yahoo! can only survive on the basis of its performance in that real world, we have to pose the classic cui bono question. Translated literally as "to whose good," we may well assume the simpler version of "Who benefits?" After all, if we can put a price on that benefit, then we can start talking about cost, which is what matters most to any self-respecting business.

Unfortunately, the BBC report is not particularly informative about the answer to this question:

At the moment most search engines, particularly Google, identify relevance for a particular topic using the interconnections between sites as much as they do the text on any single page.

The semantic web promises to change this because it helps to capture the meaning of data on a page and so give machines classifying or searching the web the capability to work out its relevance to a particular topic.

In an entry on Yahoo's blog, Amit Kumar, director of product management for the company's search site, said it was now starting to back key semantic web standards.

Mr Kumar said despite "remarkable progress" being made on how to classify meaning on webpages, the benefits of this work have not been felt by the average web user.

What was lacking, he added, was a compelling reason or "killer app" to use the semantic web technology.

"We believe that app can be web search," he wrote.

The most dangerous part of this piece of text is probably the return of the "killer app" concept. That is a phrase that was essentially blown away when the dot-com bubble burst; and there is something downright frightening about it's rising from the dead like one of George Romero's zombies. There is certainly nothing wrong with the underlying spirit of the phrase: If you cannot answer the cui bono question in terms of a well-defined deliverable with a well-defined user community, then you haven't really answered the question. The problem when the dot-com bubble was inflating was that start-ups deluded themselves into believing that whatever they happened to be doing was the "killer app;" and the only problem was to get everyone else to believe the same thing. To some extent Kumar is guilty of exactly the same specious reasoning: Yahoo! has its roots in Web search, ergo the "killer app" for Semantic Web technology will be Web search.

We are thus back in that world of reckless talk about innovation that we were hearing at Davos. This is the talk about what is new and cool (even if the Semantic Web concept has now been around so long that it is a bit of a strain to count it as either) that disregards what needs are being satisfied and what it will ultimately cost to satisfy those needs. This is not to deny that there are ways in which new software would enable our computers to facilitate our dealing with that complex problem of understanding. Rather, it is to argue against the positivist strategy of carving off a "cleanly objective" part of the problem, solving that part, and then declaring, "My work here is done!" Doing so ignores the part of the problem that resides in the social world; and, because the Internet has now become a social medium, we ignore that part at our peril, as I have tried to demonstrate in terms of the impact of "social software" in workplace settings.

The irony is that, when Google was growing to imperial size on the basis of its KISS approach to Web search, Yahoo! was promoting itself as social software: The all-purpose portal for your life in the social world. Unfortunately, this vision has not been translating into revenue with the same strength as Google's strategy of linking advertising to search results. My guess is that there are quite a few great minds agonizing over why things turned out this way. However, if those minds are too obsessed with "killer apps," they may lose any "sense of reality" of what people are doing with their computers, both at home and in the workplace; and they would forget the warnings of Ludwig Wittgenstein concerning the attempt to write a book called The World As I Found It!

Observing and Acting

I was more than a little surprised to discover that I had apparently touched one of Linda Milazzo's sore nerves with what I had thought was a positive contribution to addressing a truly disturbing situation, particularly since I would not have known about that situation had it not been for her original blog post. The stridency of her reply (which appeared in both the Comments on her Huffington Post site and as a comment here on The Rehearsal Studio) was such that I figured that I (if no one else) would benefit from a 24-hour "cooling off" period; and, now that this time has elapsed, I find myself glad to have taken my own advice! Having done so, I feel I can take a more detached view of the rhetorical and logical flaws in her attack and try to deal with them both properly and calmly.

The rhetorical problem is less serious. It involves little more than the repetitive structure of a rondo furioso lacking much elaboration with each repetition. The language is also more than a little hyperbolic, but that was also true of the original post. In that post the hyperbole served to get my attention, so it may be that Milazzo wanted to make sure that her comment would get equal attention.

More problematic is the logic of the text, which seems to indicate that, at the very least, we hold different worldviews. Here is the "theme" of her "rondo" structure:

You've suggested a marketplace methodology to boycott Larry King Live. Are you taking it upon yourself to lead the way -- or are you merely using your comments to ask others to do the work?

If you believe you can energize the activist community to boycott Larry King Live, then lead the way. Otherwise you're merely using your comment to dampen the simpler and more possible exercise of contacting the show and voicing opinion. Whether or not you choose to believe it, media does listen to criticism when they hear enough of it.

While there have been boycotts that emerged from an activist community being energized, such an approach is neither necessary nor sufficient for a boycott to take place. Most of the participants in the Montgomery bus boycott were not members of an "activist community," nor were the South African blacks who decided to stop giving their business to white-owned shops. The were "just plain folks" who, when presented with an action to take, decided to take it because they found it to be a good idea. The declaration of "I am going to do this" (whatever "this" may be), preferably with an explanation for the action, in a public place may be all that it necessary to get the ball rolling. If you declare it and do it, then others are justified in saying "If (s)he can do it, so can I;" and a personal commitment then grows into a boycott. Since I am realistic enough to assume that The Rehearsal Studio is not much of a public place, I felt it was more important to make that declaration on a Web page of The Huffington Post. I may never know if my declaration will make any difference, but I felt it was an action that was consistent with my own logic as informed by past experiences.

(Ironically, the only other comment I got on The Rehearsal Studio came from outside the United States and expressed surprise at the racist connotation of the "back of the bus" phrase!)

The other logical flaw had to do with why I was not applying my logic "toward more egregious culprits." This one can be chalked up to Milazzo having been so angry with my text that she missed the final sentence (which happened to be cloaked in parentheses):

Needless to say, if you can pull that off, think of what you could do for those other CNN broadcasters who claim to offer something more substantive than the sort of schmoozing that draws audiences to King!

In other words my position was, "If it works for schmooze, try it for news!" In that terminology Milazzo's counterargument would be, "Why waste your time on schmooze, when you should be going after news?" However, in light of my concluding sentence, the basis for argument is over nothing more than which is to be the first step in the "journey of a thousand miles." Actually, in my own journey I have almost entirely dispensed with CNN (not to mention Fox) as a source of news; but it is true that my own first step was taken with Larry King. This is because, at the time, I was living in Singapore and was heavily dependent on the CNN International service (which, in those days, was really quite good) for "hard news." It took only a few doses of Larry to realize that he had nothing to do with news and wasn't a particularly interesting schmoozer. The rest of my rejection of CNN evolved gradually, after I had returned to the United States, as it became more and more apparent that their commitment to hard news was "devolving," probably out of a perceived need to be more competitive with Fox.

This takes us to why I invoked Walt Kelly in rejecting the advice Milazzo was promoting that set up this whole opposition. There are now two sources of hard news out there that deliver pretty consistently in the first half hour slot of every hour. One is the BBC World Service for television; and the other is Al Jazeera English (which, incidentally, hired one of my favorite CNN International news readers). Shortly after the BBC announced that they would be providing a signal to North America, I sent electronic mail to Comcast suggesting that this was the perfect time to fill in the "news gap" in their channel lineup and pointing out the viable candidates. The response was probably written by a computer (or, more likely, pulled from a database). You could tell because nothing in that reply made reference to anything substantive in the letter I had sent. This is why I subscribe to the philosophy that writing a nasty letter (or even a polite and friendly one) to the mayor is unlikely to get you very far, if the mayor can't (or won't) read!

24 hours on it is hard to believe that any of this could have created such a fuss. We all make the final decisions on which actions we take and whether or not we choose to invoke anyone else as a model while making such decisions. All I can do (metaphorically at least) is chop my own wood and boil my own water. Whether or not this results in any large-scale change may involve whether anyone chooses to use me as a model. However, since I have little influence over how that choice will be made, I choose not to worry about it!

"Kristen's" MySpace Page

I really want to see what the social software evangelists make of this one! Last night, after all the celebrations on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had adjourned to the various bars, clubs, and restaurants that are so vital to the Manhattan economy, Steven Musil put up a fascinating post on the News Blog run by CNET News.com:

It's probably a safe bet that you won't find Eliot Spitzer listed among "Kristen's" friends on MySpace, even though the alleged prostitute in the sex scandal seems to have quite a few.

Two days ago, we learned that Spitzer--the politician who made his reputation as being tough on crime--had been implicated in a prostitution scandal. We got to see Silda Wall Spitzer stand by her man--AKA "Client 9"--while he apologized for "acting in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong." Then Wednesday we saw him resign from the governor's office.

The only thing we haven't seen--until now--is "Kristen," the woman who allegedly played the role of prostitute at a Washington, D.C., hotel with Spitzer last month in this mini-drama. Thanks to her MySpace page, we have a chance to meet "Kristen," a 22-year-old aspiring musician whose real name was revealed by the New York Times as Ashley Alexandra Dupre.

So, let me get this straight, is this the MySpace, the "brave new world" for teenagers over which Janet Kornblum gushed in USA Today back in 2006?

If you're a teen in America today, the place to be is the social networking site MySpace, which has virtually exploded in the past few months.

Actually, Kornblum had the presence of mind to provide a sidebar for her article, which began as follows:

As MySpace booms in popularity among teens, it also is drawing the wrath of parents and school officials who are concerned about the off-color nature of some pages and the safety of young users who give too much information about themselves.

Nevertheless, in spite of those who tried to raise cautionary warnings, MySpace became the darling of the social software pushers (as well as the property of Rupert Murdoch). A little more than a year after Kornblum's story had run, Candice Kelsey had an entire book, Generation MySpace: Helping Your Teen Survive Online Adolescence, on the shelves, which, if nothing else, recognized the need to provide parents with a "reality check" on what their kids were doing in cyberspace.

We now know that, like every other commercial platform for social software out there, MySpace is all about selling stuff. MySpace just happens to be the place that takes greatest advantage of teenage buying power. However, as Kornblum's original sidebar observed, life on MySpace necessitates far more than maintaining a strong caveat emptor attitude. The question of safety, particularly from sexual predators, has been around pretty much since the platform surfaced; but there is also the problem of what happens when what Janet Malcolm dismissed as "harmless chatter" ventures into that "off-color nature."

This takes us back (metaphorically, of course) to Dupre's MySpace page and what Musil found there:

Her page features several photos of Dupre, who seems to be a very popular woman, with more than 1,800 MySpace "friends." According to her profile, she "learned what it was like to have everything, and lose it, again and again."

The thing about social networks, which was probably extremely appealing to many teenagers, particularly those having trouble making friends in the "real world," is the ease through which one can make lots of friends, often through the friends-of-friends links. The question for those of us for whom "community" is a complex concept in social theory (rather than a buzzword for promoting cool software) is: What exactly is the demographic profile of Dupre's 1800 MySpace "friends?" My guess is that most of them are not in her peer group (euphemistically speaking). From the opposing point of view, what are parents likely to think if their own teenage kids happen to be in that set of "friends;" and would they be justified in wanting to know what sort of "harmless chatter" might be taking place within that "circle of friends?" (Trying to frame this as a more objective question: If you were a parent, what would you think if your school invited Dupre to participate in one of those "Career Night" events at your kid's school?)

It is not my intention to be overly moralistic. We all know from personal experience that the teens are a complex period in life, and I sympathize with Kelsey's effort to inform parents of the assets and liabilities of a technology that spread across the teenage population like wildfire. I just wonder how many of us would have anticipated that someone like Dupre would be in that space, probably not for any predatory reason but just to "hang out" as if she were still part of that teenage demographic. Now that we do know, I have to confess that I am still at a loss as to what we should do with that knowledge. I certainly do not believe in going to Puritanical extremes. I suppose I still have not worked out in my own mind whether or not her presence jeopardizes the safety of the general MySpace community; nor am I willing to dismiss the possibility that, at some fundamental level, this community may ultimately take care of itself without intervention from outside its population. After all, the greatest threat to the LambdaMOO community (about which most, if not all, of the MySpace community is probably oblivious) was resolved strictly within the community; and I continue to believe that the story of that threat is one that should never be ignored. At the very least Musil's little post should serve as a not-so-little reminder that the consequences of Spitzer's indiscretions may have a far greater extent than we had initially assumed.

Information Chutzpah

The day began with Al Jazeera English reporting on McClatchy; so it is fitting that it should end with a follow-up from McClatchy reporter Warren P. Strobel:

The Pentagon on Wednesday canceled plans for broad public release of a study that found no pre-Iraq war link between late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al Qaida terrorist network.

Rather than posting the report online and making officials available to discuss it, as had been planned, the U.S. Joint Forces Command said it would mail copies of the document to reporters — if they asked for it. The report won't be posted on the Internet.

This seems to be the second time that our Department of Defense has earned itself a Chutzpah of the Week award, as if limited the distribution to explicit requests from reporters is going to be much of a limitation. The first time was actually far more egregious, since they were playing with the finances of a man seriously injured in battle. This time they are just playing with information, which we can all expect to see sooner or later. Meanwhile, those interested in learning more about the source material that Al Jazeera used can find a hyperlink to the earlier McClatchy report and the end of Strobel's story.

No Surprise but Still Worth Reporting

This is the sort of story that we would expect to read on Al Jazeera English, rather than through any of those media conglomerates controlled by and for the American ruling class:

An exhaustive Pentagon-backed study of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents seized after the 2003 US-led invasion has found no direct link between Saddam Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

However, to be fair, Al Jazeera compiled their report from both wire services and leaked excerpts from the study; and the McClatchy Newspapers group appears to be one of the beneficiaries of the leak. This is consistent with the McClatchy reputation for trying to get the "full story" from Iraq through such "novel" techniques as engaging "Iraqis on the street" as sources. As I have previously written, the Internet both enables and facilitates the sort of active reading that is necessary to cut through the propaganda that passes as news for those who insist on being passive. Nevertheless, even that passive sector eventually woke up to the fact that the reasoning behind invading Iraq for their weapons of mass destruction was specious, if not maliciously deceptive. Now an even greater deception has been revealed over the second line of reasoning that linked Saddam to 9/11.

Yes, Virginia, all those lives have been lost (along with the bankrupting of the American economy) over two bald-faced lies! Yet, in the broad mural of the commission of actions with dire consequences, your media sources are trying to flood your attention with the sexual vices of one man, who, when he was not indulging that one vice, was doing his damnedest to stand up for all those whom the American ruling class keeps trying to enslave. We are all now looking at that same mural; but there is so much on it that we are going to have to set some priorities. Can enough of us agree on those priorities to declare them in a strong enough voice?

An Evolutionary Perspective on Vice

Every now and then I encounter a Huffington Post blogger whom I know through his/her more professional publications. Gary Marcus is such a blogger; and his post about Eliot Spitzer, "Client 9: What was he Thinking?," has helped me to sort out the issues in a scandal that has surprised me more for the media attention it has received (even from the BBC World Service) than for the act itself. What is most important about this post is that Marcus has been academically precise in his terminology at a time when most representatives of the media are fulminating in language that, while vague and sloppy, is probably driving up the price of those advertising slots I mentioned in conjunction with another controversial issue.

It is in the interest of such precise terminology that I feel it is important to frame Spitzer's behavior with the fundamental premise that all actions have consequences. It is within this frame that we can best appreciate Marcus' strategy of appealing to Freudian theory for an explanation:

This is not just a case of a man being led about his hormones, to the exclusion of the rest of his brain, but something more complicated: a case in which an extraordinarily intelligent man used all of his rational capacities to form a track-covering plan -- yet seemingly focused none of his cognitive wherewithal on evaluating whether that plan was worth pursuing in the first place.

Freud, wrong about so much else, was certainly right that the mind is forever locked in internal conflict; where he talked about "id" and "ego", modern scholars see something slightly different, a clash between "ancestral systems" and more modern "deliberative cognition", but for present purposes the point is much the same. Id beat ego, just as it has so many times before.

Why does this happen so often? The answer, in a nutshell, is this; evolution blew it. When our fancy new deliberative reasoning systems evolved, evolution, which lacks foresight, took what amounts to the lazy way out, crudely grafting the new capabilities onto the older ancestral systems, with nary a thought as to how the two would work together. The ancestral mate seeking systems that led Client 9 by the nose thus still receive extremely high priority, whether or not their actions are in the interests of our minds as a whole.

One of the great advances in brain science in recent years has been in our understanding of how the human brain can "reason about the future," so to speak, particularly in terms of "envisioning" the consequences of an action being considered. The Freudian model gives us a "conceptual" (rather than physiological) localization of such brain activity; and that localization is the Ego. However, no matter how good the Ego may be at dispassionate reasoning about consequences (and, as has been amply demonstrated, Spitzer was very good at this), it is always in conflict with those "drives" that are the domain of the Id; and Marcus was right to reduce this whole argument to the question of why Id is so good at beating Ego.

Personally, I like his appeal to evolution but dislike his portrayal of evolution as an agent with intentions (which he may have done for the sake of a more readable text). It is not a question of what evolution intended but of who has survived the process of selection. This introduces the hypothesis that, while both Ego and Id clearly contribute to our survival as a species, when "push comes to shove," as it were, the Id carries more weight in survival value. Think of all those situations in which survival depends on aggression unattenuated by reflection, such as, at the risk of taking a sensitive example, what it takes to have an effective military force. This is not to say that Spitzer's specific behavior had survival value; but, like it or not, it was part of the baggage that came along in the relationship between Ego and Id that led to the survival of our species. As Jimmy McNulty (a paragon of unbridled Id) said on The Wire, "It is what it is!"

On Not Being a Passive Observer

This morning Linda Milazzo used the bully pulpit of her blog post on The Huffington Post to call out an indignity that should not go unnoticed:

On Friday's Larry King Live show, Republican strategist and owner of The Polling Company, KellyAnne Conway, stated that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were

"arguing about whether she should let him sit on the back of the bus of her presidential ticket."

Even by CNN standards, with its ample chicanery and spin, Conway's remark was brutal. Larry King's nightly program, usually more schmooze than news, was plunged to a Limbaugh-like low.

Milazzo then made note of how Obama supporter, Jamal Simmons, who was also on the program, immediately challenged Conway without sacrificing the moral high ground; but, from my point of view, the more important aspect of her account had to do with King's relative passivity in the face of such offensive linguistic manipulation:

Larry King was clearly disturbed by Conway's 'back of the bus' assault. He asked her if she had actually used the term and what she had meant when she used it. But King's simple question was not a true rebuke. Conway's racism deserved a strong on air condemnation from the host -- not the off-camera chiding that was likely to come. At 74 years old, Larry King should have witnessed the inhumanity and disgrace of Jim Crow throughout his youth and adult years. There was institutionalized racism in Larry King's native New York, and in Florida where he worked early on. White Americans weren't blind to the injustice. They just didn't suffer its pain -- at least not directly.

Actually, King is of an age that should have witnessed enough anti-Semitism to match the level of prevailing racism and may well have experienced it rather than just witnessing it. This would add fuel to Milazzo's fire against his passivity.

Unfortunately, her idea of an active response in this case leaves a bit to be desired:

If you are disturbed and appalled by KellyAnne Conway's racist tactics, please let CNN know. Racism, particularly on the public airwaves, must not be permitted to occur. Call the CNN comments line at: (404) 827-1500 or click here to e-mail the Larry King Live show.

Without trying to sound either defeatist or futilitarian, I have to say that the idea of employing the "usual feedback channels" to either Larry King Live or all of CNN reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Walt Kelly's Pogo: "I'd write a nasty letter to the mayor if he could only read!" Milazzo's strategy is unlikely to lead to anything more than a gratuitous thank-you letter. The only way to protest is in the marketplace. In this case the way to do that would be through a mass boycott of King's program. This would quickly devalue the slots for commercials in his program, and that is the only language that CNN executives understand! (Needless to say, if you can pull that off, think of what you could do for those other CNN broadcasters who claim to offer something more substantive than the sort of schmoozing that draws audiences to King!)

Which of "The Two McCains" Would be Commander in Chief?

E. J. Dionne's Washington Post column, "The Two McCains," has now been posted on Truthdig. As his lead demonstrates, it is a highly personal statement that probably will speak for many of his readers:

Liberals who have sung the praises of John McCain in the past confront a fascinating test of consistency, integrity and political commitment now that McCain is the virtually certain Republican nominee.

It could be an amusing moment. I should know, since I’m one of them.

I know exactly how Dionne feels. There are any number of traits that emerged from his career as a politician that, like Dionne, I found admirable; and I had really hoped that his success in the primaries would be taken at face value, as a rejection of all those follies and irrationalities of the faith-based neoconservativism of the Bush Administration. However, now that he has the numbers to seal up the nomination, he is going around kissing all sorts of rings (and, as Norman Wilson put it in The Wire, "a lot more than that") that seem to embody the very principles I had thought he was rejecting.

This leaves liberals like Dionne and myself with an agonizing question: Which of those "Two McCains" would actually sit at the desk in the Oval Office, should he succeed in winning the election? Translated into the practical question of what to do on Election Day, this becomes the question of whether liberals should vote for him for his once-admirable traits or run like hell in the other direction from the current traits. Unfortunately, the answer to the question is as obvious as it is disconcerting: We have no way of knowing what sort of a President McCain would actually be! If he is "doing anything to get elected," he is hardly the first of that kind; but "doing anything" usually involves building up a lot of "social debts," most of which are unlikely to involve liberal interests. On the other hand, given his age, he really does not have to worry about his future very much; so there would not be much personal penalty for reverting to those "once-admirable traits" and telling are the conservative asses he kissed to go to hell. From that point of view, his age might prove to be more of an asset than a liability.

In other words what a "President McCain" would actually do is an enormous question mark; but is it any larger than the one for "President Obama" or "Madame President Clinton" (phrasing not out of sexism but just to distinguish her from the other one)?

The Wikipedia Fight Club

Those who followed Mary Spicuzza's SF Weekly article about Wikipedia, my commentary on that article, and any accounts of the smoke blown over whether or not the article should be taken as an authoritative source, might be interested in Nicholson Baker's article in the latest The New York Review, whose title makes his own position perfectly clear: "The Charms of Wikipedia." I know Baker best from his book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, and the basic argument from that book that appeared in The New York Review. As an accomplished author of fiction, as well as non-fiction, he has the sort of resume that might easily intimidate Spicuzza; but the two articles complement each other nicely, not because they embody the opposition of two sides of a coin but because they basically view the same side from different angles.

Baker's light is the more positive one. He makes this clear with his opening sentences:

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast.

This is the sort of breathless prose one might expect to encounter in a novel, rather than a review; but it is also an excellent way to set the reader up for the attributes of Wikipedia that most interest him.

The first attribute is actually captured in a quotation from Jimmy Wales himself:

The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive.

Baker then offers his own riff on that second adjective:

All big Internet successes—e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component—they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you're trying to sleep.

It is only later that he lets us in on the nature of his own addiction, which is actually the second of his two attributes. The addictive nature of Wikipedia is not with its encyclopedic content, such as the way one can get "hooked" by reading an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, follow up by reading related articles, then reading articles related to those articles, until you realize that it is 1 AM and you didn't even take a break for dinner. Rather, what is addictive is the "social" approach to editing. So, while I had intended a negative connotation when I interpreted Spicuzza as characterizing Wikipedia as having "assumed all the personality traits of WWE Friday Night Smackdown!," Nicholson sees the fights that break out over what gets inserted and what gets deleted as Wikipedia's primary "charm" (in the language of the title he selected). Indeed, he goes even further and argues that, without those fights, Wikipedia would not be the valuable resource it has become.

In terms of my critique of Spicuzza's analysis, this is, to say the least, an interesting take on that "wisdom of crowds" question. This is not to imply that knowledge has no room for adversity. The Socrates we know from reading Plato believed that all knowledge emerged from taking an adversarial position and putting it to the test; and, in The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins provides a history of world philosophy in which adversarial relations play a key role in the development of ideas. Still, a Platonic dialogue rarely involves more than half a dozen conversants, which is a far cry from what Baker calls "the elite top 1,200 of all editors" of Wikipedia. Furthermore, Baker's own addiction narrowed in on the very specific task of saving articles from deletion by other editors, with apparently little concern for the domain of those articles. Indeed, within his account there lurks a general suspicion of experts in the Wikipedia culture, since those experts tend to write complex webs of jargon that most readers would not understand (that being the Wikipedia argument, rather than my own).

The problem with Baker's approach, however, is not the "wisdom of crowds" question but its neglect of my other key point, which is the matter of anonymity. Consider, for example, his take on one of the more aggressive editorial acts:

This is a reference book that can suddenly go nasty on you. Who knows whether, when you look up Harvard's one-time-warrior-president, James Bryant Conant, you're going to get a bland, evenhanded article about him, or whether the whole page will read (as it did for seventeen minutes on April 26, 2006): "HE'S A BIG STUPID HEAD." James Conant was, after all, in some important ways, a big stupid head. He was studiously anti-Semitic, a strong believe in wonder-weapons—a man who was quite as happy figuring out new ways to kill people as he was administering a great university. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it's a fast-paced game of paintball.

That last sentence poses an interesting metaphor. Paintball is often played among friends; but "real" combat (that is, with weapons that kill people) tends to sustain much of its energy from the anonymity of the enemy. That is what makes the climax of Wilfred Owen's poem, "Strange Meeting," so harrowing: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend." Anonymity is the shield that cloaks us should we decide to "go nasty;" and the underlying problem is the prevailing opinion that, if you can "go nasty," you may as well get a kick out of doing so.

As an aside it is interesting to consider the role of anonymity in Fight Club, particularly when you review the cast listing and see how few of the characters have names. By contrast consider the impact of the very name "Omar Little" in the full narrative of The Wire, not to mention how Marlo Stanfield is ultimately undone by his personal frustration that his own name lacks that impact. Both of these characters are frightening for the way in which they flaunt their identity in the defiance of the anonymity of soldiers in battle or the Fight Club competitors.

I suspect the most effective metaphor for Wikipedia is the large metropolis, like, for example, the Baltimore of The Wire. There are safe parts of town; and then there are the "other" parts of town. It helps to be smart enough to know where those "other" parts are, particularly if you just want to stay out of trouble. Fortunately, the kind of music information I need seems to reside in a pretty safe (if not quiet and sleepy) part of town; and, if I am feeling contentious, I would rather look for my trouble on The Huffington Post or Truthdig, where there is a mix of actual names and "handles." Those environments make for better conversation, even if it is not always civil. Also, from the other point of view, I am not particularly interested in being an anonymous contributor to Wikipedia. If I am going to put all that work into what I write, then I want my name on the resulting text!

Ridicule on the Megaton Scale

We all have guilty pleasures, and there is no need to waste precious cognitive ergs over rationalizing them to death. Since many of us are likely to fall back on quotes from The Wire this week, I have one that reflects my own indulgence in guilty pleasures: "It is what it is." So "it is" that I feel a need to come clean over a movie that I did not watch until it showed up on cable, which proved to be a guilty pleasure beyond my wildest expectations, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. I suppose it had to do with the fact that the effort was so modest and so outrageous at the same time that I was easily hooked; but, as I say, this is not a matter for analysis.

However, it is a good example of just how effective ridicule can be when properly conceived and delivered; and, if we are living in times when ridicule is more likely to be effective than outrage in mobilizing public opinion, then this counts for something. Variety critic Joe Leydon appears to appreciate this precept in his approach to writing an "advance" (because the film is not scheduled for release until April 25) review of Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. Since Variety is more interested in the business side of the picture, Leydon makes it clear from the beginning that, while Harold and Kumar have not changed very much from their first appearance, the plot has taken a major departure from searching for the best burger joint in New Jersey:

Whether the pic can attract newcomers to the franchise --and score breakthrough success during its theatrical run -- depends on the willingness of the masses to accept a sex-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll comedy so jeeringly critical of post-9/11 paranoia and so openly contemptuous of authoritarian excesses by U.S. government agencies charged with waging the war on terror.

In other words this film may be the ultimate test of whether or not the culture of fear induced by the current institutionalization of "homeland security" can withstand a megaton-level delivery of ridicule that pushes any conceivable envelope of good taste. Thus, whatever his concerns with business performance may be, Leydon seems to have caught on to the "mission of subtext" that sustains this film in his final remarks:

Here and there, however, the madcap zaniness and frat-house boisterousness are laced with something not unlike righteous rage about racial profiling, extraordinary rendition and government-authorized oppression. Auds will be left feeling that if characters as harmless as Harold and Kumar (engagingly replayed by Cho and Penn) can wind up unfairly imprisoned, even in the context of a broad comedy, something is terribly wrong with the system.

In its own wacky way, "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" is one of the ballsiest comedies to come out of Hollywood in a long time. No kidding.

"No kidding," indeed. What our government is doing in Guantanamo Bay is about as far from a laughing matter as one can ever hope to get. However, if it takes laughter to force us to confront this hard truth and talk about it, then it may take Harold and Kumar to teach us the true lessons of patriotism.

"Top Five" Pianists?

I am barely aware that a copy of Parade comes with the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, but my wife always seems to enjoy taking the time to skim through it. Thus, I have her to thank for encountering the following item in Walter Scott's Personality Parade column:

Q After listening to Yefim Bronfman play Tchaikovsky, I’ve decided he must be the finest classical pianist of our time. Do you agree?—S.T., New York, N.Y.

A He’s certainly in the Top Five. Our choices for today’s finest classical pianists: Emanuel Ax, Daniel Barenboim, Yefim Bronfman, Richard Goode and Murray Perahia.

(Note, by the way, that the hyperlink is included only to establish attribution. This is the full scope of the content. The caveat lector for anyone considering following the link is that Parade is a veritable minefield of popup advertising!)

I obviously have no idea of S. T.'s listening habits or the reliability of his account, particularly since Patricia Zohn just wrote about Bronfman in her CULTURE ZOHN blog for The Huffington Post, which reported on Bronfman's performance at Carnegie Hall of the second Prokofiev piano concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Valery Gergiev. However, I am less concerned with whether this query may have come from a casual listener for whom "those Russians are all alike" than with yet another instance of what I have been calling "top-dog thinking."

In the performing arts, as in politics (which I am beginning to regard as just another medium of the performing arts), the "top dog" concept is a dangerous illusion. Scott deserves credit for diminishing the concept but then loses that credit by trying to talk about the top five dogs (whom he at least tried to rank objectively in alphabetical order). Unfortunately, the star system has as pernicious an effect on live performances as it does on the other media, beginning with the extent to which it deflects attention from the music and, unless the performance is a solo recital, the other performers. So it is that, when I write about a performance of music, I write in terms of the impact it has had on the way in which I listen; and, when necessary, this entails writing about what individual performers (usually soloists) bring to that experience.

In the course of my listening experiences, I have heard "live" performances (which are always more important than anything available through a recording) of all of the pianists on Scott's list. In this blog I have only written about two of them, Ax and Goode; but any efforts I have ever made them to compare them to other pianists has been to establish a context for why I heard them they way I did and has had nothing to do with the public obsession for rank ordering. Bronfman is actually one of my favorites, but it has been a while since I have had an opportunity to hear him "live." I have heard Barenboim as a solo pianist, half of a piano duo, camber music performer, and conductor; and I have no salient memories of him in any of those capacities. I have great admiration for many of the things he has been doing in the world at large; but, when it comes to the performance of just about any composer, I never seem to be convinced to get onto his channel, so to speak. In a similar way I find myself turned off by Perahia's performances.

None of this is important, though. What is important is that there are plenty of pianists not on Scott's list who bring just as much, if not more, "value" to eager listeners. In terms of what I have written on this blog, Garrick Ohlsson's performance of Samuel Barber's piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony immediately comes to mind, very much in the same tradition as that of what Jean-Yves Thibaudet brought to the Gershwin concerto in an early Symphony season (before I started writing regularly). Then there are pianists at the very beginning of their respective careers who recognize the importance of looking at familiar music through new lenses, as was the case with how Gabriela Martinez approached the third piano concerto of Sergei Rachmaninoff. Finally, there are the pianists who, through the right combination of age and experience, the media have transformed into "monuments" and are best appreciated for their capacity to "bridge the generation gap." Menahem Pressler is such a pianist; and, even if the Beaux Arts Trio has now announced its "farewell tour," I suspect that he will still be making regular appearances at the San Francisco Conservatory in this broader capacity.

This is not to say that personality is not an issue in musical performance. I would probably go so far as to say that any music performed without any personality is not worth the listening effort. However, that last sentence puts the focus on the music, which is what the best performers always know how to do. The rest is just fodder for a publicity business, which, if it has any virtue at all, helps those performers to make a living by doing what they do best.

The Ultimate Warhorse

In his capacity as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas has played a major role in cultivating and reinforcing my proposition that we listen to music, particularly "live" performances, in order to become better listeners. Last night at Davies Symphony Hall he reminded us that this proposition is as applicable to those compositions we think we know best as it is to any work we have not previously heard. I do not know if more analytic ink has been spilled over Ludwig van Beethoven's third ("Eroica") symphony than over any other Beethoven composition (or, for that matter, any composition in the history of music); but that work is at least a viable contender for that position (corrected after originally typing "honor," probably through my own reaction to "academic" thinking about music). Having already written about the problem that any pianist faces in approaching the performance of Frédéric Chopin in a culture saturated with recordings of that music, particularly those by Arthur Rubinstein, it goes without saying that conductors face the same problem with the canon of the nine Beethoven symphonies; and, yes, I do mean "saturated" in the sense of a "listening mind" that is so sated with experiences that it barely has room for any more. Thomas therefore set himself a formidable challenge, particularly in coupling this symphony with a work as radically different in just about every way as William Schuman's violin concerto.

The thing about the "Eroica" is that it is so big. It's not just that the scale of the work was so ground-breaking for its time. It's that there is something awe-inspiring just about that scale itself, perhaps in a way best captured by Carl Sandburg:

Dear God, he's big,
big like stupendous is big,
heavy and elephantine and funny,
immense and slow and easy.

There is something about the text of the "Eroica" that brings all of those adjectives into play, along with a host of others. Now, as a Mahler conductor, Thomas obviously has no problem with "big;" but, as I recently pointed out when he was conducting Franz Schubert's "Great" C Major symphony, that "problem with 'big'" resides more with the endurance of the orchestra that with the scale of the conductor's conception of the performance. The conductor has to decide which are going to be those moments that register most strongly on the listeners in the audience and then have the discipline to hold back on all the other moments that, from a theoretical point of view, are equally worthy of claiming audience attention. This may be less important in a recording studio, where those moments can be isolated from the overall context; but it is crucial in a "live" performance.

Sir Georg Solti was one of the few conductors to talk explicitly about this challenge. He did it in the context of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, which runs around two-and-one-half hours without any intermission. For Solti the most crucial moment of the opera comes with the entry of the Gods into Valhalla at the very end; and the danger is that, by that time, the orchestra will be too "played out" to approach the music with the full force that Wagner had conceived for it. (The singers at least get to rest during the scenes in which they do not appear.) In a similar way Thomas seems to have chosen the variation in the final movement of the "Eroica" in which the full force of the orchestra is invoked to deliver an augmented statement of the theme with all the intimidating grandeur that tweaked Sandburg's poetic imagination. Even with pauses between the movements, so much happens in the fourth movement that the conductor must always worry about that "Solti effect;" and Thomas kept things so well controlled that there was no doubt that, in this particular conception of the piece, this was the moment that epitomized his conception of the entire symphony. Indeed, given how much time elapses before this movement even begins, it was fascinating to see the restraint that Thomas exercised in order to afford this movement pride of place, particularly when one realizes that this movement, on its own, runs through that gamut of Sandburg adjectives.

Within this broader architectural conception, it appeared that the other "movement of priority" resided in the second ("Marcia funebre") movement. This was no surprise, at least for me. Given Thomas' command of Mahler's conception of funeral marches, I should have expected that it would carry over to Beethoven's own symphonic approach (as opposed to the one he took in his Opus 26 piano sonata). The difficulty here is that so much happens in the first movement, whose scale accounts for so much of the overall scale of the entire symphony, that the second movement runs the risk of becoming a "breather" for the orchestra, losing its funereal impact. Thomas solved this by taking Beethoven at his word, emphasizing the "brio" of the "Allegro con brio" first movement, letting all the events of that movement unfold at a brisk pace that did not dwell on any of them the way those academics do in analyzing what makes this particular score so "revolutionary." Thus, while Beethoven's funeral march is never as angst-ridden as anything by Mahler, it carries much of the dramatic weight of the symphony, if not the implication that a hero is only remembered as "heroic" after his death, since, as Napoleon apparently demonstrated to Beethoven, in life he is too capable of undermining his own image. Then, to prepare the audience for the "primary position" of the final movement, Thomas brought back the "brio" for a quiet "vivace" approach to the scherzo movement, broadened out only by the horn passages in the trio.

All this would be a tough act to follow, which is why it was only sensible that it be preceded by a performance of Schuman's violin concerto featuring soloist Gil Shaham. Like many I was first informed about the music of Schuman by performing "Chester" in my high school band. This was useful information to the extent that the deconstruction of thematic material into unevenly spaced staccato punches is as much the substance of the violin concerto as it was of "Chester," which, having been composed in 1956, finds itself situated between the first (1947) and second (1959) "versions" of the concerto. The critical difference in the concerto is found in the lengthy solo violin passages that weave their way in a steady pulse of eight beats in and around the uneven orchestral pulses. This, by the way (to draw upon another of my favorite themes) is the essence of what John Dewey meant by "rhythm," which resides not in an evenly predictable pattern but in an unpredictability that mediates the known recollections of the past with the unknown anticipations of the future. (Leonard Meyer and Eugene Narmour would later develop a general theory of music around this in terms of what they called "expectations" and "realizations.")

Another "signature element" of the concerto is its rich orchestral texture, significantly reinforced by elaborate composition for the battery. This is "the fun part." It may lack the theoretical intricacies of the structure of the "Eroica" (or any of the other Beethoven symphonies, for that matter); but Schuman's music speaks with the same clear-but-brash American voice that we had experienced earlier this season in Samuel Barber's piano concerto and his "concert drama," "Andromache's Farewell." I would also venture to guess that much of the brashness in both of these composers stems from their having the good fortune of a music education free of the Europeanizing influence of Nadia Boulanger, whose list of students is practically a time capsule of twentieth-century music composition but who seemed to have little tolerance for the musical equivalent of Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp."

On the other hand, where barbaric yawps are concerned, Thomas and Shaham made for a well-matched pair. Shaham jumped into the almost unrelenting drive of his solo work feet first and, for the duration of the concerto, looked like he was having one hell of a ball. Meanwhile, having already taken us into the respective turfs of not only Barber but also Charles Ives (whose music, ironically, had been coupled with Mendelssohn's violin concerto), Thomas had accustomed us all to the listening talents required for barbaric yawping. This was thus a concert in which the two halves complemented each other, a coupling of twentieth-century American brashness with a nineteenth-century Viennese venture out to the threshold of what would later be called romanticism. What more could we ask for in learning to be better listeners?

Protest at the Olympics

I am not great fan of the whole institution of the Olympics, but it took the Dalai Lama to remind me that even this coin may have a positive side. That reminder emerged as a result of his response to accusations that he was trying to "sabotage" the summer games in protest against current conditions in Tibet. Here is the report that Al Jazeera English prepared from their wire services:

The Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, has supported China's right to host the Olympics despite Beijing accusing him of trying to sabotage the summer Games.

His statement on Saturday came after media reports on Friday said Zhang Qingli, China's top official in Tibet, had accused the Dalai Lama of trying to "sabotage this important event and spread rumours".

A statement issued by his government-in-exile from Dharamshala in northern India, said "it is common knowledge that His Holiness the Dalai Lama has consistently supported the right of China to host the 2008 Olympic Games".

However, it is the further elaboration of His Holiness' response that makes this story interesting:

Referring to questions about whether he backed calls by Tibet support groups for a Games boycott, the Dalai Lama said he had already stated "that it was too radical".

However, the Dalai Lama said Tibet support groups "could remind the international community, including the Chinese people, about the repression and urgency of the situation in Tibet".

The Dalai Lama is frustrated by China's refusal to discuss "cultural" autonomy for Tibet, but sees a window to sway public opinion ahead of the Olympics in August, analysts say.

His statement came a day after Chinese authorities warned preparations had been made to stop campaigners opposed to China's rule of Tibet from protesting in the Himalayan region before and during the Olympics.

This reminded me that it is sometimes the athletes themselves who end up having the greatest impact on public opinion. The most-told tale in this regard is probably that of the impact of Jesse Owens' performance at the 1936 Summer Olympics on Nazi ideology, which was all the stronger since not only were the games held in Berlin but they were used by the Nazis as a major propaganda tool. My personal memory, however, was influenced far more strongly by the Power to the People salute given by African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the medal-awarding ceremony at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Smith and Carlos recognized that, for all the efforts of their own country to silence the voice of the Black Power movement, that little staircase-pyramid for the three medal-winners was about as bully a pulpit as they could get; and, having achieved that pulpit, they then recognized that this one gesture would speak louder than any oratory.

For better or worse, Björk may have given us a taste of what could happen this summer in China. Today the New York Times provided a brief action-reaction account of her own effort to protest while performing in China:

China will tighten its restrictions on foreign performers following an appearance last Sunday in Shanghai by the Icelandic singer Bjork, who shouted “Tibet, Tibet” after performing her song “Declare Independence.” China’s Ministry of Culture responded to Bjork’s action on Friday by posting a statement on its Web site, saying that she “broke Chinese law and hurt Chinese people’s feelings,” The Associated Press reported.

This may have let a genie out of the bottle in the area of Olympic planning. Are Olympic athletes "foreign performers?" If so, what "restrictions" will be imposed on them; and what role will the International Olympics Committee play in the enforcement of those restrictions? Personally, I have more sympathy for Smith and Carlos than for Björk; but my criteria are primarily stylistic. I figure that, if the New York Philharmonic could pull off a propaganda coup in North Korea without saying a word, then the Olympic athletes should be just as expressive in such matters through the "instruments" of their own bodies. Perhaps the summer of 2008 will effect just the right kind of Hegelian synthesis of the respective summers of 1936 and 1968!

A Big Bonus for a Moral Pygmy

Associated Press has a story this morning, which is somewhat in the same league as yesterday's follow-up to last week's Chutzpah of the Week award. This time, however, the issue is not one of golden parachutes but of bonuses; and the industry is not in the financial sector. Rather, it is Yahoo!, where, one would think, agonizing over the very future of the company would take priority over awarding bonuses. So, in the tradition of the Center for American Progress, let's start with the numbers as reported by the Associated Press:

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company paid its president, Susan Decker, a $1.1 million bonus in 2007, according to documents filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That represented a 29 percent increase from the $850,000 bonus she received in 2006, when she was still Yahoo's chief financial officer.

Yahoo promoted Decker in June last year when co-founder Jerry Yang replaced Terry Semel as chief executive officer.

The company awarded its general counsel, Michael Callahan, with a $225,000 bonus for 2007. He received a $200,000 bonus in 2006.

The company didn't explain what Decker and Callahan did to merit the larger bonuses.

It is the second of these awards that deserves the most consideration, particularly in the context of the recent death of Tom Lantos. For those who do not remember (or were not reminded by my obituary for Lantos), Callahan was one of two representatives of Yahoo! (Jerry Yang was the other) whom Lantos declared to be "moral pygmies" for the way they handled a sensitive request for information from the Chinese government that led to a ten-year prison sentence for a Chinese dissident. It is hard to read this news as anything other than a corporate nose-thumbing at the memory of one of the few men in the workings of our Federal government who had strong moral priorities and was not afraid to raise his voice on their behalf.

Chutzpah that Makes a Difference

It was somewhat comforting to read Jim Abrams' Associated Press report this morning about how all three recipients of last week's Chutzpah of the Week award were called to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Henry Waxman. I am sure that Waxman appreciates all the denotations and connotations of "chutzpah" (and probably has to deal with all of them in the course of his work). However, I suspect that the Center for American Progress had more to do with bringing these guys (Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial Corp., Stanley O'Neal, formerly of Merrill Lynch & Co., and Charles Prince, formerly of Citigroup Inc.) to his attention, as they had brought them to my own!

The 3 AM Phone Call and the Fear of Fear Itself

When, Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow is given the opportunity to blog on The Huffington Post, her remarks are not to be taken lightly, particularly when she expresses herself with a grammatical clarity that is becoming rarer every day in the blogosphere. However, we all still have an obligation to be critical readers, particularly when, in the framework of the trivium, that grammatical clarity exposes potentially dangerous flaws in her rhetoric and logic. Such is the case with her post this morning that takes on, as she puts it, "Swirling questions as to who is better qualified to answer the menacing phone ringing at 3 a.m."

Let us begin by examining the specious rhetoric in which she frames that "swirling questions" issue:

History proves that al-Qaeda likes to strike within 7-10 year cycles. History also shows that al-Qaeda likes to take advantage of transition times in United States politics. In other words, al-Qaeda knows that new administrations are more vulnerable and ripe for attack. A sobering fact to think about while we witness the back-stabbing, squabbling, and fratricide spewing between the Obama and Clinton camps.

However effective this text may be at grabbing our attention, it misses what should have been a crucial target: History neither "proves" nor "shows" anything. History can never do anything more than offer up a slew of data points. It is then up to the cognitive capacities of the present to interpret those data points as effectively as possible. The best book about interpreting those data points is probably Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, by historians Richard Neustadt (who has been particularly interested in Presidential history) and Ernest May. Needless the say, the book is basically a collection of case studies, both positive and negative; there are no "algorithms" for the interpretation of historical data points, whether you're a Commander in Chief or a Chief Executive Officer.

This brings us to the heart of Breitweiser's logic, which involves the role of presidential advisors in interpreting the data points of history in the context of the data points of a crisis in the present:

Yes, there is much dramatic debate revolving around the comparative experience (or relative inexperience) of both Clinton and Obama. Swirling questions as to who is better qualified to answer the menacing phone ringing at 3 a.m. In fact, some people -- namely Obama's foreign policy expert Susan Rice -- feel that neither Clinton and Obama are experienced to answer that phone call. Let's hope she misspoke.

But the truth is that both Clinton and Obama would probably handle the phone call in similar ways. They would do their best to remain calm and lead our country in a time of crisis. Who wouldn't?

They would then turn to their advisors and seek their counsel. Would there be any line of demarcation separating such advice -- in other words, does either candidate have a superior set of advisors? Not really. Frankly, both Clinton and Obama have very similar advisors who would most likely offer the same sort of advice. And that advice would be status quo.

The greatest impediment to the interpretation of history is that old saw about how generals are always fighting the last war they experienced. The same may be said of presidential advisors, which means that, regardless of who is in the White House, the advisory team may well be as ill-equipped to deal with current terrorist threats as they were at the time of the first (failed) attack on the World Trade Center. The one person who seems to have recognized the need for new thinking is Dennis Ross. He expressed his own approach in the book Statecraft; but we do not hear very much from him (except on Book TV). Actually, the closest we may have come recently to putting Ross' theories into practice was probably in the way in which the New York Philharmonic handled their visit to North Korea, although I have no idea if anyone involved with that trip ever read Ross' book. Nevertheless, I see it as a dangerous contamination of status quo thinking that neither Clinton nor Obama had anything to say about how that visit was conducted, either in response to a question from the media or out of their own initiative.

In the terms of the abstract language behind which I hide whenever I venture into the swamplands of social theory, what made Ross unique was his ability to evaluate a dangerous situation in terms of agents taking motivated actions. The advisers who got us through the Cuban Missile Crisis seem to have had a better understanding of that subtle concept of "motive" than most of the current crop of "wise (wo)men;" and it seems as if, each time more documents about that crisis come to light, we gain greater appreciation of that understanding. Ross is the only one who has gone back to their basics. (The other exception may be Richard Clarke. My guess is that the reasoning that led him to see the seriousness of Al Qaeda had a lot to do with interpreting his data in terms of motivated actions.)

In that respect Hillary is no different from either of her alternatives: They are all "rooted in political expediency" (in the words of a comment by smartvotersinoregon) at a time when they should be paying more attention to the other players in this dangerous game. The logical weakness in Breitweiser's argument is that she cannot get beyond flogging the dead horse of the status quo at a time when all of us in the electorate should be trying to shove alternatives in the faces of the candidates to gauge their reactions. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this is our obligation, because the forces of the media that are trying to steer the course of the campaign never want to talk about "subtle concepts." They consume too much air time; and, in the rare event that they actually begin to take root in the "media consumer's" brain, they distract from the messages of the commercials. (Simply put, fear sells a lot more soap than social theory!)

Ironically, Hillary's "3 AM Phone Call" gambit invites just the sort of discussion I believe is necessary. Her question of who is there to answer the phone is not the critical one. The more important question is, "What do you do after you hang up the phone?" Neither Clinton nor Obama has even hinted at an answer to this question, but then no one has put it to either of them explicitly. However, such an answer would tell us all a lot about what it means to each of them to be a Commander in Chief.

The Music of the Script

All my writing about the extent to which a musical composition may be viewed as a conversation may have obscured the fact that the complementary side of this relationship is often equally valid. It may be that one of the ways in which we shall remember the innovations of twentieth-century drama will be through its capacity for "composing" scripts in which the "drama" resides in the musical qualities of the text. I was reminded about this yesterday, while reading Chloe Veltman's review of the Cutting Ball Theater Company's production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame for SF Weekly. She described Beckett as the author of "famously abstract dramas," her first example being "Play, featuring a chorus of three heads sticking out of massive urns." Having seen this piece several times, I certainly do not dispute her description; but I also remember Beckett having written about the fact that he viewed this work as an experiment in writing a dramatic script based on musical principles. This was probably a reflection of his admiration for James Joyce, who tried to structure the "Sirens" chapter of Ulysses as an eight-voice fugue. Interestingly enough, there is a paper about this chapter by Nadya Zimmerman published in the Journal of Modern Literature in 2002 entitled "Musical Form as Narrator;" and, to a great extent, that would also describe what Beckett was up to in Play. Once you recognize that the title plays (so to speak) on the ambiguity that confounds drama and musical performance, you discover that the underlying story is painfully concrete (and is basically a tale that goes back at least as far as Dante, if not further); but it reveals itself as the underlying musical form plays itself out (so to speak). In other words the way to deal with this text is not to hide behind propositions about abstraction but to deal with it as a performance of both drama and music.

One of the first American dramatists to pick up on this technique was Sam Shepard. The Tooth of Crime, for example, was about musicians, incorporated music (which Shepard composed), and fabricated new metaphors around the terminology of music. By the time we get to Cowboy Mouth, we are dealing with a script composed almost as if it were a jazz improvisation (the improvisers being Shepard and Patti Smith); and the role of "the music itself" in the performance is considerably diminished. (These days, alas, fewer and fewer people seem to be left who know Shepard from his plays, rather than his film acting work.)

I have been thinking about this approach to drama as a result of having just seen the film version of Lanford Wilson's play, Lemon Sky courtesy of the Sundance Channel. Wilson's first full-length play, Balm in Gilead, was structured both around and through music in a spirit similar to Shepard's work but going in different directions. By the time he got to Lemon Sky he was working more specifically with "the music of narration," playing out a plot through multiple narrators who weave among each other in a manner not that different from the voices of one of the fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. In the film (which is actually a video produced in 1988 at WGBH for the series American Playhouse) this musicality is further enhanced with a score by Pat Metheny and drum solos by Jack DeJohnette, which exhibit a contrapuntal relationship to the delivery of the narration texts.

The lesson I have learned from this complementary view is that it enables a more integrated approach to some of my recent writing. I have been interested in what it means to be a good listener (to music) and a good reader (of texts); but it had not previously occurred to me that these practices might be two sides of a common coin. Yes, I tried to approach both through the foundation of the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric; but I had not yet made the connection that a commonality of foundations might imply a commonality of strategies of practice. This may change as these posts continue to reflect my listening and reading experiences!

Putting Poetic Wisdom into Practice

It was a real comfort to read Marshall Grossman's effort to apply poetic wisdom to the current turmoil in the Democratic party in his blog post last night on The Huffington Post, even if his poet was William Dunbar, who preceded the concept of poetic wisdom in Giambattista Vico's New Science by over two centuries. He is not the first to do this, since I have already commented on a similar approach by Jeff Chown, president of Davie Brown Talent; but Grossman has better academic credentials and employs them to excellent effect. (I find it hard to imagine Chown spending much time reading anything from the nineteenth century, let alone any earlier sources!) However, while Chown applied his poetic wisdom to his area of expertise, which is consumer appeal, Grossman finds his model in Aesop's "Boastful Athlete" fable, whose moral, as stated on the Aesopica Web site is "that talking is a waste of time when you can simply provide a demonstration." This leads Grossman to the conclusion I have been flogging for several months, most recently in the context of last Tuesday's primary madness.

In a further display of his literary expertise, Grossman draws his conclusion in the form of a "modest proposal" (that wonderful Swiftian turn of phrase, which I have also appropriated in another context) in the following words:

All three prospective presidents happen to be United States Senators. Let's judge them on what they do, on what they can deliver, between now and the election. Let Clinton and Obama vow not to leave Washington, DC between now and the nominating convention. Don't tell me who will deliver a progressive America. Take your campaign to the floor of the Senate and start delivering. Get in there and make it happen, stop the FISA act, assert congressional oversight of war funding. Stand in the well of the Senate and demand that the legislative branch check and balance the run away executive. Tell Nancy Pelosi to enforce the contempt citations against Meirs and Bolton. Haul Mukasey before the Senate and read him the riot act on ignoring congressional subpoenas. Tie up the DOJ's funding until you get some respect. There is enough work to be done here in Washington for you to make a real record of achievement -- and instead of destroying each other you'll put McCain under enormous pressure to come back and meet you in the Senate, where saying, at least potentially is doing. And the TV coverage will be free too. How's that for campaign finance reform?

In other words stop wasting all that money (not to mention time) playing media games on the campaign trail. Instead, get back to "doing the people's business" by taking your "day job" seriously; and let the people exercise their judgment on the basis of how well you do that job. We know that at least one Senator (Harry Reid) would appreciate that strategy from the two Democratic contenders; and, as Grossman observed, if both Clinton and Obama were to take this strategy seriously, they would be putting considerable pressure on McCain to play the same game.

There is, however, one element of my own approach that Grossman seems to have missed, which is that victories on the Senate floor tend to be won on the basis of forming coalitions. The Senate is thus one of the few places in our governmental structure that can get beyond that "top-dog thinking" that has resulted in such an agonizing primary season and probably driven much of the electorate up the wall. Following Grossman's advice would get both Clinton and Obama back into the groove of coalition-building, hopefully to an extent to which they would appreciate the value of the process. They could then take that sense of value with them to the Democratic National Convention and recognize that a properly-constituted coalition is likely to be the "secret sauce" that will make all the difference in Chown's consumer model, not just in the White House but also in both houses of the Congress. However, this is getting ahead of the game. In the short term Clinton and Obama need to take Grossman's "modest proposal" seriously and start providing the electorate with their political actions as an alternative to their "campaigning words." Properly executed, those actions will speak in a far more compelling voice, even to the point of abating our fears of what Grossman called "a Badly Wrecked Train."

THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

The buzz about just what President George W. Bush was up to by making a show (song-and-dance routine?) of waiting at the front of the White House for John McCain still seems to have the media going. The nicest image capture I have seen comes courtesy of Michael Shaw, who has a "Reading the Pictures" blog on The Huffington Post. He almost (but not quite) homed in on the most appropriate text for the occasion:

OOOOOOOOOOO! I LOVE TO DANCE THE LITTLE SIDESTEP
NOW THEY SEE ME, NOW THEY DON'T
I'VE COME AND GONE . . .
AND OOOOOOOOOOO! I LOVE TO SWEEP AROUND A WIDESTEP
CUT A LITTLE SWATH AND LEAD THE PEOPLE ON

Those unfamiliar with the world of musical comedy might not recognize these as the words of another Texas governor, who gets to strut his stuff in a song called "The Sidestep" in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Personally, I find the connection irresistible; it is the closest thing to truth-in-advertising to have come out of the White House in the entirety of the current Administration!

Catching Up on Chutzpah

It looks like it's time for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to start catching up to President George W. Bush when it comes to Chutzpah of the Week awards. By my records Condi has been stuck at two since last June, while Bush is now way ahead of her with seven. However, the Middle East has always been fertile ground for chutzpah (and not just in the Mesopotamian crescent). So let us consider Anne Gearan's report for the Associated Press on how Rice has been handling the current breakdown in relations between Israel and the Palestinians:

The U.S.-backed Palestinian president rebuffed the Bush administration's request Tuesday to quickly end a walkout of peace talks with Israel, saying Israeli military bombardment of civilians in the Gaza Strip is unacceptable under any circumstance.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said negotiations are the only solution, and defended Israel's right to seek out militants who use the tiny Hamas-held territory as a launching pad for increasing numbers of rockets targeting civilians in southern Israel.

"I understand the difficulties of the current moment," Rice said following meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "We all must keep an eye on what is important."

Regular Rice followers know about her talent for assertion-by-imperative; but this particular imperative has a significant ring of chutzpah to it, because, by implication, it dismisses the fatal consequences of the latest round of Israeli aggression against Gaza as being not "important." Put another way, she has laid all of the blame for the breakdown in peace talks on Abbas, who decided that he could not meet with Israel while those attacks continued. Thus, if the United States went into this latest effort to negotiate a peace with even a shred of the reputation of a fair broker, Rice has pretty much blown away that last shred. This is ultimately the worst of that old "New World Order" thinking, based on the premise that the total authority of the United States was all that would be required to solve all the world's problems. With all sorts of evidence to refute that premise and demonstrate that just the opposite has occurred, Rice clings to her ideology with the defiance of a captain going down with a sinking ship: chutzpah of the highest order worthy of this week's award!

The "Bush-Cheney Free Zone"

Back when I lived in Los Angeles, I used to listen to an announcer on KPFK who would always sign off at the end of his program by saying, "Remember to buy something from New Zealand, the world's only nuclear-free zone." In that spirit it is worth noting that one of the less-reported decisions in yesterday's elections in Vermont was the declaration of two cities as "Bush-Cheney Free Zones." Here is the Reuters account:

Voters in two Vermont towns on Tuesday approved a measure that would instruct police to arrest President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for "crimes against our Constitution," local media reported.

The nonbinding, symbolic measure, passed in Brattleboro and Marlboro in a state known for taking liberal positions on national issues, instructs town police to "extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them."

Regular readers will recognize Marlboro as the home of the Marlboro Music Festival. Personally, I think the Festival organizers should promote this news. There is something to be said about attending a music festival safely protected from any impositions by either Bush or Cheney!

A Coalition of Diversity

Once again the people have spoken; and, in spite of what I have called our obsession with "top-dog thinking," there still is no top dog. As Associated Press Writers Jim Kuhnhenn and Calvin Woodward put it in their review of the primary results for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:

Based on their current delegate counts, neither candidate can win enough delegates in the remaining primaries and caucuses to secure the nomination without the help of nearly 800 party officials and top elected officials who also have a voice in the selection.

In other words it all comes down to what the superdelegates choose to do at the Democratic National Convention.

They are going to be under a lot of pressure, not only from both Clinton and Obama but also from those who argue that superdelegates should be obliged to reflect the popular vote count. On the other hand, if the superdelegates were to unite among themselves, they could exert an alternative influence, which, as I previously observed, has been pitifully neglected by our political system: they could turn a competition into a coalition. Even if the concept of a coalition is alien to the prevailing rules of the political game, it has not entirely vanished from our cultural foundations.

This morning on NPR I heard at least one pundit invoke Joseph Campbell's concept of the heroic quest. Without quibbling over the authenticity or reliability of Campbell's scholarship, we would do well to recognize an important prototypical characteristic of the quest myth, which is that, while there may be a "hero," that hero is assisted by many agents. Each of those agents has both strengths and weaknesses. Each of the strengths must be brought to bear at some point along the road to achieving the quest; and sometimes a strength is used to compensate for a weakness of one of the agents (even a weakness of the hero). In other words it is not the hero who completes the quest but the team that forms around the hero (not always as a result of choices that the hero makes). Thus, for all the top-dog influences on our culture from athletic and military competitions, the fundamental myth of the quest is a celebration of the power of the coalition. Put another way, it is the fundamental myth about the building of a society.

I found myself thinking about this over the last couple of weeks while watching the episodes I had recorded from the Firefly marathon on the Science Fiction Channel. This is a quest myth that barely has a hero; but it does have a highly diverse collection of agents, each with a different knapsack of skills (and each with any number of all-too-human foibles). This is a pleasant contrast from Star Trek myths, all of which are organized around military structures in one way or another. Serendipity, the spaceship in which the Firefly characters travel, is much closer to a democracy than any of the Star Trek settings. If anything it is closest to that melancholy passage that Benjamin Britten wrote in Billy Budd, when the British officers are recalling the mutiny on the Nore and refer to it as "the floating republic," sort of the ultimate embodiment of a "ship of state" constituted on democratic principles.

This all reflects back on a point I raised about the nonsensical self-importance of the World Economic Forum. Do we, as I had then suggested, tell stories in order to keep fear at bay, because we have become so victimized by the culture of fear imposed on us; or do we, as Joan Didion put it, tell ourselves stories in order to live? It may very well be that, however badly we are being assaulted by fears contingent on the follies of our current administration, the very viability (which is to say "life") of the Democratic Party, if not our Constitutional foundations, will depend on whether or not we can live by the "coalition lesson" of the quest myth. The media will probably do their best to conceal that lesson. After all, their bread and butter (which is to say advertising revenue) almost always comes from stories of competitions, since so much of advertising is all about how to be a winner rather than a loser. However, if our culture has roots deeper than the media can undermine, we may yet be able to pull ourselves out of a mess that has been in the making for eight years. Pessimistic as I may be about the unraveling of our state of affairs, I would still like to believe that, just this once, we have what it takes to turn back those forces that have come so close to enslaving us. It just seems ironic that such a capacity may ultimately reside in the will of that elite class of superdelegates attending the Democratic National Convention.

Presidential Qualities

This seems to be the year in which we weigh a variety of personal attributes in terms of whether or not they are suitably "presidential." To some extent it began with Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope book, which engendered a fixation on not just change but audacious change. On the other hand it took some of the commentary from Europe to remind us that lack of ruthlessness can be a major shortcoming in a leader, particularly the leader of a superpower. In a similar vein yesterday I suggested that lack of chutzpah may be just as great a shortcoming. Today is seems as if all eyes (including those of the BBC) were fixed on Hillary Clinton appearing on The Daily Show last night, with particular emphasis on an exchange reported by the Associated Press as follows:

"This election is about judgment," Stewart said to her. "Yet tomorrow is perhaps one of the most important days of your life and you've chosen to spend the night before talking to me. Senator, as a host I'm delighted. As a citizen, I'm frightened."

Responded Clinton: "It is pretty pathetic."

Clinton has always had a good sense of humor, but she did well to let Jon Stewart to set her up with an opportunity to exhibit it. This is not to say that Obama lacks a sense of humor. I actually felt that one of his finer moments on the campaign trail was when he applied the fundamental principles of standup comedy to make his points in Las Vegas.

The point is that there is more to being presidential than, for example, the abstract qualities that Isaiah Berlin called "Political Judgement" or that Obama tried to contrast in terms of the corporate labels of Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer. There are also more concrete qualities of personality and sociability. These are particularly relevant in light of the study published in 1986 by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries and Danny Miller, which observed the parallels between the pathology of a corporate organization and the neurotic behavior of top management. If we are to try to view the country under the same lens that we view business organizations, then such parallels are likely to be relevant. From such a point of view, that sense of humor says a lot about being presidential. Our current President only seems to smirk and very rarely indulges in humor at his own expense. This is a sharp contrast with Clinton, Obama, and even McCain (who could do with some help from Stewart on his delivery). Another way of putting it is that humor may be like that proverbial velvet glove, which often does a good job of concealing whether or not the fist it encloses is really iron. This may turn out to be an extremely important quality when a state of crisis is at its worst; and, regardless of our cultural fear of thinking that way, this particular election is going to demand that we view our candidates in the light of how they are likely to behave in the setting of a worst-case scenario.

Predatory Practices on the Internet

Net News Publisher ran a story this morning, which, while not explicitly discussing Internet practices, is applicable to an emerging form of predation taking place on the Internet:

A group of business opportunity marketers who told consumers they could make substantial income processing medical claims from home have agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that they misled consumers in violation of federal law.

The settlement is a result of Project Fal$e Hope$, an FTC-led effort that targeted bogus business opportunities and work-at-home scams in 2006, producing more than 100 law enforcement actions by the FTC, the Department of Justice, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and law enforcement agencies in 11 states.

According to the FTC, in mass mailings to consumers throughout the nation, the defendants offered a business opportunity – electronically processing health care providers’ medical claims for insurance reimbursement – and that they would help consumers find their first medical billing client and provide them with lists of providers in their area. Consumers were told that they could earn $1,200 per month with one client, and they were promised software training and upgrades, review of all claims processed, and marketing and technical support.

As stated in the complaint, consumers were provided with names and telephone numbers of references represented as current licensees, some of whom were the defendants’ officers and directors. After consumers paid a “licensing fee” of $4,985 to $5,985, the defendants never provided a franchise disclosure statement, an earnings claim document, or any other information substantiating their earnings claims. At their own expense, the complaint notes, consumers attended a training session where they learned that the representations were false, and that they would have to make cold calls and personal visits in order to get clients. Once back home, they learned that obtaining clients was extremely difficult, if not impossible, because the market was saturated, most processors already functioned electronically, and the few who processed manually had little interest in entrusting their billing to inexperienced or unknown persons.

Presumably, the grounds for prosecution in this case involved (at least) mail fraud. On the Internet, however, the situation is more insidious, because it takes the form of employment opportunities listed on such sites as CareerBuilder and Yahoo! HotJobs. These scams all take the same form: The job-seeker is presented with what looks like the perfect employment opportunity; but once "hooked" that person discovers that this opportunity is only available to those who fork out some initial payment, which usually seems to involve four figures. The lucky ones get the pitch at an introductory seminar that offers some free food, but the food inevitably comes with a higher price tag.

None of this is new. Barbara Ehrenreich devoted an entire chapter ("In Which I Am Offered a 'Job'") to it in her book, Bait and Switch. However, that book does not say very much about the role that the Internet has come to play in taking the bad situation of victims of unemployment and making it far worse. Needless to say, Internet evangelists don't talk about this thing very much, just as they do not talk about the predators lurking on MySpace or death threats issued through the blogosphere. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that caveat lector is as important in reading the "Help Wanted Ads" as it is in reading Wikipedia.

Remembering FDR

Yesterday I wrote that "invoking [Abbie] Hoffman's memory may be one of the best antidotes to all of the current 'memorial worship' of Ronald Reagan." Today, in her Editor's Cut blog post for The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel invoked a somewhat less controversial memory, that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Her timing was impeccable, since today is the 75th anniversary of his first inauguration. Her objective was to call into question whether or not the Democratic party is still "the party of Roosevelt." This is clearly a relevant question, since America had been plunged into its worst ever economic crisis under the administration of a Republican President and presumably elected Roosevelt out of a country-wide perceived need for change. (Does that sound familiar?)

Unfortunately, vanden Heuvel's post scores primarily on rhetoric at a time when we are being besieged by rhetoric on all fronts:

On a cold day at the tail of winter, Roosevelt looked out over a nation gripped by Depression, incapacitated by fear, and confronted by threats as grave as any we face today. He spoke, reassuringly, of how we had nothing to fear but fear itself. The New Deal policies he launched transformed nearly every aspect of American political, economic and cultural life. As important, they restored hope, work and a measure of dignity to millions.

It is that spirit of grounded realism and determined idealism that we need to reclaim today. It is that spirit which offers an antidote to those who rule as if they have nothing to fear but the end of fear itself.

As we wait for the results from today's primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont, it's worth asking if the party of Roosevelt can recapture the imagination and nerve to offer solutions on a scale equal to the problems we face?

If it is "grounded realism" that vanden Heuvel wants (and it is certainly what I want), she would do better to consult a speech that Roosevelt gave at Oglethorpe University on May 22, 1932, rather than that Inaugural Address that she chose to celebrate. This is the text I have in mind:

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

There is an irony in how I encountered this text that deserves citing. It was used by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., to introduce Chapter 11 of The Mythical Man Month. This collection of "Essays on Software Engineering" was published in 1975 and may best be read as an extended apology for the fiasco that was the development of IBM's Operating System/360. The buck for this mess stopped at Brooks' desk, and many of us have benefitted from his effort to write about getting into and out of messes is such readable language. While I often argue that technocentrism is responsible for many of today's messes, this is a case where a dyed-in-the-wool technologist came up with wisdom that extended beyond his specialty; and his invocation of Roosevelt was one of the most memorable episodes in my own reading of his book.

The important message in Roosevelt's text is that, when you are confronted with a truly complex problem (like the Great Depression), the first solution you apply is not necessarily going to be the one that works best or, for that matter, works at all. The title of that eleventh chapter of The Mythical Man Month is "Plan to Throw One Away." The message of the chapter paraphrases Roosevelt: Build something. Then make sure you understand what works and what doesn't. Learn from what you build; then throw it away and build something better. The real "nerve" that Roosevelt brought to his administration was the courage to try things and then admit frankly when they did not work, writing them off as part of a learning process that might help in "getting it right the next time." Indeed, one way to read the "raw numbers" is that the demand for industrialization brought on by the Second World War did more for turning around the economy than any of the New Deal programs did. This is not to discredit any of those programs. After all, that "depression" was not just economic but also both psychological and social (a point that vanden Heuvel recognized). Much of the New Deal had to do with treating a national malaise; so, when the time came to rise to the challenges of the Second World War, the American public was psychologically prepared to do so.

Notice that, in that last paragraph, I focused only on the "nerve" part of vanden Heuvel's text, rather than the "imagination." This is a reaction of my own cautionary remarks about attaching too much "currency" to "innovation." The "innovation evangelists" work hand-in-glove with the media to cultivate a messianic culture, which assumes that there is always an answer "in the back of the book" and all we need is the right leader who has the right book. The media then translate this into a failure-is-not-an-option philosophy, anxious to jump on any glimmer of failure as a potential headline story. Roosevelt's greatest insight was that failure not only is an option but also a necessary option. Without it you may succumb to the illusion of having solved the problem and will be unprepared for the consequences that ensue when you discover that it is not quite the solution you thought it was.

So, yes, it is good to remember Roosevelt on this particular anniversary date. As I said at the beginning, the context is too appropriate for the anniversary to be ignored. Nevertheless, we need to be a bit more specific about why he deserves to be remembered; and that "we" applies to not only those of us participating in the electoral process but also those who have made a career out of influencing the choices we make through manipulation of the media we consume.

The "Day Job" Question (Again)

Since this is yet another make-or-break day of Presidential primaries, it is as good a time to remember, as I have observed several times in the past, that both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have probably been putting all their energy into campaigning at the expense of their "day job," which I like to describe as "doing the people's business." However, I should also observe that David Corn has been considering this issue in his latest post to the Mother Jones MojoBlog. Because he has been a bit more gracious in trying to put this into perspective, I feel it is as good idea to reproduce the entirety of his argument:

In the past few days, as Hillary Clinton has intensified her attacks on Barack Obama prior to the all-important primaries in Ohio and Texas, she has claimed that he has been "missing in action" regarding Afghanistan. Clinton has been trying to make the case that she's better prepped than Obama to be commander-in-chief and more qualified to answer the phone at 3:00 a.m. when crisis strikes. To prove her point, she notes that Obama, who chairs a foreign relations subcommittee covering European matters, has held not one hearing on how to bolster NATO in Afghanistan. This weekend she told reporters on her campaign plane that he has failed in a "responsibility that is directly related to Afghanistan." She urged the journos to grill Obama on this. She said that Afghanistan is "one of the two most important challenges internationally." And she added, "I think he was missing in action...because he was running for president."

It's true that Obama has convened no meetings of the subcommittee, but his camp counters that he became chair of the subcommittee early last year, just as he was starting his presidential campaign. Clinton is technically correct that Obama could have used the subcommittee to conduct oversight of actions and policies related to Afghanistan. But the full foreign relations committee, under the guidance of Senator Joe Biden, has held several hearings on Afghanistan that covered NATO's role there. It's not as if the foreign relations committee did nothing on Afghanistan because Obama did not take on the mission. Also, as happens with many committees, the chair of the full committee reserves the right to handle the big issues him- or herself, and Afghanistan counts as a big issue.

Clinton ought to be careful about hurling stones in this area. As she always tells campaign crowds, she is a member of the Senate armed services committee. In February the committee held two hearings on Afghanistan. On February 8, it focused on appropriations for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was a witness. Eight days later, the committee zeroed in on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, holding a two-part hearing examining recent reports on Afghanistan. Key witnesses included senior officials from the State Department and the Pentagon responsible for the administration's Afghanistan policy.

Clinton attended neither of these hearings. She was on the campaign trail.

Many hearings occur on Capitol Hill without all members--or even a majority of members--of the committee in attendance. In fact, that's more common than not. At plenty of hearings, the committee chair is the only senator or representative present. So it's no surprise or scandal that Clinton was not there for these two Afghanistan hearings. (She did participate in two hearings on Afghanistan held by the committee in the first half of 2007.) But in a campaign season, a spinner could easily say that she's guilty of the same charge she tosses at Obama: putting presidential campaigning ahead of Afghanistan. Her neglect, certainly, is not the same as his: he held no hearings for a year; she attended no hearings this year. But as Clinton throws the kitchen sink at Obama, she ought to make sure nuts and bolts don't bounce back at her.

I think it is important for Corn to point out that "the people's business" is not simply a matter of showing up in the right chambers in Washington at the right time. On the other hand there is also the question of the responsibility that Senate members have to their party leader. The last time I addressed this question myself was in response to an explicit request (plea?) from Harry Reid for both Obama and Clinton to "show up" for some critical votes in February; and I was glad to see Corn cover that particular period in his own analysis.

The real question, of course, is not about "showing up" but about effectively representing one's constituents, since that is the very essence of how the Constitution established the Legislative branch of government. This is not an easy question to answer: It's not as if you can data-mine the Congressional Record for relevant "facts" about Obama and Clinton, respectively, and then grind through each of those fact collections with a mathematical formula that will serve as a "value function" for each candidate. What is most vexing about the campaign process, however, is how little of all that talk dwells directly on why Obama and Clinton each think they have been the best possible representative, without even resorting to some kind of I-represent-my-constituents-better-that-you-do-yours pissing contest. This may be annoying, but it is not surprising. This campaign has not been made by what these two candidates have done to establish their respective values but by the way in which the media has decided to cover it as a "battle royal" (to draw upon the title of the first chapter of The Invisible Man). Thus, it is probably the case that neither Obama nor Clinton intended to "warp their priorities" as a result of deciding to vie for their party's nomination; but the influence of the media is so great that they have allowed their priorities to be so warped. What, then, does that say about the capacity that either of them have for leadership?

The Importance of Having Chutzpah

John Eskow ran an interesting memoir about Abbie Hoffman this morning on The Huffington Post in an effort to demonstrate that Barack Obama shares Hoffman's "history as community organizers." While I appreciate that invoking Hoffman's memory may be one of the best antidotes to all of the current "memorial worship" of Ronald Reagan, I came away with the disappointing impression that Eskow may have missed the point of some of his most salient memories. Consider the following example:

Abbie and I are walking through the Lower East Side in the long hot summer of 1968. Inter-racial tension sizzles off the pavement. Three tough young black men start taunting Abbie: "Hey man, when you gonna cut your hair?" Abbie turns around, walks up to the biggest heckler, and says: "Whenever I feel like it, whitey."

What followed was a moment of stunned, ominous silence so enormous it seemed, briefly, to engulf all of New York -- until the three black men burst out laughing and gave Abbie a round of spontaneous power-handshakes. Within moments they were walking to a demonstration with us.

From my point of view, this story illustrates the most salient attribute of Abbie's character, which was his sheer unadulterated chutzpah (and which Eskow overlooked entirely). More specifically, in the tradition of my criteria for Chutzpah of the Week awards, the anecdote is a demonstration of chutzpah with the most positive connotation. Obama may have the audacity, not just of hope but in his rhetoric of change; but chutzpah is the spinal chord without which audacity cannot stand up to adversity. Abbie knew that, as does Dennis Kucinich, who remains my "poster child" for chutzpah with a positive connotation. However, I suspect that much of Kucinich's chutzpah is informed by the "hard knocks" of his personal experiences, particularly the adversity visited upon him when he was Mayor of Cleveland. My greatest fear is that Obama's background may not have had enough of that kind of adversity to teach him the value of such chutzpah.

The Current Marlboro Touring Extension

Musicians from Marlboro is a touring group that basically gives the rest of us an opportunity to sample the offerings from the preceding summer's Marlboro Music Festival from the campus of Marlboro College in Vermont. Most of the performers are at the beginning of their respective careers, although I have been following the career of cellist Marcy Rosen since my days on the East Coast. One of Marlboro's greatest virtues is the environment in which the young rub shoulders, so to speak, with the more mature professionals in a collegial, rather than student-teacher, relationship. Since a Musicians from Marlboro concert tends to be a greatest-hits-from-last-summer affair, the resulting program may not have the unifying theme that so many concert programs now seem to have. Nevertheless, last night's Annual Subscriber Gift Concert, organized by San Francisco Performances, could be listened to as a reflection on Robert Mann's comment at the end of his San Francisco Conservatory Master Class to the effect that the best way to get to know a composer is through the music to which that composer was exposed. (Mann actually said "folk music;" but I have used Ives as an example of an "experience base" that extends far beyond what we would call folk music.)

When Mann made this comment at the Conservatory, it was in the context of guidance he was giving to a student string quartet preparing Dmitri Shostakovich's second string quartet; but an equally valid context would be the extensive experience of Mann and the Julliard Quartet with the six string quartets of Béla Bartók. This is a remarkable collection, because each of the six is decidedly unique from the others; yet all of them are firmly rooted in the folk music that Bartók had studied so assiduously with his colleague, Zoltán Kodály. It thus seems appropriate to begin with what a string quartet of Marlboro veterans (Lily Francis and Yura Lee, violins, Eric Nowlin, viola, and Rosen on cello) did with the fourth of these quartets. It is also important to recognize the role of the Julliard Quartet in our understanding of Bartók, since their legacy of several recordings of the complete cycle must be as much a burden on a contemporary string quartet as the legacy of Arthur Rubinstein recordings is on any pianist wishing to perform Chopin (who was also heavily influenced by the music he heard around him). Nevertheless, the Marlboro quartet delivered a performance of the Bartók fourth as a conversation entirely of their own devising, rather than a departure from a model previously developed by the Julliard.

In my student days this was the Bartók quartet that received the most attention in the classroom, the presumption being that it was the least "accessible" of the six. Allen Forte even went as far as to suggest that the third movement embodied a Webern-like serialism, rather than simply experimenting with the use of tone clusters to accompany a series of recitative passages by each of the instruments. However, as Mann had demonstrated in coaching a student string quartet working on Elliott Carter, the accessibility of both a composition and its performance often derives from the extent to which performances can perceive and realize the music in the spirit of John Dewey's conversation metaphor. This is why I feel it was important to describe the Marlboro performance as a conversation "of their own devising." The "script for the dialog" may be in the published score; but the actual "conversational technique" of affirmations and challenges is a matter of how the "actors perform the script." As a result, while many of us may have been well-informed by past Julliard performances of Bartók (both recorded and "live"), our state of informedness provided the basis for appreciating the unique Marlboro voices that were engaged in this particular conversation.

The Bartók quartet was flanked by two decidedly different approaches to folk material, both of which involved texts sung by mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford. First there were four arrangements by Ludwig van Beethoven of folksongs, two of which were Scottish (one with a text by Robert Burns) and the other two Irish. These are rather odd "rough beasts," to invoke the metaphor of that later Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. They were the product of a commission from Scottish publisher George Thomson, who had collected the texts and melodies of the folk material and wanted Beethoven to arrange them for voice accompanied by piano trio. According to Eric Bromberger, who prepared the program notes, Beethoven never saw the texts, only the titles and melodies; so these works are hardly major models of art song. For that matter, as I have previously suggested, most of Beethoven's writing for the human voice is far from his best effort. (As far as I am concerned, he hit the top of his game with the first act quartet in Fidelio, "Mir is so wunderbar;" and the down-slope on either side of that stunning moment is pretty steep!) So these folksong settings are best appreciated for their novelty.

On the other hand the Bartók quartet was followed (after an intermission) by Johannes Brahms' two Opus 91 songs for alto, viola, and piano. In the second of these songs, "Geistliches Wiegenlied," the viola plays a direct quotation of the German folksong, "Joseph, lieber Joseph mein," which comes from the fourteenth-century carol "Resonet in laudibus." References to Christmas are so legion and so hackneyed that this brief meditation on the Nativity is powerfully transcendent in its modesty, and Mumford easily found just the right tone for realizing that modesty. If Brahms felt haunted by Beethoven's ghost whenever he tried to write for orchestra, when it came to German art song, he had nothing to fear! Both of these songs convey the listener to the still center of the universe, where we encounter, of all things, the Nativity scene in all of its childlike simplicity.

The final work on the program was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 593 D major string quintet. This was composed in December of 1790, exactly one year before his death; and, while there is much to praise in this work, that context may have elevated it on the wrong pedestal. Bromberger quoted Louis Biancolli (compiler of The Mozart Handbook) calling it "full of noble sentiment and great feeling;" but I have trouble buying into that perspective. I prefer to think that, even at the age of 34, Mozart had still not lost touch with his inner-twenty-year-old, responsible for all that ingenuity and wit that make his music so engaging. This is certainly the sort of performance that the Marlboro musicians brought to their audience. The feeling was definitely there; but the tone was not so much one of "noble sentiment" as of the sheer joy of discovery that emerges when conversation at its best is allowed to run its course.

The extent to which this was a conversation among equals was further reinforced by the seating for this quintet. Francis and Lee exchanged positions, so that Lee led the ensemble as first violin. Similarly, Nowlin, having also played the Brahms, drew back to the second viola chair, ceding the lead to Maiya Papach. I really enjoy this kind of practice, seeing it so often in the seating of the San Francisco Symphony. It is the mark of the sort of sensibility that goes into managing a repertoire, where different voices play different roles in different compositions. In other words it adds to the overall diversity of the performance experience, and it is the pleasures of such diversity that play such a strong role in motivating us to go to such performances in the first place.

The Paradox of Fundamentalism

Several month ago Anthony Grafton wrote an "appreciation piece" about Clifford Geertz based heavily on Grafton's experience in co-teaching with Geertz at Princeton. Grafton was particularly impressed by the way Geertz could persuade his anthropology students to assimilate seriously the mindset of even the most alien of cultures for the sake of arriving at a better understanding of what made those cultures tick. I could not help but remember Grafton's words this morning while reading the reactions to Barry Yourgrau's latest blog post on The Huffington Post, "McCain's Elbows, John Hagee, and the San Antonio B'nai B'rith." Of greatest interest were the reactions provoked by the following paragraph from the original post:

Perhaps that flapping notion [referring to the way McCain carries his arms] holds some merit though--honest John is trying to flap away from the trouble he's in from not denouncing the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, who is a bonafide wacko, a medieval crank, anti-Catholic bigot and slaughter-monger, who happens to be grotesquely pro-Israel.

I had to wonder how Geertz would have reacted had one of his anthropology students used that kind of language or, for that matter, the turn of phrase in the comment by Querent about "most mentally disabled fundamentalists." Hopefully, he would have responded with a quiet reminder that cultures are to be interpreted, rather than evaluated, and that the methodology of interpretation involves the effort to assume "the native's point of view," however difficult that effort may be. Indeed, my recent attention to the work of John Dewey grew out of my reading the first two Parts of Geertz' collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures; so it is no surprise that the language I have quoted reflects the very problems that Dewey argued could be resolved through works of art. This is, in Dewey's words, the language of "a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience," thus undermining all possibility "of complete and unhindered communication between man and man."

Ironically, one of my closest experiences with a fundamentalist took place at the St. Andrew's hospice that is practically right outside the wall around the Old City of Jerusalem. (Before the 1967 War it was about as close as you could get to the Old City while remaining within Israeli borders.) The fundamentalist in question was returning to the United States, along with the rest of his family, from missionary work in Asia; and Fate had ironically planted him at the very site where I had established my own accommodations. This experience gave me my first real sense of the extent to which the fundamentalist mindset is not pathological but fraught with paradox.

Appealing again to a healthy sense of irony, that paradox lies in the discrepancies between the Old and New Testaments and the fundamentalist conviction that both texts are authoritative ("word of God") sources. The problem, of course, is the wide discrepancy of opinion about the Jews. Thus, this particular fundamentalist was very comfortable sitting in the living room of our hospice opining over the need for a State of Israel to occupy that territory that had been given by God to Abraham in the Book of Genesis, disregarding all the New Testament texts that condemned the Jews for their role in the Crucifixion. In a way this paradox is in the same league as the optical illusion of the Necker cube, which, due to the lack of any depth cues, can be seen in two inconsistent ways, each viewing the cube from a different perspective. You can see it from one perspective or another, but you cannot see it from both at the same time. So it is that a fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament sees today's Jews as God's chosen people, while an equally fundamentalist reading of the New Testament sees them as fated for eternal damnation.

Yourgrau's text is sort of an example of "thinking out of the box" by denying the significance of this paradox and attributing it to some kind of mental pathology. Perhaps he believes that all fundamentalists should be "deprogrammed" through techniques that have been applied to followers of cults deemed "irrational" or "destructive" by our societal norms. Without appearing to defend fundamentalists, however, I would argue that his approach basically denies the possibility of communication and, by denying the possibility of communication, also denies the possibility of establishing a platform of understanding upon which differences can be discussed. In other words he is no different from President George W. Bush attacking Barak Obama for wanting to meet with leaders of countries like Cuba or North Korea.

There is no easy way out of this mess. It does not take much study of history to appreciate that a mind in paradox, whether the mind of an individual or the "collective mind" of a culture, is a mind under great stress. Even the Necker cube annoys many viewers by challenging the assumption that there is only one way to interpret a visual stimulus. However, the one thing that history may teach us is that increasing the stress tends to provoke consequences that are even worse than those that gave rise to the stress. Not only did Yourgrau's language increase the stress on the fundamentalist mindset, but also it seems to have incited others to do the same through their comments. I am not so much worried about the consequences of a "fundamentalist backlash" as I am about the way in which this strategy reveals how intolerant many who purport to be "liberal" and "rational" really are; and that says a lot as we head towards an election that is more likely to be venomous than decisive.

DIXIT VOX POPULI!

It is one thing for the indignant blogosphere to rail against the ways in which the mainstream media distort our sense of reality. It is another when such inadequacies of the media emerge in the result of a poll. Thus we should consider the following report released by Reuters yesterday morning:

Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news, according to a new survey.

While most people think journalism is important to the quality of life, 64 percent are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities, a We Media/Zogby Interactive online poll showed.

"That's a really encouraging reflection of people who care A) about journalism and B) understand that it makes a difference to their lives," said Andrew Nachison, of iFOCOS, a Virginia-based think tank which organized a forum in Miami where the findings were presented.

Nearly half of the 1,979 people who responded to the survey said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, up from 40 percent just a year ago. Less than one third use television to get their news, while 11 percent turn to radio and 10 percent to newspapers.

More than half of those who grew up with the Internet, those 18 to 29, get most of their news and information online, compared to 35 percent of people 65 and older. Older adults are the only group that favors a primary news source other than the Internet, with 38 percent selecting television.

Now anyone who understands the intricacies of social theory knows that there is no such thing as an unbiased poll. This poll is no exception, so we need to be careful about how we read the actual data. The fact that the poll was conducted online excludes some segment of the sample space that clearly does not see the Internet as an option for getting news. If we do not know the size of that segment, we do not have a clear sense of how the numbers may be biased against it; and, to further complicate matters, it is unclear that a sample size that is less than 2000 is representative of those people who do use the Internet with enough of a comfort level to use it as a source of news (and, for that matter, take an online poll). So don't expect any fat ladies to start singing; in this particular opera we are probably barely at the end of the overture!

More important, however, is the unaddressed question of how those who claim to use the Internet actually do use it. This point was raised, at least in part, towards the end of the Reuters story:

Howard Finberg, of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, said the public often doesn't understand that the sources they are accessing online such as Google News and Yahoo News pull stories from newspapers, television, wire services and other media sources.

However, Finberg is only pointing out the tip of an iceberg. In addition to those who might rather passively let Google or Yahoo! tell them what they ought to know about the news, there are those who now use the Internet to read their favorite newspaper(s), either by going direct to that paper's Web site or by setting up RSS feeds. (Those newspapers, of course, also "pull stories" from wire services, particularly at a time when reporting staffs are being downsized. Furthermore, in response to the high cost of printing and distribution, the Internet "edition" of a newspaper is likely to have far more content than the print edition. The San Francisco Chronicle is now saying this explicitly to its print readers and, as one might guess, receiving a fair share of irate letters in response.) Similarly, there are other polls indicating that the audience for both television and radio delivered through the Internet is also increasing. Watching (or listening to) your favorite source for broadcast news on your computer or downloading its podcast version is tantamount to getting that news from television or radio, even if you are not using one of those more old-fashioned devices.

These questions all lead up to a more important question, which is whether or not those who get their news through the Internet are more active as readers than those who rely on television, radio, and newspaper. As I wrote at the beginning of the year, the greatest virtue of the Internet is that it facilitates our being more active as readers; but how many of us actually take advantage of that opportunity? For example we all recognize that there are (at least) two sides to every story; but how many of those people who use the Internet as their primary source of news react to reading a report by using Google (for example) to search for another "side of the story?" My guess is that more people see the Internet as a way to save time (through time-shifting and filtering), rather than a resource that enables spending more time reflecting on what they read. The Internet thus becomes a sort of Readers' Digest for news, which is great for efficiency but may do little when it comes to understanding the "digested" material one "consumes" (forcing me to exercise great caution in invoking any form of the verb "to read").

Thus, the most important result of this poll is that we need to know more about what Internet users are actually doing; and a poll is probably too coarse an instrument for such a study. This is more in the ballpark of the "Eyes on the Internet" studies that are sponsored by the Online Publishers Association (OPA). However, even those studies can raise more questions than they provide answers. To give the most obvious example, what study, regardless of its methodology, is likely to give us reliable figures on the amount of Internet time devoted to pornography? If people know they are being examined, they are going to adjust their behavior accordingly; and they are likely to object to any situation in which they do not know when they are being examined.