Learning from al-Qaeda

Once again it may be time to smash the rose-colored glasses of social software evangelists, or at least subject them to a new refraction is see if the prescription needs changing. The "war on terror" movement still seems to have considerable trouble viewing an organization like al-Qaeda as a loosely distributed organization, which, as Lawrence Wright had observed in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, can be highly sloppy and therefore error-prone. Those who still strive for "zero-level probability of a terrorist attack" also fail to see the extent to which social software platforms are highly conducive to such loose organizational structures. They will not get this insight from the technology evangelists, because those who evangelize tend to spend so much time promoting the "software" that they have little time to think about the "social."

Nevertheless, according to an investigation by Tom Marchbanks for BBC Panorama, that technology that is so conducive to "the way of al-Qaeda" may have now been enlisted in the support of sectarianism in Northern Ireland. Here are some of his findings:

Internet ratings company Nielsen claims that Bebo, with its one million Irish users, was the most popular site in Ireland after Google in 2007.

Sectarianism on the site hit the headlines after threatening posts surfaced following the 2006 murder of Catholic school boy Michael McIlveen in Ballymena.

Three years on, and some pages on Bebo brazenly continue to promote violence.

Guns and bombs

One page dedicated to the Real IRA, removed recently, contained a post which claimed a new "cell" had been formed.

While another, promoting the 32 Sovereign Continuity Movement (32CSM), the political wing of the Real IRA, contains pictures of people holding what appears to be a pipe bomb.

One user, calling himself a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Movement, even discusses buying a gun and the bargain price of ammunition.

But the pages are not just used to brag about violence or weaponry. Fundraising events are also promoted.

A page on Bebo recruiting for the Republican Sinn Fein - widely thought to be the political wing of the Continuity IRA (CIRA) - advertises a £5 entry for a fundraiser event alongside a press release from CIRA prisoners.

'Revenge is a dish best served cold'

The sites are not just from the republican side, loyalist pages on Bebo are also widespread, including what appears to be the official internet sites for outlawed terrorist groups, such as the Orange Volunteers.

Although these particular sites have few registered friends and show little sign of activity, other loyalist pages on Bebo which have sprung up in the last six months, use similar names, and are much more active.

As I see it, this is yet another consequence of those who are so wrapped up in technology that they see no need to set aside time for less objective matters, such as the subtleties of governance. As Anthony Lewis pointed out in the title of his book, our own Constitution addresses the question of "freedom for the thought that we hate" in its First Amendment; but the history (or, as Lewis called it, "biography") of the First Amendment makes it clear that our judicial system has always recognized the distinction between hatred in thought and hatred in action. As those actions cross the line into the pathological, we are likely to see an increasing number of court cases and rulings that explicitly address the role of social software in the pathology under question. Such cases are likely to depend heavily on "expert witness" testimony; but I hope that the presiding judges will be astute enough to recognize that any such expert witness in the support technology may be far from an expert on the impact of that technology in the social world!

The BBC Gives THE WIRE Some Respect

Following the British press has often left me with the feeling that The Wire had a stronger support base in England than it had in the United States. This was just affirmed by a "feature piece" on the Telegraph Web site reporting that "BBC Two is now showing all 60 episodes nightly, Monday to Friday, starting tonight." I like to think of this as "literary television;" and it reminds me of when the Philadelphia PBS station ran the episodes of The Forsyte Saga nightly and totally hooked me into the unfolding drama with an intensity that is sorely lacking in the stuff now being obtained for Masterpiece Theatre (which seems to have become Masterpiece Classic, under a more general Masterpiece rubric, without my noticing). I do not hesitate to call The Wire "literary," because this is precisely the stance that co-creator David Simon wanted to take:

Our models are the big Russian novels. We’re trying to do with modern-day Baltimore what Balzac did with Paris, or Dickens with London.

Back in the day the BBC did precisely this kind of number of War and Peace; and that particular instance of "literary television" sustained me through several months of the time I spent working in Israel.

Simon has never been shy about why the general public never followed most of the critics in getting hooked on The Wire:

The average Emmy voter has the attention span of a gnat.

Vladimir Nabokov had chosen somewhat more elegant language when he lectured about reading Dostoevsky as "a mischievous but very healthy pleasure, as you stamp and groan through a second-rate book which has been awarded a prize" (a pleasure which I had experienced at its greatest when I had to write a review of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach); but Simon basically hit the nail on the head. Babylon 5 fought the same battle against viewer attention span, and not too long ago my wife and I indulged in the complete DVD collection to give the entire narrative the close reading it deserved. We plan to do the same for The Wire, now that we have all the episodes on DVD.

Meanwhile, the attention span problem remains with us. Brian Lowry's initial review of Dollhouse for Variety was politely dismissive at best, concluding that it was difficult to rate the show on the basis of its first two episodes. Well, Brian, would you have rated War and Peace at all, if you had never gotten any further than Anna Pavlovna's party? Would you have bailed on Proust before he dipped that madeleine in his tea? Lowry seemed willing to grant that the Dollhouse narrative was complex, but he felt a need to pass judgment on the "authenticity" of that complexity by summoning connotations of pretension while that script was still unfolding its characters and their motives at a pace that would not have troubled either Tolstoy or Proust.

Reading a narrative is not just a matter of recognizing the plot line and following it. It is also a matter of reflecting on where the plot is going and how other factors, such as the settings and the characters, contribute to the course of that plot. "Literary television" played out in episodes supports such reflection simply by virtue of the temporal gaps between the episodes, just as we reflect on where Tolstoy or Proust is taking us each time we put down the book we are reading. I grant Simon his sarcasm and recognize that "literary television" will never acquire the "competitive numbers" that determine success in what Edward Jay Epstein calls "the new logic of money and power in Hollywood;" but I am glad that there are production organizations like HBO that are still willing to satisfy the needs of those of us who never seem to be satisfied with anything less than "literary."

The Sense of Fugue

Last night András Schiff performed the first of his final two recitals in his cycle of the complete piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. It was time for the second of the two "monuments" in the canon of piano sonatas, the "monumental" Opus 106 in B-flat major ("Hammerklavier"). This sonata is technically challenging from its opening gesture (which would later be honored by Johannes Brahms in the opening gesture of his own first piano sonata); but the work also poses major challenges to the listener. Most of those challenges have to do with what I have called the "journey through an extended duration of time." Except for the (extremely?) brief scherzo, each of the movements of this sonata takes on an unconventional (for its time) time-scale; and, while the first movement does this through relatively familiar sonata-allegro territory, the relationship between structure and process of the final two movements is harder to penetrate.

Yesterday I wrote about this journey as it was pursued in the andante cantabile third movement of Beethoven's Opus 97 ("Archduke") trio in B-flat major in my Examiner.com review of a recital by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. In this case the journey is based on a theme-and-variations structure; and the extended duration arises when Beethoven departs from choosing a simple theme in favor of what I have previously called "a more elaborate structure unto itself, which could then be mined for variations from many diverse perspectives." In the adagio sostenuto movement of Opus 106, the structural framework follows the conventional sonata form; but Schiff offered the following comments in his conversation with Martin Meyer included in the program book:

While it's true that this structure is easy to make out in the score, in playing or listening to the piece it's much less obvious, because it's the poetic side that dominates as an expressive force, with its slow iambuses and intricate whispered figuration. Beethoven produces absolutely astonishing effects of sonority, which makes the "deconstruction" of the main theme in the final part of the coda all the more haunting. Following a wide-ranging journey of the passions, the movement ends at once laconically and full of expectation on a pianissimo held chord of F-sharp major.

This is clearly not for casual listening. Indeed, it requires an alertness of perception that may put performance at a disadvantage when this sonata is performed at the end of a program (as it was last night).

Even more challenging, however, is that the alertness allotted to this movement may sap the "cognitive energy" required for the fugue of the final movement. This, again, is a major journey, not to mention a major departure from the traditional conventions of fugue. However, even in the absence of those conventions, there remains the sense of fugue as a conversation among its "voices," rather than just a massive contrapuntal fabric. I continue to admire how Richard Goode establishes this sense in his performances of Bach counterpoint, and here in San Francisco pianist Frank French demonstrated that same sense in his concert performance of the 48 preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. In the framework of that sense of fugue, a journey of extended duration amounts to a particularly involved (and extended) conversation. Unfortunately, that sense was absent in Schiff's performance. Indeed, it was absent not only from Beethoven's fugue but also from the encore performance of Bach's BWV 903 "Chromatic" fantasia and fugue in D minor. It was almost as if towards the end of last night's journey Schiff had shifted to autopilot to finish out the evening. Nevertheless, he followed his Bach encore with a graceful and witty account of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 574 "Eine kleine Gigue" in G major; but I suspect that this work is familiar enough to him that even it could have been "flown on autopilot," so to speak. This may just have been the sort of "occupational hazard" that is hard to avoid when one undertakes a truly massive project.

In Pinochet's Company

Judge Baltasar Garzon is at it again. For those who are not big on following or remembering details, he was the Spanish judge who had ordered the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, thus escalating the Chilean dictator's atrocities to the level of crimes against humanity in violation of international law. This led to a massive investigation and prosecution, which was never brought to closure because of Pinochet's death; but what was important was that Garzon started the ball rolling at a time when everyone else seemed content to let the memory of the Pinochet years fade away while Pinochet himself enjoyed the benefits of being a senator-for-life.

As we know, Pinochet would never have come to power without the assistance of our Central Intelligence Agency, presumably with the support of President Richard Nixon and (then) National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger; but Garzon never pursued the case far enough to investigate the causal chain in greater detail. This time, however, he has key members of the Bush Administration squarely in his sights, according to a story released by Reuters yesterday afternoon:

A top Spanish court has moved toward starting a probe of six former Bush administration officials including ex-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in connection with alleged torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, The New York Times said on Saturday.

…

The complaint, prepared by Spanish lawyers with the help of U.S. and European legal experts, also names John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who wrote secret legal opinions saying the president had the authority to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, and Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy.

Spain can claim jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents who were prisoners at Guantanamo Bay say they were tortured there.

The other Americans named are William Haynes II, former general counsel for the Department of Defense; Jay Bybee, Yoo's former boss at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel; and David Addington, chief of staff and legal adviser to ex-Vice President Dick Cheney.

Thus far, we have had no comment from any of those named in the complaint. Now I am sure that there are many who would like to see someone (if not Garzon) go after the biggest fish in the pond; but, like Hugo Chávez, Garzon seems to have learned from the Tao Teh Ching (of Mao Zedong's Little Red Book) that the thousand-mile journey begins with the single step. This seems like as good a choice of a first step as any.

Waiting

A friend asked me on Thursday how things were progressing with my radiation treatment; and I realized that I had not really informed anyone that they were not progressing at all, at least not yet. It has now been over a month since I wrote a post outlining the treatment I would be receiving, which would begin by injecting CAT-scan-visible markers to delimit the area to be the target of the radiation. Those markers will be inserted this coming Friday (April 3). I was reminded of this because, as of today, I have to stop taking the "baby aspirin" tablet I take every evening along with my cholesterol medication. Aspirin thins the blood, and you do not want to have thin blood running through any vessels that may be penetrated when the markers are applied. (I did not have to worry about this when I had my prostate biopsy, because I was not taking the low-dose aspirin at the time.) Then, I take an antibiotic (Cipro) the night before Friday's procedure takes place; and I have at least one dose to cover me after the procedure as well. Finally, there is the Fleet enema I take a couple of hours before the procedure (which deserves no more vivid detail than the procedure itself). Once the markers are in place, the CAT scan can be performed and the results interpreted for planning the direction of the radiation beam. Only then can the actual treatment be planned and begun. The coming week will therefore be primarily a matter of waiting. Fortunately, I have supplied it with concerts that will keep me occupied with writing and (hopefully) distracted from the waiting itself.

High-Wire Chutzpah

I told this joke over two years ago on this blog (and more times that I can recall in social conversation). It's the one about a mule that can do any kind of work on the farm, provided that first you whack him on the head several times with a two-by-four "in order to get his attention." I find it a good way to approach our chronic cultural problem of evading (if not outright denying) our sense of reality. I suspect that this is the sort of thing that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had in mind when he spoke at a press conference held in conjunction with a visit to Brazil by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As reported for BBC NEWS from Sao Paolo by Gary Duffy, Lula offered his own interpretation of how the world can come to be in economic crisis:

It is a crisis caused and encouraged by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything, but are now showing that they know nothing.

It takes high-octane chutzpah to invoke such language in a diplomatic setting, leaving it to Brown to keep up diplomatic appearances, which, according to Duffy, he seems to have done:

If Mr Brown appeared uncomfortable with this claim, he did his best not to show it.

The press, on the other hand, was more interested in the smell of blood in the water and tried to get Lula to elaborate. Surprisingly enough, he obliged:

As I do not know any black or indigenous bankers. I can only say it is not possible for this part of mankind, which is victimised more than any other, to pay for the crisis.

Without trying to be an apologist, I think it is important to recognize that these are the words of a man whose ox has been seriously gored. Back in September it seemed as if Brazil had been blessed with a new source of wealth in the form of potentially vast deepwater resources of hydrocarbons. At that time Lula had the chutzpah to start laying down plans that indicated that, as I wrote at the time, he was "more interested in resolving existing problems of education and poverty than … in turning his country into the next 'engine of economic growth.'" Indeed, he went so far as to take this discovery as an opportunity "to rethink the very nature of governance," by virtue of being liberated from those who, regardless of the color of skin or eyes, "appeared to know everything." All those plans must now be on hold when both the price of oil and the very "wealth of nations" have been thrown into question by circumstances that can be traced back to those aforementioned (if undiplomatically so) "Masters of the Universe" (now trying to be "masters of rehab").

So was today's chutzpah nothing more than a man whose ox was gored trying to gore another man's ox? Would answering that question determine whether the chutzpah carried a positive or negative connotation? I doubt that there is a clear answer to that second question. My guess is that if these words had come from the mouth of Hugo Chávez (who already holds a Chutzpah of the Week award), then the Western press would spare no effort to condemn him as a "red menace;" but, since both the United States and the United Kingdom see Brazil as an important economic partner, the media will go to great lengths to make sure that Public Opinion (perhaps as personified by Jacques Offenbach) will cut him some slack. (For the record I have no idea of the color of Brown's eyes.) For all we know Lula was well aware of the extent to which Public Opinion really wants to direct her anger at "sticking it to the rich;" but, if he was playing to that anger, then his chutzpah is taking him to the brink of demagoguery. My personal feeling is that there is no clear call on the nature of this particular act of chutzpah, but the act is strong enough to justify Lula receiving his first Chutzpah of the Week award. Whatever else we may say about him, he invoked an interesting strategy to get the mule's attention.

A Democratic Press Conference?

The buzz over today's "alternative" press conference at the White House has been going for about a week, and it has taken me about that long to try to get my thoughts about it in order. For those who have missed that buzz, Associated Press Writer Philip Elliott has just provided a handy summary:

Call it Round Two of the news conference, with a big Internet twist. President Barack Obama took questions from the White House press corps on Tuesday in a prime-time, East Room session that represented the most formal and time-honored of president-and-reporter interactions. On Thursday, he is taking to that same room for another public grilling — this time by regular folks armed with questions submitted via the Internet and in person, as part of a political strategy to engage Americans directly.

I suspect that this is the sort of thing that Dan Froomkin had in mind when he ran a Commentary piece advocating "a Wiki White House" on the Nieman Watchdog Web site. Participation has certainly been impressive. According to Elliott, as of 9 AM (Eastern time) this morning, over 100,000 questions have been submitted; and this revives one (of many) issues that I had in criticizing Froomkin's proposal. The fundamental premise behind Wiki technologies is that admirable goals such as understanding and knowledge may be achieved through conversation (or, as Jürgen Habermas put it, "communicative action"). One consequence of this premise is that the "quality level" of such understanding and knowledge depends heavily on the quality level of the conversations. When the conversation deteriorates (as it does in what I have called "Wikipedia Fight Club" practices), the "signals" of knowledge and understanding similarly deteriorate into "noise." What Froomkin could not see through his Web 2.0-colored glasses was that the quality level of conversations tends to be directly dependent on the number of conversants. It is thus hard to imagine that Habermas' concept of an "ideal speech situation" would accommodate over 100,000 participants, just as he did not recognize that some conversants might be more interested in undermining understanding than in achieving it (which is likely to be the case when you have that large a number of conversants).

In this respect it is important to note that tonight's press conference will not be based on Wiki-style conversation. Here is Elliott's summary of the actual process:

Obama's campaign allowed supporters to organize themselves to go door-to-door and raise money. Because of that, many felt an ownership of the campaign and devoted countless hours to giving Obama the Democratic Party's nomination and then the presidency.

Obama's aides are taking that step forward, incorporating tools that let visitors to the White House Web site pick the questions Obama will answer, turning the president's Thursday event into a democratic press conference.

Political strategist Simon Rosenberg described this as "part campaign-style politics and part 'American Idol.'"

So is this really a "democratic press conference?" To address this question we need to turn back to Christopher Blackwell's article, "Athenian Democracy: a brief overview" (listed on the Dēmos home page as "An Introduction to the Athenian Democracy"). As I did the last time I reviewed this source, I want to begin with the semantics of the word "democracy:"

For the Athenians, “democracy” (demokratia, δημοκρατία ) gave Rule (kratos, κράτος ) to the Demos ( Δήμος ).

Blackwell's approach was then to dig into the semantics of Δήμος:

Demos is the Greek word for “village” or, as it is often translated, “deme.” The deme was the smallest administrative unit of the Athenian state, like a voting precinct or school district.

Note that adjective "smallest." The Athenians recognized, at least implicitly, that there were problems in having too many conversants, which meant that it was necessary to keep administrative units at a manageable level. For matters on a scale larger than the confines of such units, it was necessary to appoint representatives, who could then have their own conversations on a more accommodating scale. This insight was important enough that it became a fundamental building-block of our own democratic process. In terms of the language of Elliott's summary, our "ownership" extends only as far as those we directly delegate to represent us. Through such delegation we strengthen the odds (but do not guarantee certainty) that the signal-to-noise ratio of the conversation will be an effective one; but at the same time we must monitor those conversations to make sure that those we delegate are representing us the way we want to be represented. (In other words representatives need to be continually reminded that they are accountable to those who delegate them.)

This covers a good portion of how our Constitution has shaped our Government. On the other hand the Constitution says nothing about press conferences. Indeed, it says nothing about the President having any conversations beyond those concerned with the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of our Government. As the press conference became more institutionalized, it provided a new de facto set of representatives to converse with the President. They were not delegated by any "deme." They were appointed by the institutions of journalism that they represented. If the deme did not like the representation provided by one of those institutions, they could collectively decide not to patronize it. Representation was determined by the market economy, rather than conversations within the deme.

Today's press conference is going to try to change those rules. The risk, however, is that the model Rosenberg described is more plebiscitary than representative. This is mass selection on an American Idol scale, rather than delegating representatives to put hard questions to the President better than we can (and then calling those representatives to account for their performance). Morely Winograd, who runs the Institute for Communication Technology Management at the University of Southern California found a good way to summarize the process:

In the new world of online media, formal press conferences are just one element or program to get the message out — to those, usually older, who watch such things on TV. The online version he is doing is an alternative way to get out the same message, in this case on the budget, targeted toward a different audience, usually younger.

In both cases the questioners are just props — or, in some cases, foils — for the star, Obama, to deliver his message. But in the latter case, they get to self-nominate instead of be selected by elites.

In other words the very principles of conversation itself have been undermined. It is all about "props … for the star;" and props are never concerned with such elevated matters as communication and understanding. This is just another way to play the same dog-and-pony show on a new stage, or, to invoke that metaphor that become so popular during the campaign, a new way to put lipstick on a pig.

For those who think that a verb like "undermined" might be unnecessarily hyperbolic, let me recall the last experiment with reader-rated content, the Citizen's Briefing Book. For those who have forgotten, this was when the Obama transition team used Change.gov to, as Tim Dickinson put it on his National Affairs blog, empower "average citizens to suggest and vet policy proposals that will ultimately be presented to the president." What were the resulting top three citizen proposals on the basis of "citizen rating?" Here they are (again):

Ending Marijuana Prohibition

Bullet Trains & Light Rail

An end to the government sponsored abstinence education to be replaced by an introduction of age appropriate sex education.

Is this where this evening's conversation will go? According to Elliott, Obama aides will probably be imposing a bias in favor of energy, health care, and education. In other words there will be "(wo)men behind the curtain" using user-submitted (and rated?) questions as a prop (what else would you call it?) to reinforce the priorities of the Administration. I happen to share these priorities; but that does not warrant my giving any approval to a plebiscitary pig, no matter how good its makeup artist was!

A Darker Growth Industry

Yesterday I suggested that "rehab could become one of the major growth industries behind economic recovery." While it is nice to contemplate that the spirit of people helping others could provide a motivating force to get us out of the current crisis, a story filed from Houston last night by Sheila McNulty for the Financial Times made it clear that such altruism is far from the only path to economic growth:

Guns and ammunition are one growth industry in this recession, fuelled by anecdotal evidence that the economic downturn has sparked an increase in crime from which Americans want to protect themselves.

The Texas Senate criminal justice committee is debating whether to permit state residents to come to work with guns in their vehicles. Proponents say as crime rises, Texans must have guns to drive safely to and from work. Critics object that, given the increasing number of Texans losing their jobs, guns in their cars is a recipe for disaster.

In November last year there were a record 1,529,635 background checks for gun licences in the US, up 42 per cent from the same period a year earlier, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In January 2009 the number of background checks re­quested was 1.21m, up from 942,556 in the same month last year, and rose in February to 1.3m, up from 1m in February 2008.

My guess is that Franklin Roosevelt did not have such circumstances in mind when he said of the Great Depression, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself;" but it is clear from McNulty's account that the "engine" behind this particular growth industry is nothing more than raw get-them-before-they-get-us fear. Whether or not Roosevelt anticipated such a reaction, his cautionary admonition is as relevant now as it was almost half a century ago.

Nevertheless, to be fair, the growth of the firearms industry has at least one major driver other than preemptive fear of crime. McNulty's report concludes by exploring another aspect of this growth:

Jonathan Lowy, director of legal action at the Brady Center [to Prevent Gun Violence], says 95 per cent or more of the guns used in the Mexican drug battles are from the US. “That has certainly become a part of the US market, supplying guns to the Mexican gun cartels.”

Mexico has restrictive laws on gun sales and a ban on many types of firearms.

Thomas G. Mangan, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix, says most of the guns recovered in Mexico are traced back to the US. “The biggest target is the south-western border states.’’

More than 7,000 guns were recovered in Mexico last year and traced back to the US, Mr Mangan says. At a Senate hearing last week, William Hoover, assistant director for field operations at the ATF, said the US had traced almost 10,000 weapons in Mexico so far this year. He said 90 per cent of such weapons came from the US.

Last year a Brookings Institution report estimated that 2,000 weapons illegally cross the border from the US into Mexico every day.

Apparently, we have an manufactured product for which there is still a high demand for export! Is this the sort of thing that Tom Friedman had in mind when he preached that globalization would lead to expanded market volume? As Paul Saffo used to say, "The future always arrives late and in unexpected ways." Were these current circumstances part of the future of globalization that you expected, Tom?

Rehab as an Employment Opportunity

Whether we are talking about goods or services, layoffs come from companies that are providing supply in areas where demand is decreasing (if not vanishing). If we want to think about creating jobs, we should think about where demands need to be met. The recent emphasis of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) on areas such as education and infrastructure not only see to the needs of the general American population but also should provide a significant number of opportunities for employment; and, if Barack Obama is still shy about being perceived as "too progressive," he seems to be willing to embrace this part of the CPC agenda. However, opportunities beyond that agenda are beginning to take shape, some of which may well amount to making lemonade from the lemons of the current economic crisis. Consider the following story the Claudia Parsons filed for Reuters this morning:

Experts say more and more people in finance are seeking treatment for addiction as the global economic crisis sinks its teeth into a high-stakes industry where confidence is the name of the game and nobody wants to admit to a weakness.

"We absolutely do see more people coming in naming either a job loss or huge financial reversals or big investments with Bernie Madoff," said Sigurd Ackerman, medical director at Silver Hill Hospital rehabilitation facility in New Canaan, Connecticut.

"They're being admitted with depression or increases in substance abuse, or both."

Ackerman said there was a high concentration of financial professionals in the town, 40 miles from New York, whose main streets are lined with high-end boutiques catering to the well-heeled wives of hedge fund managers and bankers.

"You're supposed to be a master of the universe, you're supposed to be on top of everything," said one financial services executive who began alcohol rehab in August.

At a time when most businesses are imploding, rehab could become one of the major growth industries behind economic recovery:

Robert Curry, founder of Turning Point for Leaders, a coaching and consulting firm in New Canaan that creates treatment programs for senior executives, said the financial crisis was a factor in more drink and drug use.

"We've got more than 50 homes in foreclosure in this town and that's unheard of," Curry said. "Domestic violence incidents have spiked, and that is very closely tied to substance abuse."

Struggling with a divorce, the Connecticut executive sought help at Turning Point. A residential rehab program will be just the first step in a program that would last at least a year and include follow-up counseling, therapy and support groups.

Curry is a former financial executive who started working with substance abusers two decades ago, around the time his alcoholic father died and he realized he had a drinking problem of his own. Despite the recession, demand is growing.

"Companies are downsizing," he said. "Budgets are being trimmed, and yet we're seeing an increase in our business."

For those who might doubt that there is serious money in this opportunity, Parsons concluded her report with a few figures:

A month in rehab costs from $25,000 at Caron [Treatment Centers in Manhattan] up to around $60,000 at high-end private facilities. Curry said most of his clients pay out of pocket for privacy reasons.

The Connecticut-based executive was paying his own way.

"It's more than I'd like," he said. But "it's less expensive than losing your job ... less expensive than losing a client or losing your family, or losing your home or getting in trouble with the law."

Irony is clearly at work here, but there is also a message for those wondering what sort of knapsack of skills will be most suitable when entering the job market. The best answer may be found in the grammar of our language. Ten years ago it seemed as if the providing of both goods and services depended on having the right skill set for manipulating objects, frequently through some form of technological mediation. Rehab is not about manipulating objects (concrete or abstract). It is about engaging with subjects, dealing with people as if they were people rather than entries in a database. We have sustained at least of quarter century of work practices that have tried to abstract away such a need to engage with subjects; and those work practices persisted even when they provoked such catastrophes as the mismanagement of the aftermath of Katrina. Perhaps Jean Baudrillard's "chicken" about the infantile preoccupation with objects is finally coming home to roost. If you want to be a gainfully employed provider again, your skill set had better include the ability to engage effectively with other people!

Preludes and Fugues as Autobiography

In preparing my Examiner.com review of Frank French's performance of the second volume of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier yesterday afternoon at the Unitarian Universalist Church here in San Francisco, I found myself lapsing into Wittgensteinian ways that I normally try to quarantine to this blog. In particular I raised the question of whether either "prelude" or "fugue" constituted a legitimate ontological category, in the positivist sense of being defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership. That invocation of Ludwig Wittgenstein takes me back, once again, to his "Blue Book," which remains one of my major sources of inspiration. As I did recently in taking on the more fundamental question of the meaning of a word, I would like to quote a relevant paragraph concerned with category membership:

We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term "game" to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap. The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beauty.

That last phrase is particularly relevant to the point I wish to make: It is as silly to describe a prelude or fugue in terms of ingredients as it is to think that way about "pure beauty." Presumably Wittgenstein already knew that Immanuel Kant had come to a similar conclusion about beauty, but he might not have been aware of John Dewey's more recent attempts to analyze aesthetic reactions.

Bach affords us an interesting opportunity to play on Wittgenstein's use of the noun "family." Consulting the catalog included in the book that Wolfgang Sandberger compiled for the Teldec Bach 2000 collection, I realized that the second volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier was completed in 1742, when Bach was in his late fifties with less than ten years before his death. Put another way, by this time just about all of the keyboard works that we associate with him had been completed, most of them for quite some time. He had not yet visited the court of Frederick the Great, who would offer a theme that inspired his Musical Offering; but the "Goldberg Variations" were also completed in 1742. Even his organ preludes and fugues had become a thing of the past, not to mention the two-part and three-part inventions and the English and French suites. Most recent were the first three sections of his Clavierübung project (the final being the "Goldberg Variations"); and I would argue that this project shares with The Well-Tempered Clavier a retrospective reflection on a life of making music in a wide variety of settings. From this point of view, I would invoke a metaphor I recently applied to Sergei Prokofiev's final symphony serving as a "family album of photographs" of past accomplishments, the "family" being not Bach's many sons who had also begun to distinguish themselves as musicians but his past compositions. The "family likenesses" of the preludes (or the fugues) have more to do with their being products of Bach's practices than with their having distinguishing "properties."

There is thus a way in which particularly the second volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier may be heard as the only autobiographical account Bach would be capable of telling. We know from anecdotes that he probably had no good memory for the birthdays of his many children; and, for all we know, he may not even have kept track of just how many children he had. However, his "musical progeny" were always with him; and in The Well-Tempered Clavier he could look back on them all not just "without blushing" but with a deep sense of pride in accomplishment. This is not the sort of narrative autobiography that Richard Strauss would later attempt in Ein Heldenleben; but it is a reflective examination of one's past, which, after all, is the fundamental nature of autobiography. To appreciate it, we just have to be aware of those past achievements on which Bach was reflecting, which is why we are at an advantage in having so many different ways to listen to performances of so much of Bach's music.

The New Flamboyance

Nicola Luisotti composed an interesting program for his conducting debut with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall this week, shortly before becoming Music Director of the San Francisco Opera. The first half was all from the twentieth century: Zoltán Kodály's 1933 suite of dances based on material he had collected in the Hungarian town of Galánta and Ernest Bloch's "Schelomo" with Michael Grebanier as cello soloist. The second half represented the nineteenth century with Johannes Brahms fourth symphony in E minor (Opus 98).

As an opera conductor, Luisotti has a clear sense of music as drama; and, as I have written elsewhere, this was particularly evident in the perceptive interpretation of "Schelomo" that he developed with Grebanier. However, he also cuts a very flamboyant figure, never afraid of highly communicative facial expressions and the broadest of gestures. His style thus contrasts radically with, for example, the "Russian subtleties" of conductors like Valery Gergiev and Yuri Temirkanov. Both of these Russians understand the power of body language. Indeed, neither of them uses a baton, as opposed to that rather long stick that Luisotti wielded; but I am not sure that I would call either Gergiev or Temirkanov "flamboyant," while in Luisotti's case the "show" seems to be coming as much from the podium as from the ensemble of the players themselves.

It may be that my impression of Luisotti on Saturday night was influenced by my having spent the afternoon watching Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker in a concert at the beginning of this month now in the archives of the orchestra's new Digital Concert Hall. Dudamel's debut with the San Francisco Symphony about a year ago was also a closely-watched occasion; and Dudamel brought more than the usual share of flamboyance to that occasion. His Berlin program consisted of Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead," Igor Stravinsky's violin concerto (with soloist Viktoria Mullova), and Sergei Prokofiev's fifth symphony. This kind of "experience base" made it difficult for me to approach Luisotti's performance without drawing parallels.

On the positive side both conductors worked well with their respective soloists (as Dudamel had done in San Francisco), resulting in a performance of perceptive understanding (regardless of the radical differences between Bloch and Stravinsky). At the same time both brought considerable exhibitionism to the symphony performances. This worked well enough for Dudamel, since Prokofiev's symphony is already a pretty exhibitionistic piece of work. Brahms is another matter. He is certainly capable of summoning intense emotion, but he usually restrains himself from excesses. To be fair to Luisotti, the sound of his Brahms was quite effective; but the performance left me wondering just what role his body language had played in achieving that result. Of course the other parallel involving these two conductors is that they are both young and are both probably still finding their respective voices for the many different regions of the repertoire they must command. Both quests will take some time, and it should be interesting to follow them.

Obama and the Ghost of CHUTZPAH Past

Like so many others, I was very impressed with Barack Obama's performance on The Tonight Show, even including his post hoc recovery from his one major gaffe. Nevertheless, I could not avoid watching that interview in the context of the final paragraph of Elizabeth Drew's analysis of Obama's first thirty days for The New York Review (March 26 issue):

But the still-new President has a staggering number of challenges before him —an unusually, if not unprecedentedly high number of very difficult decisions to make on domestic and foreign policy. Yet the President was traveling for most of his third and fourth full weeks in office. A little more management may be in order. The recent increased amount of presidential travel—to Indiana, Florida, Arizona, and Colorado—may have been another indication that Obama was not particularly happy in the White House, and that 2012 election politics were already on his and his aides' minds. John Dickerson, of Slate, said on Washington Week in Review on February 13 that the President's aides had concluded that it hadn't been helpful for Obama to be seen participating in the give-and-take of Washington, that "that's not what he was elected to do." Yes it is.

This may be a good time to remember that Obama received his first two Chutzpah of the Week awards because did not spend very much time at his "day job" while campaigning to get where he now is. He put on a good show for Leno, but it looks like he is again neglecting his new day job for the sake of more campaigning!

Madoff's Chutzpah Ploy Fails

Bernard Madoff's appeal to be released from jail while awaiting sentencing has been denied. The "due course" of the Appeals Court did not take very long. The basis for denial was that he posed a flight risk. Whether or not the Court recognized "flight into cyberspace" as part of that risk, as I had suggested, is irrelevant. I had also suggested that the Court would make their decision in a way that would "make sure that he does not do further damage;" and they have done so. Madoff can keep his Chutzpah of the Week award. I think it will be the first to decorate a prison cell!

A Virtual Bank for a "Fiction of Convenience"

Over two years ago I wrote a post entitled "Virtual Money in the Real World," in which I examined the effort of the German city of Magdeburg to introduce its own regional currency (the Urstromtaler) as a way to encourage local spending. My conclusion was that "spending virtual money in the real world of Magdeburg builds a much stronger sense of community than spending real money in the virtual world of Second Life (not to mention spending real money to improve the skill level of your World of Warcraft character)." I do not follow (or participate in) World of Warcraft; but I would guess that it still maintains an economic infrastructure to support the atavistic passions of its players. Second Life feels like a thing of the past, not even "making the cut" in Caroline McCarthy's "How to get social on Inauguration Day" piece for CNET, which cited Facebook and MySpace activities (not to mention live blogging and Twittering). What strikes me as interesting is that none of the platforms McCarthy cited require an economic infrastructure, leading me to wonder if the world of social software had gotten over all that (except where a "defense budget" is concerned, which comes off as a disquieting parallel with the "real world").

Well, if I am to believe a story on BBC NEWS, virtual currency is alive and well in Entropia Universe. Indeed, its economic infrastructure is viable enough that a plan for a bank is in the works; and that bank will be licensed by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. I found the details behind this story fascinating:

At current exchange rates, 10 PED (Project Entropia Dollars) are worth one US dollar.

Unlike many other online games, which charge a monthly subscription fee, the software for Project Entropia is free to download and install.

However, players pay real money to get at in-game items, such as guns, armour and other gear [that "defense budget" still drives the economy!], and the micro-payment system pays for Entropia's running costs.

The licence will make it easier for players to convert real world cash into PEDs and sustain their characters in the game, said Mindark in a statement.

"We will be in a position to offer real bank services to the inhabitants of our virtual universe," said Jan Welter Timkrans, boss of Mindark. It plans to offer players interest-bearing accounts, let them deposit their salaries and pay bills or lend cash via the in-game bank.

The licence also means that each account is backed by deposit insurance to the value of $60,000 (£42,000).

Regulators will get oversight of financial transactions carried out in the game world, so they can spot if criminals are using it to launder money.

Mindark claims that more than 800,000 people have registered to play the game and 80-100,000 are regular players. About $420m of player-to-player transactions were carried out during 2008, according to Mindark figures.

Presumably the penultimate paragraph about regulators refers to external auditors accountable to the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, but they will probably need the cooperation of Mindark management. Given the track record of malicious activities taking place on social software sites, the Swedish authorities are probably going to need technical help when those activities cross the line into their domain of monetary fraud; and it remains to be seen if suitable protocols of cooperation can be established to safeguard the integrity of user finances. Note the implication here: That "integrity of user finances" in Entropia is not, in any fundamental way, different from the integrity of any "real" currency assets possessed by those users. As I have argued in the past, any currency that is exchanged for PEDs is as much a "fiction of convenience" as the PEDs are. The only significant difference is that PEDs were not created to facilitate the purchase of food, clothing, and shelter (not to mention software) in that "real world" that all the users inhabit; but there does not appear to be anything to prevent a user exchanging PEDs back into dollars, meaning that, from a functional point of view, a PED is as "real" a currency asset as a dollar or a Euro.

Entropia may thus become a socioeconomic experiment worth following. As we become more aware that our current economic crisis emerged from a crisis of regulation, here is a virtual world in which the need for such regulation has been accepted as a "design axiom." I doubt that the "Bank of Entropia" (or whatever Mindark chooses to call it) will turn out to be a better place for me to put my dollars than the Bank of America; but, given the current fortunes of the Bank of America, I would not place any bets on that doubt!

Every Narrative Deserves an Opera

Narratologists are not particularly given to such things as party stunts, but there does seem to be an ongoing game concerned with conjuring up a narrative analysis of Karl Marx' Capital. Nevertheless, if we are to believe a report by Colin Freeman of the London Telegraph there seem to be some Chinese willing to take such a narrative approach seriously:

Normally disdained by revolutionaries as a bourgeois art form, the show's producers insist that in the confident, modern-day People's Republic, opera is a novel way to explain the proletariat's triumph in the class struggle.

"The particular performance style we choose is not important, but Marx's theories cannot be distorted," said director He Nian, in an interview with China's Wen Hui Bao newspaper.

Mr He, who is best known for a stage adaptation of a martial-arts spoof, plans to open the production in Shanghai next year, and will borrow elements from Broadway musicals and Las Vegas shows. There will, however, be no trivialisation of the book's core messages: an economist from a local university has been asked to ensure that it remains intellectually respecful of Marxist doctrine.

To that end, audiences can expect a storyline that appears to be only marginally racier than the original Das Kapital, a dense, 1,000 page tract which has traditionally tested the commitment of even the most ardent Communist reader.

The opera's plot will involve a business where workers begin to realise their boss is exploiting them. They then embrace the Marxist theory of surplus value. Far from uniting to overthrow the established order, though, some of the chorus line mutiny, others continue as they are, while some engage in collective bargaining. Mr He insists it will be "fun to watch".

I personally take the Telegraph seriously enough to have set up my own blog there (as I recently reported). On the other hand it was through the Telegraph that I learned that the Royal Opera House was planning a new opera about Anna Nicole Smith (with a composer whose work I already knew); so I have to wonder whether the Telegraph has some long-range plans building up to April Fools' Day. Given He's assessment, we should ponder whether an opera about Anna Nicole will be more "fun to watch" than one based on Capital. Since the first volume already runs to 1000 pages, does this mean that the opera will only cover that volume? Is there a long-range plan for a trilogy, perhaps with a "prologue" opera based on "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," thus providing opera lovers with a Ring cycle for our times? What kind of hilarity may we expect to ensue over the coming opera seasons around the world?

What Part of "Guilty" Don't You Understand?

Bernard Madoff has not made the cut for any of my Chutzpah of the Week awards basically because, regardless of the magnitude of his fraud, there was a certain banality (or, perhaps, to avoid connotations of Hannah Arendt, I should turn to Daniel Mendelsohn's latest New York Review piece and call it banalisé, as in "rendered quotidian, everyday, normal") about his actions. It has only been with the rendering of a verdict that his true capacity for chutzpah has surfaced. Here is how the story broke on the BBC NEWS Web site:

Last week, Madoff, 70, pleaded guilty to all 11 charges against him when he appeared in a New York court last week

He was remanded to jail until his sentencing in June.

But Madoff's lawyers have argued to a US appeals court he should be released as he had not fled while under house arrest at his Manhattan penthouse.

This bears some family resemblance to one of the classic paradigms of chutzpah: the man who kills both his parents and then throws himself at the mercy of the Court on the grounds that he is an orphan. It goes without saying that, having been found guilty, Madoff should not take the comfort of his penthouse for granted. However, that penthouse offers more than comfort; it also offers virtually uncontrolled connectivity. As prosecutors try to investigate who else (including immediate family) may have been involved in Madoff's scheme, we have been treated with accounts of his efforts to move around large assets through his computer without ever having to leave the penthouse. Having established Madoff's guilt, the Court has a certain responsibility to his victims to make sure that he does not do further damage; and confining him in a way that deprives him of his connectivity resources seems like a step in the right direction. The Appeals Court probably appreciates this factor by replying that they will make a decision "in due course." Meanwhile, Madoff finally gets his Chutzpah of the Week Award for his last-minute ploy to maintain business as usual in the face of his guilty verdict!

Accountability Redux

The last time the Government Accountability Office (GAO) assumed a high profile in the news media was last December, when it reported on a list of potential abuses by financial institutions of the terms attached to then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion bailout plan. Since then the GAO has been broadening its sights from terms of agreement to the broader responsibility of regulation. Their report to the Senate yesterday was not a pleasant one. Here is the lead from Kim Dixon's report for Reuters:

The U.S. government's hodgepodge of financial regulatory agencies failed to take a big-picture view of risk and ignored red flags in the current economic crisis, a government report said on Wednesday.

"Regulators did not effectively address the weaknesses or in some cases fully appreciate their magnitude, until the institutions were stressed," Orice Williams, director of financial markets and community development at the Government Accountability Office, told a Senate panel.

Several of these regulators also appeared before the panel and received a scathing welcome from the ranking Republican Senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky:

Welcome back from the vacations you've been taking for the past five years. The regulators should have stopped the risk takers taking undue risk with taxpayers' money or with equity that has been invested.

I am glad to see that Bunning has now awakened to smell the coffee. Will he now inquire into how that coffee got brewed in the first place? Will he look into the extent to which those regulators were constrained by the Bush Administration? Will he examine one of my favorite hypotheses from last year, that the Bush Administration "turned laissez-faire policy into 'a failure to govern at all?'" Will he acknowledge the consensual role that Republican legislators took in this fundamental undermining of our Government's tasks and operations? Welcome to the real world that the Bush Administration tried to hide behind their veils of faith-based words of comfort, Senator Bunning! In the immortal words of Boss Tweed, "What’re ya’ gonna do about it?"

Chief Apology Officer

Would you buy a used insurance policy from this man? For those who do not recognize the face, he is Edward Liddy, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the American International Group (AIG); and today he will be in Washington facing members of Congress who will most likely provide faithful representation of the "tidal wave of rage" of American voters over his company's business practices. Needless to say, he will begin by delivering a prepared statement, which can be previewed on the BBC NEWS Web site:

The chief executive of AIG has admitted that fundamental mistakes were made at the US insurance giant.

"Mistakes were made at AIG on a scale that few could have imagined possible," Edward Liddy will tell a Congressional hearing later on Wednesday.

He will also admit that AIG is "too complex, too unwieldy and too opaque".

Mr Liddy also calls the $165m (£119m) bonuses paid by AIG "distasteful" after the insurer took about $170bn of aid from the US government.

…

In a prepared testimony, Mr Liddy says the company "strayed from its core competencies in the insurance business".

Nowhere was this more evident than in "the creation of what grew to become an internal hedge fund, which then became substantially overexposed to market risk," he adds.

He also addresses the contentious issue of excessive bonuses.

"I am mindful of the outrage of the American public and of the president's call for a more restrained compensation system," he says.

Mr Liddy said that he would never have approved the $165m bonuses if he had been chief executive at the time the contracts were signed.

"It was distasteful to have to make these payments," he says.

Since Liddy only became CEO last September, I am not surprised to see that he plans to fall back on a not-on-my-watch defense. More to the point, however, is whether it had occurred to him that, in a time of crisis for so many businesses in the financial sector, it would make some sense to do some "due diligence investigation" of what he might face in his new job. Had that been the case, such "due diligence" would have benefited from a conversation with Robert J. Arvanitis as serious as the one Joe Nocera had conducted in preparing his recent Talking Business column for The New York Times. I am thinking particularly of the internal view of AIG business practices, of which, as I documented in my own recent analysis, Arvanitis said, "they never thought of it as abuse."

I got a sampling of some of the wrath that Liddy is likely to face by watching a bit of C-SPAN yesterday. As a matter of fact, the specific wrath I encountered was a Republican suggestion that it might be a good idea to let AIG fail after all. So much for "the party of big business" (although it is a nice reminder that laissez-faire has a dark side, too)! My guess is that Congressional decorum will prevail over preparing any tar and feathers and then riding Liddy out of town on a rail; but I would hope that Liddy is smart enough to realize that heartfelt apologies are not going to get him very far (particularly among any who doubt that he has a heart at all).

The real benefit of having the text of his prepared statement is that those who will question him will have a point of departure for more productive conversation. I, for one, want to hear someone ask, "The buck now stops at your desk; what are you doing to clean up the mess, even if that mess happens to be inherited?" As we used to say in the Sixties, if Liddy cannot make a clear case that he is part of the solution, then he is just another part of the problem. Perhaps a faint whiff of boiling tar in the Committee Chambers might help inspire him to shift from apologies to productive proposals!

What's in a Word?

Google's latest European legal battle, as reported this morning on the BBC NEWS Web site, deserves some consideration:

Lawyers for Google are to appear in the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in a row over its use of trademarks.

LVMH, the company behind Louis Vuitton luggage and other brands, has accused Google of selling search words such as "vuitton" to the highest bidder.

Web users searching for its products will see adverts for rivals or firms selling counterfeit goods, LVMH argues.

Without getting into the question of whether Internet search can/should/must draw upon "semantic" support, it strikes me that there is a fair amount of naïveté out there over just what keywords are and what they do (or fail to do). While I would not presume to instruct anyone at Google on the virtues of reading Ludwig Wittgenstein, I figure I can be so presumptuous on my own blog; and I would say that Wittgenstein's "Blue Book" is about as good a source as any to get a sense of what is really going on beneath the surface of keyword search.

For those new to this source, the very first sentence of "The Blue Book" is:

What is the meaning of a word?

This question immediately spawns a host of other questions; but the ones Wittgenstein pursues have to do with the "meaning" part of the question. When the lectures that provided the source material for this "book" were first given, The Meaning of Meaning, by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards had been in print for about a decade; but neither they nor their book surface in the lectures, since, as Ray Monk noted in his Wittgenstein biography, Wittgenstein dismissed the book "as an irrelevance." On the basis of those lectures, there is an initial danger that he would also dismiss any questions about the nature of "word" as irrelevant; but he has no trouble regarding words as a special case of the symbolic constructs of Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift (the "concept notation" that is one of the pioneering works of mathematical logic). Here is how Wittgenstein invoked Frege:

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any proposition: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

This builds up to the punch line of the one sentence for which I shall remember Wittgenstein above all other sentences documented in his name:

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.

There we have the crux of Google's legal woes in Europe. In the vast complex of the software machinery that has made Google what it is, the sign (to use Wittgenstein's terminology, rather than the BBC's "search words" phrase) "vuitton" (uncapitalized to emphasize how it is processed by that software machinery) is "an utterly dead and trivial thing." In other words it is an object with no inherent meaning (whether you follow the work of Ogden and Richards or the rejection of that work by Wittgenstein). However, if "vuitton" has no meaning; Google has endowed it with value, because anyone can bid in an auction for the right to have it associated with a Web-based advertisement.

LVMH, on the other hand, has taken this sign and brought it to life by endowing it with a very specific (and, it goes without saying, very commercial) use (applying the same emphasis that Rush Rhees invoked in his transcription of Wittgenstein's lecture). From this point of view, the legal case is not over whether Google has violated a trademark, no matter how strong a case Google makes that it respects such trademarks. The case is over whether or not Google can run their business by processing "dead signs" when those signs are "alive" to just about anyone who types anything into a Google search window.

I should go on record in declaring that I knowingly use at least one "dead sign" in my Google searches. There are many Web pages out there with my own content where I am identified at "StephenWS." As a matter of fact, this is now my "Display Name" for my new "presence" on the Telegraph Web site. If I am looking for my own stuff, I often include this "dead sign" to filter my search results.

From this point of view, it will be very interesting to see how the ECJ rules. A ruling that basically denies Google the right to traffic in "dead signs" (almost in Nikolai Gogol's sense of that phrase) could disrupt their entire business plan (at least in Europe but probably anywhere else as well). Furthermore, it is unlikely that any advances in Semantic Web technology are likely to rescue that business plan; since, as my recent review of the work of Arthur F. Bentley demonstrated, Semantic Web technology involves nothing more than "adding of inorganic signs." Now I am not suggesting that it is time to don sackcloth and wander the parking lot of the Googleplex with a sign reading:

The End of Google is Near

However, I seem to have taken an interest in countering the "Ten things Google has found to be true" with my own list of things Google seems to have overlooked, particularly the ones that may have significant consequences. Perhaps someone should be instructing them on the virtues of reading Ludwig Wittgenstein!

Two Leaders and Three Followers?

I have used my Examiner.com site to provide a more "bread-and-butter" review of yesterday's recital by the Prazak String Quartet and Menahem Pressler at Herbst Theatre; but, beyond that bread and butter were some interesting aspects of the nature of the performance. In my studies of chamber music performance practices, I have found considerable discussion of the question of who is in charge. Is chamber music truly "communal;" or is some form of Giddens-like domination necessary for the integrity of the performance? In the Beaux Arts Trio it always seemed to me that Pressler was the dominant player, reinforced by not only the physical strength of his piano sound but also by the responsibility of his part for multiple voices in the composition. (Some of this came out to me in my reading of Nicholas Delbanco's book about the Trio.) On the other hand, while the compositions for string quartet that the Prazak performed did an excellent job of treating all four parts as equals, it seemed to me as if first violinist Vaclav Remes was asserting his "authority" through a variety of physical cues. These tended to detach him from his three colleagues, particularly when he would lose eye contact with them in favor of facing the audience.

What would happen when two individuals who had become accustomed to such domination would encounter each other? In this case the result was fascinating. The attention that Remes had given to the audience earlier in the program was now directed at Pressler. It was as if he was accepting Pressler's authority on the condition that he would then serve as the "medium" through which that authority was exercised over the entire quartet. As should be clear from the way in which I wrote my review, I did not feel as if the performance suffered from this "authoritarian" strategy; but it provided an interesting data point to support the argument that the performance of chamber music does not, of necessity, have to be a "democratic" process!

In Comedy Begins Responsibilities

One wonders how Jon Stewart must feel now that his encounter with Jim Cramer has prompted positive reaction from the White House and, as a corollary, BBC reporting on the White House reacting to Cramer's appearance on The Daily Show. Sadly, however, the BBC seems to have fallen into one of the favorite traps of American media, viewing the program as a "debate" and then trying to assess "who won." This misses the point. Satire is not about truth "winning" over falsehood or deception. It is about using humor to expose flaws, thus making others more aware, lest they be victimized by those flaws.

In this case, as the BBC report made clear, Stewart's real target was the abundance of flaws in how business news is reported on television, particularly on cable and, more specifically, in all-business-news-all-the-time channels like CNBC. Cramer was little more than a symptom of a far more dangerous disease, which is the risk that CNBC offers little more than entertainment disguised as business reporting. The irony, of course, is that The Daily Show has never concealed that it is only offering satire; but, through their satire, one often gets more "hard news" information than one gets from a channel like Headline News, whose original concept of summarizing world news in twenty minutes has now been stomped into oblivion by its own stable of opinion-mongers.

Even if this was not a real debate, there is much to be learned from Cramer's inability to hold up his side of the conversation. However, his poor performance on The Daily Show does not necessarily constitute poor performance in explaining business news to his viewers. He may have fallen into the same trap that closes on other guests, not only Stewart's but also Stephen Colbert's. This is the temptation to try to compete with the host in the arena of comedy. (I have a personal friend, whose wit I almost always appreciate, who tried to engage that wit while being interviewed by Colbert; and he was reduced to mincemeat in short order.) It is also possible that Cramer went in front of the Comedy Central cameras without thinking about whether or not he should have his own message for the viewers, something like, "You've had your fun, but Mad Money is still one of the better sources of investment advice." Of course, we should also recognize that Cramer's messages on CNBC are products of a team of writers, rather than Cramer's personal wisdom, just as Stewart's rapid-fire wit also relies on a team of writers (even if Stewart deserves full credit for his excellent delivery). In other words both of these guys are performers dependent on their script writers. However, Stewart does not pretend to be anything other than a performer. Is Cramer anything other than a performer? Personally, I do not think so, which is why I do not need someone like Stewart to warn me about the hazards of watching CNBC!

Keeping the Conversation Going

My What I Read list now reflects the fact that I have started reading Stephen Hough's blog. Since I am interested in conversation through comments, I wanted to comment in his most recent post. It turned out that, in order to do this, I had to set up a blog of my own on the Telegraph Web site. I found this odd in terms of most commenting practices, but I also found it cool that I could be maintaining a blog in London when I cannot even remember the last time I was there physically! In any event the blog has now been created with a subtitle of Beyond Rehearsal. I figure it might provide a good staging area for ideas that are ready to leave this "rehearsal studio." After all, we all know that anything uttered with a British accent carries more authority than when it bears an American accent!

Bringing the Hamas Question into the Spotlight

Once again, we must turn to Al Jazeera English to satisfy our need for a context-based account of our alleged "vigorous engagement" towards peace in the Middle East, particularly as regards whether or not Hamas will be allowed to participate in that engagement. The basis for their latest report began with the morning papers:

Several ex-senior officials in the US government have written to Barack Obama, the president, urging him to seek dialogue with the Palestinian Hamas movement, a newspaper report says.

The Boston Globe on Sunday reported that the group has called on the White House to hold talks with Hamas leaders to persuade the Palestinian group to lay down arms and join the rival Fatah in a unity government.

Specific names cited in the Al Jazeera account include Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Paul Volcker, hardly the sort of names one would associated with the accusations of Chamberlain-like appeasement that the Bush Administration was so quick to flourish. Just as surprising as the signatories, however, was the amount of time it took for this story to surface:

The letter was handed to Obama just days before he took office in January, the newspaper reported.

Where Al Jazeera could go beyond the Boston Globe was in seeking out a source who could address both sides of this Hamas question and its potential for impeding any serious engagement. They found such a source in Marl Lynch, Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University:

I think that there is a group of people who think that it is necessary. Hamas controls Gaza, you can't get aid into Gaza without working with Hamas and they represent a large portion of the Palestinian people.

On the other side you have a lot of people who say that the international community has a series of conditions. They haven't met those conditions, they have blood on their hands and there are a lot of people who have deep qualms about talking to Hamas.

Al Jazeera also provided a European perspective in the form of Clare Short, a former British Labour Minister, who just led a delegation of six European politicians to Damascus to meet with Hamas officials:

The Europeans seem, at least to my eye, more open to the possibility of working with Hamas towards meeting those conditions rather than having them as preconditions.

I found this a discreet way to address the current American position. Neither the Al Jazeera staff nor their sources would come out and say that there was one factor in the United States with which European politicians would not have to contend, that factor being the significant lobbying power of AIPAC. We need to remember that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were courting AIPAC energetically at the organization's last convention; and we know that all-too-many decisions in Washington are biased by "deals that dare not speak their name." Recall that Obama's AIPAC speech was, to put it politely, conciliatory, while my reaction to the review of Clinton's Secretary of State nomination by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee described AIPAC as "the greatest threat to Clinton's effectiveness" as an "honest broker." It may be that, if Europe is making progress towards being such an "honest broker," then the wisest thing the United States might do is to withdraw from the negotiations, recognizing the suspicion with which our country continues to be viewed by all Middle East countries except for Israel. The Bush Administration would never have considered such a possibility. Would Obama be audacious to entertain it as a means to an end that is as important to us as it is to the European Community?

Signal and Noise from Corporate America

Last night Daniel Bases wrote a lead for his Reuters story that was hard for someone with my analytic bent to resist:

It pays to communicate but Corporate America is doing less and less of it with investors as the U.S. economy falls deeper into recession, undermining market confidence in the process, a new study showed.

As I write this I see that I have accumulated 114 posts with "communication" as a label and 269 posts with "economy." The above sentence seemed to suggest that these two topics might be on a collision course; so I felt compelled to continue reading in the interest of trying to figure out what, if any, damage might ensue. Here is what I found:

The number of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index with a consistent track record over the past 10 years of issuing quarterly earnings per share guidance is down 36 percent in the last 10 months, according to Thomson Reuters Proprietary Research.

Well-known companies such as General Electric, Microsoft, Costco Wholesale, and Nucor have stopped giving consistent earnings guidance.

"They are just pulling back because they don't want to continue to have to put out numbers that they cannot meet on the street," said Martin Sass, chairman and chief executive officer of MD Sass, an investment management firm with $6 billion in assets under management.

"It has devastating implications for their credibility, their stock prices, and the like," he said.

For those, like myself, who try to invest wisely without deep-ending on tracking those investments, I feel it is worth observing that "earnings guidance" is a technical term. In a 2005 Commentary piece on researchstock.com, Richard J. Wayman called it "a relatively new term;" so I suppose it is now more familiar to those to try to follow the financial news as thoroughly as possible. Here is Wayman's definition:

Earnings guidance is defined as the comments management makes about what they expect their company to do in the future, also known as “forward looking statements.” These comments often focus on sales or earnings expectations in light of industry and macroeconomic trends. These comments are made to investors so that they can evaluate the company’s earnings potential.

It goes without saying that it is not easy to make credible "forward looking statements" under volatile conditions; but what does that mean for the more general issue of communication between a company and its investors? By not making any statement about the future, it seems as if a company may end up sending one of two messages:

1. Things are going to be so bad that we do not want to frighten you into selling off your investments in our company.
2. Things are so unpredictable right now that we really do not know what is going to happen over the next quarter, so we are not going to say anything about what might happen and ask you to trust our skills in running the company.

Neither of these messages is particularly beneficial to the company. In current conditions the first interpretation is likely to induce the very fear it is trying to prevent. The second interpretation is more honest; but will such an act of "coming clean" raise the level of trust that investors have in the company? Richard Bernstein, chief U.S. investment strategist for Bank of America/Merrill Lynch offered the following comment to Bases:

We pay very little attention to guidance at all. It's basically public relations to manipulate investor thinking, and has little to do with true fundamentals.

From his point of view, even that "act of 'coming clean'" is "basically public relations to manipulate investor thinking;" and, given how much deception and opacity we have been facing, it is hard to disagree with him. Nevertheless, we find ourselves in a situation where not communicating at all ends up sending messages that are just as noisy (in the technical sense of information theory) as any guidance messages.

The problem is that a statement of earnings per share over the coming quarter is nothing more than a single number. About two years ago I wrote a blog under the title, "If You Reduce it All to a Single Number, that Number is Almost Certainly Wrong!" Nevertheless, ours is a culture that desperately hungers for such numbers; and, as I observed almost a year ago, that is the culture that Nicholas Carr was trying to confront in his Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Whether we read it in an earnings guidance statement or in the first page of Google search results, we blindly accept answers while ignoring any message that provides the reasoning behind those answers. I would thus argue that the issue is not, as Bases seems to suggest, that we should be concerned that Corporate America is not throwing numbers at us; rather, the issue is whether or not it is in Corporate America's interests for investors to understand the nature of the situation behind those numbers. As an investor, I would think that it is in their interests; but I am sure there are plenty of companies whose managers would disagree. Nevertheless, since it is my money that is at stake, I feel that I should at least have the right to decide to invest it in companies who appreciate the value of understanding and avoid those who messages are little more than what Wayman calls SWAGs (Systematic, Wild Ass Guesses)!

"Object in Chief"

I suppose that my greatest admiration with President Barack Obama comes from his unflagging persistence in talking to the American public as if they were adults, even when confronted with no end of evidence to the contrary. This was nicely demonstrated with a bit of rhetorical flair when, as reported by Jim Kuhnhenn for Associated Press, Obama spoke to the rich and mighty members of the Business Roundtable. We would expect our "captains of industry" (as we used to call them before that epithet was displaced by "Masters of the Universe") to approach their leadership responsibilities with more than a modicum of balance. However, Obama must be thanked for being the responsible adult to remind them that this is the case:

A smidgen of good news and suddenly everything is doing great. A little bit of bad news and ooohh , we're down on the dumps. And I am obviously an object of this constantly varying assessment. I am the object in chief of this varying assessment.

That "object in chief" epithet was a good measure against the prevailing epithets of power, particularly since it reminds us of Harry Truman's precept about where the buck ultimately stops. Nevertheless, since I seem to be occupied this morning with the power of the single sentence, I took great pleasure in reading that Obama also had one of those in his rhetorical quiver:

I don't think things are ever as good as they say, or ever as bad as they say.

I would like to believe that the Business Roundtable got the message that it was time to follow Paul's advice to the Corinthians and "put away childish things," in order to get back to doing the hard work that needs to be done; but I fear that George W. Bush got so much mileage out of talking to people as if they were scared children that even the Business Roundtable has been sapped of the will to do that kind of hard work.

Chutzpah in a Single Sentence

Given my use of adjectives such as "frivolous," it should be clear to most readers that I do not take the content of Chris Matyszczyk's Technically Incorrect blog for CNET News particularly seriously. As I observed when dropping my accusation of frivolity, I use it primarily as a pointer to far more substantive (and usually interesting) content. I may not make much of what Matyszczyk says; but I shall defend to the death his right to read the right stuff, as long as he gives me good pointers to what he is reading! A penchant for frivolity, however, can often lead to excess; and that excess can boil over into chutzpah. Such was the case in yesterday afternoon's Technically Incorrect post, leading me to consider giving a Chutzpah of the Week award for a single sentence:

Like teenies snorting a particularly zippy strain of coke, we have grabbed the Web and slipped our tongue down its throat without for one tiny second considering the longer-term consequences of our snogging.

For all of my own efforts to reflect soberly on both our aversion to thinking about consequences and our dispensations for addictive behavior, while addressing the role of Internet technology in promoting such behavior, I have to set my sobriety aside in stunned awe of that sentence. It was one of those I-can't-believe-I'm-reading-this moments, which I may not have experienced in its full glory since my adventures with Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn. From a purely rhetorical point of view, this veritable flood of tropes, argot, and innuendo leaps over the top in a single bound; and that outrageous leap gets right to the spirit of true chutzpah. So, yes, a single sentence can win a Chutzpah of the Week award. My only concern is that the award will encourage the author to outdo himself in future posts!

Barriers to Understanding

Once again I find myself using Chris Matyszczyk's Technically Incorrect blog for CNET News to track down source material far more interesting (and less frivolous) than the post itself. In this case the source appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of the NYU Journal of Law & Business with the provocative title, "A License to Deceive: Enforcing Contractual Myths Despite Consumer Psychological Realities." The authors are Debra Pogrund Stark, of the John Marshall Law School, and Jessica M. Choplin, of DePaul University. A reductive summary of the paper would be that it is about whether or not a plaintiff's failure to read the fine print of a contract constitutes grounds to excuse the defendant from charges of consumer fraud.

There is a certain literary irony in the fact that the "abstract" for this paper does not fit on a single screen of my Firefox browser, which left me wondering how long the actual article is. (Page numbers were not in the suggested citation. Fortunately, however, the download was free; so I took the time to retrieve a copy. The whole paper is 89 pages long, although the text itself concludes at the top of page 51.) In spite of its length, the "fine print" of the abstract offers enough rewarding reading to be reproduced:

Are consumers "foolish" or "negligent" when they trust what salespersons falsely tell them rather than read all of the terms of the contracts they sign? Should consumers be barred from bringing a fraud action on the ground that they have not "reasonably relied" upon such false statements or deceptive conduct when the form contract they sign states that they have not so relied? Currently seven states' courts have interpreted their consumer fraud statutes to require "reasonable reliance," and three-quarters of the states' courts impose this requirement for a common law action for fraud. Some courts have also ruled that the presence of a "no reliance" type clause bars a consumer from being able to raise the alleged false statement or deceptive conduct.

The attached article, "A License to Deceive: Enforcing Contractual Myths Despite Consumer Psychological Realities," provides an interdisciplinary analysis of this important aspect of consumer fraud law. The article proposes law reforms based upon the results of our fraud simulation study, reading contracts survey, and an analysis of the cognitive and social psychological reasons why consumers trust what salespersons tell them rather than read all of the contract terms.

In our survey of consumers, we found that on average 67% of the consumers reported that they failed to read all of the terms of the contracts they signed among the six different categories of consumer transactions surveyed (agreements relating to computer software, rolling contracts, car rentals, apartment leases, home purchase and home loans). As detailed in the article, the primary reasons why consumers rely upon what the salesperson tells them and fail to carefully read and understand all of the terms of the contracts they sign are due to cognitive barriers such as: (i) visual and comprehension challenges based upon the manner in which many form contracts are drafted, (ii) analytic deficiencies based upon schema deficits, (iii) positive confirmation biases, (iv) inability to imagine possible negative outcomes (i.e. the availability heuristic), (v) default assumptions, and (v) sunk cost effects. The article also explores some of the social psychological reasons why consumers fail to read the contracts they sign including: (i) misplaced trust in the defrauders due to a variety of factors which creates a strong motivation to trust which is exacerbated when the consumer is of a lower socio-economic status, (ii) social norms not to read contracts in certain contexts and a concomitant social value to trust, and (iii) a perceived (and often real) inability to negotiate the terms of the contract.

In light of these cognitive and social psychological barriers to reading and understanding all of the terms of the form contracts that consumers sign, we contend that courts are enforcing a contractual myth and creating a license to deceive when they enforce no reliance type clauses in contracts when in fact many consumers do in fact rely upon such statements in making the decision to purchase the product or service. Ninety percent of the public we surveyed reported that they expect that the terms of the contracts they sign will be consistent with the salesperson's statements and eighty percent reported that if there is an inconsistency they think the company should honor the statements made by the salespeople when the consumer has not read the terms of the agreement.

While promoting certainty of contractual obligations is a legitimate goal, and the enforceability of "no reliance" type clauses through the reasonable reliance requirement is sensible under certain conditions in transactions between sophisticated companies, this article contends that based upon our empirical data it is not sound policy to make it a bar to a consumer bringing a common law fraud action or a statutory fraud action (the consumer would of course still have the burden to prove that the parol false statement or deceptive conduct took place).

This article comprehensively addresses an important aspect of consumer fraud among the fifty states and provides very important data relative to the issue of consumer protection in general and consumer fraud in particular.

To find out what makes the analysis interdisciplinary, the reader must turn to the footnotes, which provide richer credentials than the "byline" of the paper. Stark is a Professor of Law, and Choplin is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. Since I have always felt that jurisprudence has to reconcile the objectivity of legal codes with the subjectivity of the parties in any legal case (if not the normative practices of their social world), I view these authors as a much-needed dynamic duo in the research of an area as highly charged as consumer fraud.

What most drew my attention to this abstract, however, were the two enumerations in its middle paragraph, both of which are concerned with what may be called "barriers to understanding." I find this aspect of their study an excellent continuation of Jürgen Habermas' extensive research into the nature of understanding and the question of how understanding is achieved through communicative action. Most important is how those two lists encompass the objective, the subjective, and the social, the three "worlds" at the foundation of Habermas' model of understanding. Ironically, there is no mention of Habermas in the full Stark-Choplin paper. (One advantage of a digital text is that you do not have to read the whole thing, or even skim it, when you have a good search tool! Whether or not that really is an advantage is left as an exercise for the reader!) Equally interesting is that the authors' first list of five "cognitive barriers" generalizes with little difficulty to domains of discourse beyond the text of contracts, while the second addresses practices that deliberately thwart understanding, which may again be generalized beyond the domain of contracts. As I have previously observed, Habermas was too focused on his "ideal speech situation" to afford much attention to the idea that communication might have more to do with undermining understanding than with achieving it; and in this respect Stark and Choplin add to the shortcomings of his work with valuable experimental data.

Nevertheless, there is an extent to which deception is subject to that same arms race metaphor that I recently raised in the matter of economic regulation, thereby comparing it to spam filtering. If we know that there are specific strategies for thwarting understanding, then we can be more aware of them. However, as we become aware of them, those who mean to deceive us will probably come up with new strategies of their own for doing so. This may be one reason why, in the almost 1000 pages of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas never elected to venture beyond the confines of the ideal speech situation, figuring that going there would be too depressing.

Getting a Fair Hearing

I always seem to find a lot of points of disagreement with Charles Rosen, whether it involves one of his piano recitals or one of his contributions to The New York Review (which I always read eagerly, since any point of disagreement always sets me thinking). His latest piece (in the March 12 issue) is entitled "Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter!;" and in it he returns to a question he has discussed often in the past: Why do we have so much trouble listening to contemporary music? This was an appropriate setting, since so much has been made of how difficult it is to listen to Carter's compositions.

In this particular essay, however, Rosen makes his key point without any explicit reference to Carter:

Schoenberg once said, "My music is not modern; it's just badly played." I heard Pierre Boulez direct his small chamber ensemble in a work of Harrison Birtwhistle, and when I said I had never heard a work of his sound so wonderfully effective, Boulez explained: "We had thirty-five rehearsals." At the Paris Opera, when Boulez conducted the first production of Alban Berg's Lulu with the third act that had been withheld for so long, I went to both the second and the last of thirteen performances. At the last performance, the orchestra seemed to be playing almost by heart, and when I remarked to Boulez that I had never heard an unfamiliar modern opera executed with such confidence, he said, "We had forty-five recording sessions."

It struck me as interesting that Rosen should dwell on a topic related to my analysis of our unrealistic approaches to the current economic crisis. Whether we are dealing with unfamiliar music or steeply descending stock indexes, we cannot seem to get beyond what I have called "our fixation with instant gratification," which I have interpreted as a general rejection of adulthood.

The fact is that very little happens instantly; and, as a corollary, what is done in one instance is likely to be undone in the next. This goes beyond H. L. Mencken's precept that a clear and simple solution to a complex problem is inevitably wrong. The solution has to be not only simple but also immediate; and this constitutes yet another way in which we have lost our sense of reality, not only in the arts and the economy but in just about anything related to work.

As a "refugee" from Silicon Valley, I have a particular sensitivity to this problem in the research domains of science and technology. I seem to have come through an "old school" graduate education, where I was taught that research is something that takes considerable time, whether you are a historian trying to establish which of your sources can be taken as credible or a scientist collecting data over several years, only to discover that it will take another several years to interpret those data. "Scientific method" may be a nice and clean ideal; but it does not account for the frustrating possibility that the very language in which we express our hypotheses may be inadequate, if not flawed. Much of research has a lot to do with groping around in the dark. When we finally catch a bit of light, we can never be sure if it is coming from a primary source or is only a reflection (or, for that matter, a reflection of a reflection).

Unfortunately, such groping has become taboo in the age of funded scientific research. It is extremely rare that a research effort gets financed without being bound by some form of legal contract; and the bonds of that contract are inevitably expressed in terms of "deliverables." Attention thus shifts away from such necessary pursuits as making sense of your experiences, as you negotiate your way through poorly articulated hypotheses and agonizingly cryptic observations, and towards more product-oriented questions concerned with how many patent applications you filed and how many peer-reviewed papers you have published. To put it bluntly, the discipline of inquiry has deteriorated into the domain of manufacturing, demanding the fabrication of the tangible to compensate for the intangibility of research itself.

Max Weber saw this coming in 1918 when he gave his "Science as a Vocation" lecture at Munich University, the same year and venue as that of his "Politics as a Vocation" lecture. I realize that I have paid too much attention to the politics lecture and not enough to the one on science. Ultimately, the real question is whether or not the very concept of science as a salaried profession erodes the practice of science; and the "vocation" of science may well be closer to a religious calling than to one of the boxes in a corporate organization chart.

Needless to say, this is a highly idealistic perception of the work of science; but it also reflects back on the work of a composer like Carter. Carter gave a series of lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during my senior year there, and I remember his talking about receiving commissions for his work. While there are plenty of reasons for him to enjoy receiving a commission, his greatest aggravation was almost immediately being caught in a web of accountability to the funding organization. Rosen writes about the skill his wife, Helen Frost-Jones, had in freeing him from the tangles of that web. Rosen claims that he was visiting Carter when one of those accountability calls came in from the Ford Foundation. As he tells the story, Frost-Jones took the call and said:

Yes, Mr. D'Arms, Mr. Carter is thinking about your commission a great deal—too much in my opinion. Goodbye.

Nevertheless, Carter did have to worry about delivering a "product" on schedule, since the performance of the commissioned work had already been planned. Even worse, a symphony orchestra seldom has the luxury of rehearsing a new work for more than a week, since they have to prepare for performances on a week-by-week schedule, which is what makes the numbers Boulez quoted about preparation time so significant.

Boulez recognized that, as important as it may be to think about what you are doing, you need time to figure out how to think about what you are doing before you can think about doing it. On the "Boulez time scale of rehearsal," there is a prerequisite stage of acquiring the basic nuts and bolts of execution that precedes the stage concerned with questions of interpretation that make the music sound like music, so to speak. This may have something to do with why the most satisfying performance of Carter's music I have heard took place at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music: Not only, as I suggested yesterday, do students have the "safety" of being able to experiment with their performances; they also have the "safety" of a schedule that is on "Boulez time," rather than the more "industrial time" they are likely to encounter as professionals. Within that schedule they can think about music, rather than product; and we in the audience can then benefit from those thoughts in our own efforts to become better listeners.

Michel Foucault in the Age of Crowdsourcing

It all began when I read this morning's Webware post by Stephen Shankland for CNET News:

A few months after the debut of Google Map Maker, which lets people add roads to uncharted areas of Google Maps, Google is letting people add directions, too.

"Today with our newly launched feature on Google Map Maker, you can get driving directions in regions where this was not previously available...In the spirit of Map Maker, you can correct the directions as appropriate," said programmer Vinay Chitlangia and user experience designer Sree Unnikrishnan in a blog post Tuesday. "Our hope is that with this deep editing ability, we will be able to ensure the most up-to-date and reliable maps ever."

With the service, people can edit details of intersections such as street names and what types of turns are permitted. Google also offers a guide to using directions on Google Map Maker.

The service helps with debugging Google Maps, too. "Finding directions is a great way to fix roads on the map that are broken, incomplete, or not connected well. For example, directions are incomplete for Devanahlli to Bommavara in Bangalore, India. This is because the road connecting Bommavara to a nearby main road is not drawn on the map," the Google employees said.

Crowdsourcing, in which people on the Internet collectively produce significant amounts of content or work often through small individual contributions, is a much-hyped concept, but it can be powerful when it works. Google also is using crowdsourcing for adding geotagged images to Google Maps' Street View.

My immediate reaction was to reflect, once again, on what Michel Foucault has called "the authority of the author." Reading fiction can be an exciting experience when we recognize that the "teller of the tale" need not necessarily be a reliable narrator. When we make the move from fiction to non-fiction, the reading experience may shift from exciting to dangerous; and, if what is being "authored" is a map and/or a set of directions based on that map, the danger may escalate to the potentially fatal. The question thus arises as to whether or not any of us, as users, can accept the authority of the content authored for Google Maps by those whose only credential may be that they are "people." Yes, that is a deliberately hyperbolic position; but in the age of Internet speed in a Web 2.0 environment, it seems necessary to keep putting out warning signs that say nothing other than:

Let the reader beware!

Where maps in unfamiliar, if not unknown, territory are concerned, I believe you cannot have enough of those warning signs.

Granted, the principle of crowdsourcing is that the "wisdom" of the crowd provides the authority behind the authored content. Thus, Google Map Maker has a Web page that explicitly addresses the role of the crowd in validating such content:

When you opt to moderate a User Submission, you will have the following options:

Approve - You can approve a User Submission if from your personal local knowledge you are sure that the User Submission is accurate both in terms of location and its labeling and does not violate the Map Maker Terms of Service in any manner. The user may mark features that may not be visible on the image. You can approve the feature, if you are aware of the existence of the feature in reality and the feature is accurate.

Deny - You can deny a User Submission if from your personal knowledge you are sure that the User Submission is either false or inaccurate in terms of its location and labeling. Please refer below, for more guidelines on the type of content that can be denied.

Request Details - You can request further information on a User Submission if there is any confusion. This will send the user an anonymous email with your question and a link to the feature. The user can then submit comments back via the Description tab when editing the feature. Please also see the History tab to see how features have been edited. You can also request for more information, if the user has marked a feature that cannot be seen on the image. By requesting details, the user will be able to confirm the existence of the feature.

No Action - If you are not sure of a particular User Submission then you can opt not to take any action in respect of it.

Report Abuse - Any User Submission can be reported if it contains: (a) bad or incorrect data, (b) commercial information or Spam, (c) violation of the Google Map Maker Terms of Service and (d) other reasons

This is nice enough as a stands, but it still raises questions. In this Web 2.0 world where users just jump in and "do it," without necessarily reading the instructions in detail (if at all), does this text have any real impact on how Google Map Maker content emerges and is moderated? More seriously, is there any "higher authority" to guard against content moderation degenerating into what I have called "Wikipedia fight club" practices? Then, without trying to sound too alarmist, I have to note that the Get Directions page for Google Map Maker happens to present an example in Pakistan. In a time when we cannot ignore the need for "homeland security," where potentially dangerous situations are concerned, we should approach any information source with prudence, if not the fear that the Bush Administration attempted to induce. At the very least we need to recognize that there are parts of the world (and Pakistan is probably one of them) where individuals may volunteer information for motives other than being seen as a helpful information source. How are we to know if there are any such motives behind the directions we receive? How is Google to know? As has been the case with the proposal that the Internet be harnessed to provide a more plebiscitary approach to government, it is too easy for the "wisdom of crowds" to devolve easily into the madness of brute force; and there are many parts of the world where such brute force can be fatal to the unprepared.

Whether or not such devolution takes place has less to do with the nature of information and more to do with the social context of the crowd. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid put it in the title of their book, information has a "social life" that cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, Google has a track record for ignoring the subtleties of that social life; and Google Map Maker may just add to that record.

Playing the Confidence Game for High Stakes

What shall we make of how Chuck Mikolajczak reported today's business news for Reuters? He certainly told it straight, as a reporter should:

U.S. stocks posted their best day in four months on Tuesday after Citigroup said it was profitable in the first two months of 2009.

Major indexes jumped off 12-year lows in heavy trading after a key lawmaker said he expected the reinstatement of a rule that makes it harder to bet that a stock will fall.

Financials led the huge rally, rising 16 percent after Citigroup Inc (C.N)Chief Executive Vikram Pandit also stated in a memo to staff of what was once the largest U.S. bank that he was confident about its capital strength.

Nevertheless, since I tend to seek out the literary in every story I read, no matter how straight the delivery may be, I could only think (with grudging respect to Peggy Noonan) of the words of Willy Loman's long-suffering wife Linda in Death of a Salesman:

It takes so little to make him happy.

So little, indeed: Citigroup's self-proclamation of two months of profitability, and CEO Vikram Pandit's declaration of confidence. If that is not enough to confirm that our whole economic system is little more than a confidence game played for stakes we can barely imagine, I do not know what is. Furthermore, just to play the rubes for all they were worth, all the high rollers started breaking positive like a row of dominos:

The last time the S&P rose this much was after the U.S. government decided to rescue Citigroup for the first time in late November, when it agreed to pump $20 billion of new capital into the bank to avert a collapse that could have crippled the world's financial system.

Shares of Citigroup, in which the government more recently took a large common equity stake to help shore it up, jumped 38.1 percent to $1.45. Citi's stock has fallen about 78 percent year to date.

Other bank shares rallied, with Bank of America (BAC.N) up nearly 28 percent at $4.79, and Wells Fargo (WFC.N) up 18.5 percent at $11.81. An S&P index of financial stocks .GSPF popped up 15.6 percent.

JPMorgan (JPM.N) was the Dow's top performer with nearly a 23 percent jump to $19.50. All 30 Dow components were in positive territory.

…

Other standouts included technology shares, with a jump in bellwethers like Apple Inc (AAPL.O) halting a three-day sell-off in the sector. The iPhone maker's stock, up 6.6 percent at $88.63, provided the biggest boost to the Nasdaq 100 .NDX. Microsoft (MSFT.O) gained 8.8 percent to $16.48 while Qualcomm (QCOM.O) added 7.2 percent to $35.36.

Highlighting the broad-based rally, the Dow Jones Home Construction index .DJUSHB climbed 15 percent, led by Pulte Homes (PHM.N) and D.R. Horton Inc (DHI.N).

Trading was heavy on the New York Stock Exchange, with about 2.19 billion shares changing hands, above last year's estimated daily average of 1.49 billion, while on Nasdaq, about 2.39 billion shares traded, above last year's daily average of 2.28 billion.

Volume on the NYSE was the second largest for the year.

Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a ratio of about 14 to 1, while on the Nasdaq, about five stocks rose for every one that fell.

Now, given how bad economic conditions are, I do not want to rain on anyone's parade; but isn't this a bit of an exaggerated reaction to a few claims that may not even have been validated? Indeed, the magnitude of that exaggeration demonstrates just how desperate things are and how addicted we continue to be to our belief in quick fixes (multiple semantics intended there). I may have thought that one of the changes that mattered would be that Barack Obama would treat us like adults, in contrast to George W. Bush treating us like scared children; but our fixation with instant gratification demonstrates that childhood is still with us. Tomorrow may be another day, Scarlett; but don't expect it to be better, just because today was good!

Naming Students

Those who have begun to read my contributions to SF Concerts Examiner may have noticed that I have now referred to two San Francisco Conservatory students by name: Hye Yeong Min for her participation in a Schubertiad program arranged by Paul Hersh and Madison Emery Smith for her Graduate Recital, as well as her promotion of that recital. I have written about the practice of identifying students by name, most recently a little less than a year ago when a review of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music production of Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto on San Francisco Classical Voice "provoked a controversial exchange of comments over whether student performers should be reviewed (or, for that matter, named)." I still feel strongly enough about my original position that I shall take the liberty of repeating it:

Regular readers may have noticed a tendency on my part to refer by name only to professional musicians, as opposed to students, such as those at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, or adult amateurs. This may be a reflection on my personal experience. One of things I remember about being a student, particularly a graduate student, was the way in which it seemed to grant me the ability to experiment "from a safe place." Education is very much a matter of exploration, and one cannot be a successful explorer by going down paths that have already been beaten smooth. Forging a new path, however, always carries an element of risk; and in the "real world" some of those risks could entail dire changes in the rest of your life if they are not approached with considered caution.

In other words an educational institution affords the opportunity to protect its students from the risk of serious consequences while encouraging them to be adventurous at the same time. As I see it, this idea of the "safe place" can be applied to just about any area a student wishes to pursue.

If I still believe this precept, why have I violated it twice before getting even half-way through this month? Smith was my first step down this slippery slope; and I took the step because initially I was writing about her effort to promote her recital, rather than about the recital itself. In the past I had seen single sheets of paper, possibly enhanced with a photograph, tacked up on a bulletin board; but I had never encountered as striking an announcement as the color post card Smith was circulating:

Having written about Smith's initiative as a publicist, it felt a little silly to write about the recital being publicized without mentioning her by name.

I shall also invoke the "silly" plea where Min is concerned. She was the only student participating in Hersh's Schubertiad. She was thus keeping company with two faculty members and one alumna, who was now running her own music school. Because the Schubertiad has traditionally been as much a social occasion as a musical one, it seemed appropriate to give the names and "credentials" of those occupying the "virtual drawing-room," thus casting the whole affair in a somewhat Proustian frame. If I had felt that Min's performance was out of place in her participation, I probably would have passed over any "roll call" in silence. However, this was Hersh's "drawing-room;" and she was one of the "friends" invited for the occasion. As I made clear in my review, she was definitely "up to" that occasion.

I am hoping that my effort to explain myself will provide some sort of "retaining mechanism" that will protect me from descending further down my slippery slope. I have observed that several Conservatory students now arrange to give performances beyond the protecting walls of the Conservatory. Out there in the "real world," people they do not know may be committing time and/or money to hear them perform. In that setting they have left the "safe place." I can write about them the same way I write about the performers I hear at Davies Symphony Hall; and, by all rights, I should write about them that way.

Regulatory Overhaul

Here is how Alan Rappeport summarized for the Financial Times Web site the speech that Ben Bernanke gave this morning:

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, on Tuesday urged an overhaul of “financial infrastructure” to help blunt future crises and said that new reforms would require global co-ordination.

The Fed chief, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, stressed the importance of finding new ways of handling groups that are deemed too big to fail and acknowledged that some policies were magnifying global volatility.

My guess is that this was designed as language to impress Main Street without rankling Wall Street too much, but it is hard to walk down that middle road without waffling. It is difficult to find anyone who does not want reform these days; but it is unlikely that this same "everyone" will come to an agreement over what that reform should be. (The disagreements currently surfacing in the Congress make for a good case in point.) I was reminded of what I wrote that last time I tried to take on the issue of economic reform about a month ago:

When one listens to "the voice of the people," rather than any government-based "official story," one quickly comes to realize than there is a tight coupling between the security of the economic framework and the effectiveness of governmental authority. This is why any strategy for recovery must not be confined to the "engines of the economy." Rather, it needs to address the broader scope of political economy, whether that scope rests on foundations of Adam Smith or Karl Marx.

Like it or not, Bernanke's head is deep in the gear-works of those "engines of the economy;" and it is unclear that he recognizes that the sociopolitical side of the problem is as important as the economic framework. This one-sided perspective may be illustrated by one of the details addressed in Rappeport's report:

Delving into the roots of the current downturn, Mr Bernanke argued for a retooling of the “financial plumbing”, the institutions that support trading, payments, clearing and settlement. He highlighted the repurchase agreement market and the money market mutual fund sector as soft spots in the financial system.

Except for Bernanke's preference to the plumbing metaphor over that of a mechanical engine, this pretty much makes my case.

Ironically, Bernanke came very close to sociopolitical ground in another part of his speech:

He also suggested the creation of an authority charged with monitoring systemic risks to help protect the financial system from crises, which he said should be co-ordinated internationally “to the greatest extent possible”.

“The risk-management systems of the private sector and government oversight of the financial sector in the United States and some other industrial countries failed to ensure that the inrush of capital was prudently invested,” Mr Bernanke said, explaining that the failure had led to “a powerful reversal in investor sentiment and a seizing-up of credit markets”.

Mr Bernanke explained that companies considered too big to fail bring many undesirable effects, such as moral hazard and excessive risk-taking. Such companies, he said, needed special oversight and consolidated supervision. Moreover, a system needs to be developed to allow for “orderly resolution” if such companies become insolvent.

Thus, while risk-management systems may definitely be numbered among those "engines of the economy," the decision to take a risk and the possibility of "moral hazard" cannot be abstracted out of the social world into the mechanical metaphors of the objective world. (In my own current medical condition, both the physicians treating me and I have to make decisions about risk, even if none of us are skating onto thin moral ice, so to speak. So I now have first-hand experience with trying to keep the concerns of the social world from getting lost in the abstractions of the objective world.)

I was once involved with a project on fault-tolerant software that gave me an opportunity to collaborate with Peter Neumann at SRI International. Neumann was fond of saying that you can only program your software to tolerate the faults you know about, leaving you vulnerable to the faults you had not considered. "Systemic risks" in the engines (or plumbing) of our economic framework are no different from spam in our electronic mail. Udi Manber's metaphorical view of the problem of spam filtering as an arms race also applies to those "systemic risks." While Neumann was concerned with faults in an engineering system that had not yet revealed themselves, economic regulation has to deal with risks that may not yet have been invented by virtue of those trying to avoid the regulatory framework!

The flaw in Bernanke's position may be that "systemic risk" presumes a "static system." However, in the social world no system is ever static. The structure of the system is always changing to reflect the practices of those who are part of that system. This is the fundamental principle of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory; and Bernanke's myopic view of structure could well impede any progress towards a reform based on political economy, rather than those "engines of the economy."

A New Gig

Those who work their way far enough down this page may have noticed that I have added SF Concerts Examiner to my What I Read list. This is actually a bit of vanity. I am now writing concert reviews and previews for Examiner.com, covering San Francisco as my "beat." I shall not be doing any of my (long-winded?) theorizing about music performance (or any of my non-musical topics) over there, which means that I shall now be writing on two independent sites. This will continue to be my "rehearsal studio;" and I hope to provide Examiner.com with more direct and specific products from my rehearsing, so to speak. The overlap between these two sites should therefore be minimal; and there may even be occasions when I hyperlink to my writing over there, just as I intend to provide Examiner.com articles with hyperlinks to The Rehearsal Studio when extended background material is in order.

Bach's Lessons in Listening

Back when I was working my way through the Brilliant Classics Bach Edition, I raised the question of whether a "marathon" program of all 48 preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, usually in the order in which they were written, could really "inform the inquisitive ear." Here in San Francisco Frank French has decided to demonstrate that listeners, as well as music students, can benefit from such a performance project. He scheduled two concerts, one for each of the two volumes that traverses the chromatic scale, at the Unitarian Universalist Church, the first of which was given this afternoon. He also made it a point to perform this music on a piano tuned with a system developed by Thomas Young in 1799, rather than using equal temperament. Young is probably best known as a physicist, but his physicist's interest was applied to the problem of tuning, particularly for keyboard instruments. His system has a Wikipedia entry, which summarizes the basic idea as follows:

Young temperament is a well temperament devised by Thomas Young, which he included in a letter to the Royal Society of London written July 9, 1799. It was read January 16, 1800 and included in the Society's Philosophical Transactions published that year.

Before closing, Young outlined a practical method to "make the harmony most perfect in those keys which are the most frequently used," by tuning upwards from C a sequence of six pure fourths, as well as "six equally imperfect fifths," in other words six progressively purer flat fifths. His goal was to give better major thirds in more commonly used keys, but to not have any unplayable keys.

When this system is used, because of the differences in the major thirds, each key has its own characteristic sound. The distinctions between the keys are subtle, but they are most evident in keys whose harmonic relation is remote. Thus, one is particularly aware of the qualitative difference between C major and C sharp major. This does not mean that there is some kind of "dramatic arc" to the chromatic ordering of Bach's preludes and fugues; but the ordering helps the ear to appreciate gradually those qualitative differences. Consequently, in a very fundamental way the "inquisitive ear" really is informed about listening habits from Bach's time, particularly where preferences regarding the selection of key are concerned.

The question remains whether this kind of "marathon" concert is the best way for the ear to acquire this new sense of listening. There is definitely a problem of fatigue in what may be described as "densely-packed diversity;" and I am afraid that at least some of that fatigue took a toll on French's performance. There were more than the usual number of evident errors; but I find this secondary, if not an antidote for the expectations for perfection induced by the recording industry. Where I had more trouble was in decisions that French made in setting priorities to negotiate the tightly-knit contrapuntal webs of both the preludes and the fugues. I have written in the past about how Richard Goode's performance of Bach counterpoint seems to be informed by the discourse of social conversation, which serves to provide each work with that sense of a "journey" that I feel is so important to the listening experience. Thus French's sense of journey in each composition may have also suffered from the fatigue of the situation. My guess is that the concert would have been better structured in equal thirds, rather than equal halves, providing more time for French to recharge his batteries, so to speak.

Having said all that, however, I suspect that his "total immersion" approach is the best one to take to familiarize the ear with the new sounds he is trying to present. It is a bit like learning multiplication tables. You can invoke "new math" to theorize all you want; but the problem of basic skill acquisition will still remain. In the domain of listening, this is just another problem of skill acquisition. Now I need to see to what extent listening to Bach's second volume will be informed by this afternoon's experience!

Musical Conversations-with-Self

Yesterday's exploration of the thesis that communicating with God is more like conversation-with-self than like an actual dialog provided me with an interesting entry point for last night's San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall. The Roman Catholic take on such conversations was represented by three centuries (early seventeenth, nineteenth, and twentieth), two nationalities (Italian and Hungarian), and two religions (Catholic and Jewish). Each perspective approached the relationship between man and God in its own characteristic way, which made for a wealth of diversity.

The evening began with Giovanni Gabrieli's motet "In ecclesiis," from the second volume of his Symphoniae sacrae, published in Venice in 1615, two years after his death. Gabrieli served on the musical staff of San Marco (as deputy to his uncle Andrea) and may be best known for the approaches he took to the spatial deployment of musicians throughout the space of this cathedral. Thus, in many respects, the cathedral became as much of an "instrument" as the performing instruments and voices. This particular motet was set for three mixed choruses, three trumpets, three trombones, and organ; and conductor Ragnar Bohlin had clearly given much thought to how these sources should be spatially arranged in Davies. He decided to keep the brass in their usual place at the back of the stage, place one of the choruses in front of the brass, and place a portative organ in front of that chorus. The other two choruses occupied the far left and right aisles of the floor of the audience area.

The result was moderately successful. Since I was seated off to the side and close to the stage, I had to contend with the problem of being too close to a few of the individual voices in the left-hand chorus. Nevertheless, for the most part I could appreciate the overall sense of balance without difficulty. The only real problem was Davies itself, since this music had clearly been conceived for a space with far livelier acoustics than those of a concert hall. (The very idea of a concert hall had not yet emerged in Gabrieli's time.) As I said, Gabrieli treated San Marco as an instrument unto itself, which meant that he composed for the sustained resonances and echoes that "came with the territory," so to speak. Large blocks of sound took priority over the intricacies of counterpoint; and details became secondary, if not tertiary. Thus, while Bohlin did well in honoring Gabrieli's sense of the spatial, his sense of architectural setting was, of necessity, abandoned. Thus, while "In ecclesiis" may have been conceived to set a context for prayer in a very specific religious space, the secular setting for this performance probably ended up missing the point behind its composition.

Nevertheless, the idea of details absorbed into large masses of sound clearly had an impact on the way in which György Ligeti set four excerpts from the text for the requiem mass between 1963 and 1965. This composition was intended for concert halls; and it is hard to imagine it ever having been performed in a Catholic church for a variety of reasons (including Ligeti's Judaism). Thus, in place of the acoustics afforded by a large cathedral, Ligeti drew upon the resources of a very large orchestra, two mixed choruses, and soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists. In spite of such density of resources, however, detail is far from secondary; and Ligeti even had the chutzpah to include a harpsichord, then setting it in such a way that it could hold its own.

Ligeti's composition was focused on the "Dies irae" sequence, whose dramatic depiction of the Last Judgment has inspired no end of orchestral excesses (not all of which involved setting the text). In the program book Thomas May quoted Ligeti as saying of this movement that "its wild and dramatic passages … allude to pictorial representations of the Last Judgment, particularly to Memling's altar-piece in Danzig, but also to the apocalyptic paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, as well as Dürer's copperplate engravings." My own thoughts drifted further south to Michelangelo's fresco on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo's work is all the more frightening for the ways in which he captured expressions of raw human emotion when confronted with the prospect of eternal damnation; and, for all of his involvement with abstraction in the middle of the twentieth century (including "Aventures," which was sort of a "rehearsal studio" for his requiem setting), Ligeti's composition is intensely humane, even in the face of what May called "an outlandishly Rabelaisian sense of humor." Thus, while that humor may be consistent with Bosch's bizarre images, this is as much a setting for conversation-with-self over "last things" as Gabrieli's music was a setting for prayer in San Marco.

Finally, the evening concluded with Franz Liszt's tribute to the unofficial poet laureate of the Church Militant, Torquato Tasso, whose Gerusalemme liberata was a massive attempt to escalate the First Crusade to an epic of Homeric proportions. Tasso spent much of his life in an asylum and was only honored for his work shortly before his death by Pope Clement VIII. Tasso's tragic life, rather than his epic, is the subject of "Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo," the second of Liszt's thirteen symphonic poems. Liszt was apparently inspired to undertake this composition after having heard a gondolier's song while in Venice. The connection is unclear, since the primary setting for the period of Tasso's life that he chose to depict was Ferrara; but Liszt always had a way of reinterpreting things in ways that would best suit his needs (itself another take on conversation-with-self, the "self" in this case being "the rationalizer"). Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas introduced the work to the audience by casting it in the same extravagant mold as that of Freddie Mercury's "Bohemian Rhapsody." I suspect that the setting for "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World might have been more appropriate; and even better probably would have been We're Only in It for the Money, Frank Zappa's absurdist retaliation against the idea of escalating rock to epic proportions. Still, given Ligeti's own appreciation of the absurd, he probably would have appreciated being coupled with his Hungarian forebear Liszt in this manner.

He probably would also have appreciated sharing with Liszt the role of "bookends" on either side of a performance of Maurice Ravel's G major piano concerto. I recently read (and lost track of) a report of a concert in England that coupled Ravel's two piano concertos with George Gershwin's (one being the "Rhapsody in Blue"). The parallels are interesting: Gershwin completed the "Rhapsody" in 1924, followed by a full three-movement concerto in 1925. Similarly, Ravel began with his single-movement left-hand concerto in 1930, followed by the G major in 1931. Last night's performance with soloist Martha Argerich demonstrated just how keen a listener Ravel was when it came to Gershwin's music. Ravel's concerto is, on the one hand, an homage to Gershwin's jazzy rhetoric while, at the same time, a demonstration of his own command of the orchestral palette (which Gershwin never really had). The extent to which this concerto is sustained by its foundation in sonority probably provided the best justification for it sharing the program with sonorous composers such as Gabrieli and Ligeti. If Liszt had any presence in this concerto, it was through his piano virtuosity; but the piano was just about the only instrument that was silent in "Tasso!"

Communicating with God

Reflection on one's faith is one of the oldest sources for the creation of art in a variety of media. With the emergence of modernism, this source became supplemented by reflection on the faith of others (with both positive and negative connotations). According to a story filed last night on the BBC NEWS Web site, Dutch artist Johan van der Dong chose to consider the role that technology plays in such reflection:

An art exhibition opening in the Netherlands will allow people to call a telephone number designated for God - but they will have to leave a message.

Dubbed God's Hotline, it aims to focus attention on changes to the ways Dutch people perceive religion.

Dutch artist Johan van der Dong chose a mobile phone number to show that God was available anywhere and anytime, Radio Netherlands reported.

Critics say the project mocks those with religious beliefs.

Forming part of an art installation in the town of Groningen, the voicemail message says: "This is the voice of God, I am not able to speak to you at the moment, but please leave a message."

…

Exhibition spokeswoman Susanna Groot said there was no intention to offend anyone.

"In earlier times you would go to a church to say a prayer and now [this is an] opportunity to just make a phone call and say your prayer in a modern way."

Instead, the aim is to provoke debate about the priorities of modern life.

The very idea of communication between man and God is so rooted in Western civilization that it can be traced all the way back to the third chapter of Genesis (where the conversation is not about prayer but about the first violation of one of God's rules). Prayer is but one of several ways in which religious rites are ultimately about communicating with God, so it is no surprise that contemporary artists should continue to reflect on the nature of this communication in terms of both the technologies and priorities (as Groot put it) of modern life.

I have always thought that one of the best interpretations of prayer was expressed by Peter Barnes in his play and screenplay for The Ruling Class. In the film Peter O'Toole plays Jack Arnold Alexander Tancred Gurney - 14th Earl of Gurney, the youngest of a long line of English nobles with an apparent history of eccentricities. Jack's particular eccentricity is that he goes around dressed like Jesus in a Passion Play and believes he is the embodiment of God. Early in the script we encounter the following exchange:

Lady Claire Gurney: How do you know you're God?
Jack Arnold Alexander Tancred Gurney, 14th Earl of Gurney: Simple. When I pray to Him, I find I am talking to myself.

I find this entirely consistent with George Herbert Mead's assertion that conversation is not limited to our exchange of linguistic symbols with others. We can also "exchange" those symbols with ourselves; and Mead even argued that the best characterization of thought is in terms of conversations we hold with ourselves.

Recent technologies have reinforced Mead's assertion in some interesting ways. I was a student when Joseph Weizenbaum first released his Eliza program on the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1966. Following the "non-intrusive" precepts of psychoanalyst Carl Rogers, this program "conversed" with the user by doing little more that providing cues to encourage the user to maintain the conversation. The "doctor" version of this program structured its cues around the sorts of things that a Rogerian might say in an analysis session. As Weizenbaum's Wikipedia entry puts it:

Weizenbaum was shocked that his program was taken seriously by many users, who would open their hearts to it.

Weizenbaum further observed that many (including his own secretary) would only use the program if they were left alone in a room with a connection to it. However, his "shocked" reaction missed the point: His software had provided users with the opportunity to converse with themselves about their problems, thus satisfying Rogers' hypothesis that conversation-with-self (as in Mead's serious thought) provided the best path to working through those problems. Eliza offered the first technology-based secularization of prayer.

Once we recognize that communicating with God is more like conversation-with-self than like an actual dialog, we appreciate that there is no reason to expect God to reply, so to speak. We can thus put down our thoughts on a piece of paper and cram that paper into the remaining wall at the site of the ruins of the Jerusalem Temple (the "Wailing Wall"); and I remember that, when fax technology became a commonplace, those who looked after the site of the wall set up a fax machine. You could send off a fax to that machine; and someone "on site" would take care of "delivering it to the Wall," so to speak. All van der Dong has done is replace fax technology with voice mail technology and circumvented the need for the Wall. I can see why those who attribute "divine power" to the Wall could take offense; but, once we understand (as Barnes did) the real nature of prayer, there is nothing particularly radical about leaving a message on "God's cell phone." For all we know, van der Dong's installation may revive an appreciation of the true nature of prayer; and, viewed in the context of those "priorities of modern life," would that be such a bad thing?

Personal Technology and Personal Infection

This is not really news. However, it has received so little attention that it probably deserves to be treated as such. The earliest account I have found to date was posted on February 18, 2006 to British Nursing News Online:

Researchers at Craigavon Area Hospital in Northern Ireland have found that mobile phones are cultivating the deadly superbugs causing havoc in Britain's hospitals.

The researchers took swabs from 105 mobile phones used by doctors and nurses. They found most of the phones were contaminated with bacteria and 15 were harbouring a strain known to cause serious infection.

Researcher Dr Richard Brady said the contamination of mobile phones risked spreading bacteria despite new measures to increase hand-washing in hospitals.

He said: "We recognise mobile phones are going to be used more and more in health care settings and we are a little bit worried that the bacteria found on mobile phones could be a problem with hand hygiene”.

Brady is now part of the Scottish Infection Research Network; and, thanks to the investigative interests of Kate Foster, came to more public attention at the beginning of this year through the pages of Scotland on Sunday:

FIRST it was handwashing, then it was cleaning the floors. Now mobile phones are revealed to be the latest battleground for hospital superbugs as a team of experts reveals the bacteria thrive on handsets.

A startling image released by researchers reveals colonies of bacteria grown from a working hospital doctor's mobile phone.

The photograph has been issued by a group of infection specialists investigating the spread of hospital superbugs, such as Clostridium difficile (C diff) and MRSA, between staff and patients.

They say the image reveals the ease with which deadly bacteria can be unwittingly carried around hospitals by members of staff.

The research has been carried out by Richard Brady, a surgical research fellow at the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh.

Brady said his study was prompted by the rise in the use of mobile phones by hospital staff and the lack of guidance on how to clean them, despite strict handwashing policies.

There are concerns that the mobile phones could be a route of transmitting infections because they are in regular contact with users' hands and close to their mouths, and because, despite regular handwashing, the bacteria on them could survive if they are not wiped clean.

A ban on mobile phones in hospitals has been relaxed in recent years and doctors have begun to rely on them, rather than the traditional hospital switchboard paging system, for instant communications with colleagues.

Brady said: "Mobile phones are being used in all aspects of healthcare delivery. They are the much preferred route because it makes communication more efficient. However, one aspect that has not been covered is bacterial contamination. They are particularly susceptible to this because they are in close contact with the mouth and hands, and travel to various clinical environments."

Nevertheless, it has not been easy to find reports about this problem from American sources. Last night Chris Matyszczyk posted the results of a similar study at the University of Turkey on his Technically Incorrect blog for CNET News. However, since Matyszczyk is a member of the CNET Blog Network, his posts lack the editorial authority of the CNET news organization. As was the case the last time a CNET Blog Network post came to my attention, the most useful and substantiating information turned up in a comment. Had it not been for that comment, I might have dismissed Matyszczyk's post as an excuse for his showing a photograph of a cell phone at the bottom of a toilet bowl!

Hospitals are clearly a major source of infection. One of their primary purposes is to see to the needs of those infected. We also know that there are an abundance of routines practiced in hospitals to prevent the spread of infection. What may be less apparent is that the opportunities for infection to spread may be one step ahead of those routines, in the spirit of that arms race metaphor that I enjoy invoking. By all rights personal technologies should have been covered by this "arms race" by now; and I have to wonder if the reason that such technologies continue to be such a risk is that too many people feel that the convenience of the technology outweighs the risk of its spreading infection. If this is the case, then we have yet another brick in the wall that blocks us from having affordable quality health care.

The Brave New World of Accountability

This just in from a Reuters report: Banks are having second thoughts about taking our Government's money if strings of accountability are attached. Here are a few tidbits from that report:

Northern Trust Corp (NTRS.O), which has been faulted for treating clients to concerts and fancy food at a recent golf tournament, will return $1.6 billion it took from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.

"The public has the right, for us, to be very tough on how recipients of TARP money spend it," Frank said at a briefing with reporters.

Frank also said U.S. Bancorp (USB.N), the eight-largest U.S. bank, will return $6 billion. The bank received $6.6 billion from the fund.

…

A growing number of U.S. banks are finding that participating in the bailout program designed to spur lending is more troubled than it is worth.

Three smaller lenders, TCF Financial Corp (TCB.N), Iberiabank Corp (IBKC.O) and Sussex Bancorp (SBBX.O), have in the last week decided to give back TARP money.

Banks have complained about new rules being imposed on them under the new economic stimulus law.

One new rule can limit pay for a bank's 20 top executives, which banks say would make it harder for them to hire and retain top talent.

Horrors! The age of the blank check from Washington is officially over! Presumably, the recognition that the Government would do something in response to that failure of the banking sector to provide the Government Accountability Office with the data necessary to monitor the bailout money they have received, not to mention the eagerness of the New York Attorney General to prosecute such matters before his state's Supreme Court, has put the fear of Barney Frank (a bit more substantive than God) into the banks. Perhaps we are experiencing changes we can believe in!

Defense by Chutzpah

Andrew Cuomo won his second Chutzpah of the Week award (with positive connotation) for the subpoenas he issued to John Thain (formerly Chief Executive Officer of Merrill Lynch) and J. Steele Alphin (Chief Administrative Officer of Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch) as part of his investigation of the (shall we insert "obscene" here?) bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch executives just before the acquisition by Bank of America. This investigation has now led to the case of Cuomo v. Thain being heard before the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan (Case Number 400381/09); so it seems fair now to present a Chutzpah of the Week award to Bank of America for its current strategy for pushing back against Cuomo's prosecution. As Reuters reported this morning:

Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) said it could suffer "grave harm" if it is forced to reveal data about an estimated $3.6 billion of bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch & Co officials in the days before the bank acquired the brokerage.

In a petition filed late Wednesday in a New York state court in Manhattan, the bank urged Justice Bernard Fried to reject New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's demand for the data, which the bank believes should be kept confidential.

The report also elaborated on what constituted that "grave harm" to Bank of America:

Bank of America said revealing the data could help rivals poach talent, prompt employees to leave because their privacy was violated, cause "internal dissension and consternation," increase security risks for bonus recipients, and give rivals a better idea of which businesses it considers most valuable.

Do this issues carry any weight? That decision can only rest with Judge Fried. I actually do not know to what extent the judge will be influenced by Cuomo's motives, which I saw as the primary justification for his chutzpah award:

I can think of no better way to throw a harsh bright light on the failure of the banking sector to provide the Government Accountability Office with the data necessary to monitor the bailout money they have received than to launch an investigation of a particularly egregious use of that money.

It seems to me that, if this case is ultimately about abusive practices with government money, then a verdict that acknowledges those practices will do far more harm than any of the issues Bank of America cited. Cuomo is appealing to the need for accountability, and I suspect that support for his intentions now go all the way up to the White House. Outside of the objective arena of the New York State Supreme Court, who is there to speak for the defendant other than the corporate voice of Bank of America; and will the American public, stuck with paying the bill for this bailout, find that voice persuasive?

What We Read and How

Like it or not, I seem to have gotten caught up in all the advance publicity and previewing of Watchmen. However, what has interested me the most is a comment, documented by Sukhdev Sandhu in his review of the film for the London Telegraph, by Alan Moore, creator of the twelve-part comic book series on which the movie is based. Moore asked for his name to be taken off the credits. Sandhu offered the following remark he had previously made as a possible justification:

My book is a comic book. Not a movie. It’s been made in a certain way, and designed to be read in a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cosy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee.

I do not know much about Moore beyond the background material I have encountered for Watchmen, but I like to think that I know a fair amount about reading. Regular readers know that I read all sorts of stuff, and comic books have figured significantly in my reading experiences. Regular readers probably also know that I view "experiences" in terms of how they help us form our perceptual categories; and in this case my own ontology now draws a distinction between "comic book" and "graphic novel," which Moore may or may not share with me. One thing, however, is certain: I have never read a comic book "in an armchair, nice and cosy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee!" I have in my time read both fiction and nonfiction in such a setting. I might even acknowledge that, should I decide to take on any product of the recent effort to turn Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past into graphic novel, the scene Moore has envisaged might be the most suitable (substituting tea for coffee and adding a plate of madeleines, of course). However, even the comic books from the old Classic Comics series just do not fit with that setting.

A real comic book has a pulpy nature that, however serious the content may be, tends to defy the sedate. When I worked at the student radio station at MIT, we had a ratty old couch that was the preferred setting for the consumption of Marvel Comics. I offer that couch as a paradigm for reading comics (possibly including the Coke machine on the other side of the room). It could hold three readers sitting side-by-side (each reading a different comic) or (when conditions were right) a single reader stretched out across the length of the couch. I suppose that the pulp is only part of the story. The other is that the setting should do justice to the "comic," which is not the same as the "literary humor" of a Max Beerbohm or even a Douglas Adams.

I fear that Moore may want us to think about his comic book in terms of the "pleasure of the text" (generalizing the concept of "text" to include the images); but the semiotic high-mindedness of a Roland Barthes just does not sit very well with comic books. The pleasure is in the reading; and, to a great extent, it is a guilty pleasure. That is what makes the experience comic, rather than merely humorous; the sense of raw fun trumps the appreciation of wit (even when wit is a critical element of the comic book, as in so many of the Marvel products). Moore needs to take himself less seriously and reject the pleasure of the text for the pleasure of the sprawl!

The End of Music?

Back in November of 2006 on my previous blog, I wrote a post entitled "Does Music Have a Future?" It involved an examination of a manifesto of the Future of Music Coalition, along with a related book by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard, The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Revolution. The ideology behind this futurism could be captured in a single sentence from the manifesto Web page:

For too long musicians have had too little voice in the manufacture, distribution and promotion of their music on a national and international level and too little means to extract fair support and compensation for their work.

Note the absence of concepts such as composing, performing, and listening, all of which are presumably subsumed by "manufacture." As I put it in my original post, the focus is on "the commercial survival of people wanting to make a living as musicians," with very little regard to the practice of music itself.

Needless to say, I was no more pleased with this ideological stance when I first wrote about it than I am today. However, to give some sense of how little things have changed since the manifesto emerged, let me reproduce my critical reaction:

However, all this trafficking in manifestos probably needs to be examined in the context of my recent attempt to get below the surface of the iPod phenomenon. See, as soon as the manifesto writers get on the bandwagon of a digital future (which is definitely the case with the aforementioned book), then it is not long before the iPod is paraded out as the wave of the future. At this point it is important to remember that iPods now provide content other than music, so any examination of the technology must take content such as video and podcasts into account. Consequently, if we buy into the argument I have been trying to promote, which is that the iPod is, above all other things, a convenient mechanisms for detaching from reality, then the fact that it provides music as content becomes relatively incidental.

At the end of the day, if there is a "digital music revolution," then it has precious little to do with music; and the primary reason for this is that the technology behind this revolution is solidly locked into what Noam Cook and John Seely Brown call an "epistemology of possession." The iPod is a handy little toy that provides us with a new way to acquire and manage old possessions, and it delivers those possessions as a cocoon to protect us from the cruel world out there. However, if we want to talk about music, we have to recognize that music (as opposed to the music business) is more about practice than about possession. Those practices involve not only making music (composing or performing) but also going to performances and playing recordings. Cook and Brown argued that talking about practice requires a different epistemology from talking about possession; and they envisage a "generative dance" that engages both epistemologies.

My fear is that if the only talk we hear about the future of music has to do with possession, then practice may drop out of even our peripheral vision of the world of music. Unfortunately, I am "old school" enough to believe that you cannot have music without practice. Thus my choice of headline: If we embrace the manifestos of the "future of music" with too much enthusiasm, the consequence may be that music has no future at all!

In other words the concept of "manufacture" dominates the manifesto because the envisaged future is all about possessing the next generation of "end products." In this future there is no room for those who would prefer to pay the price of admission to experience the immediacy of performing musicians practicing their crafts.

On this blog much of my emphasis has been on the underlying nature of listening to musical performance and acquiring that listening skill. My preference has always been for "live" performance, holding to the precept that the primary value of recordings is to prepare us for opportunities for such performances. The best recordings are best viewed as documents of performances, rather than end products of a manufacturing process. This recently provoked me to draw the following conclusion about such manufacturing:

Unfortunately, this just sucks the life out of performance, literally as well as metaphorically; and, as a consequence, the practice also impedes (if not debilitates) our capacity for being (or learning to be) good listeners.

This morning Alastair Jamieson filed a story for the London Telegraph that cast the situation I have been examining in an even darker light than I had anticipated:

Flatter sounds associated with digital music are now being chosen by some record producers as young listeners no longer appreciate high fidelity recordings.

Researchers believe the use of iPods and computers to play music by millions of consumers over several years has raised the collective perception of the sound quality.

Their findings suggest that the veneration of vinyl records by purists following the arrival of the CD in the 1980s is being repeated by modern day music producers exasperated by the apparent indifference of young listeners to the metallic 'sizzle' associated with the MP3 players used for digital sound.

Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California, has conducted an eight-year study in which students have rated various formats playing the same song. He found that, over time, there was a rise in preference for MP3 players and that there was no perception of inferior quality.

Professor Berger told The Times that the phenomenon was similar to the continued preference of some for music from vinyl records heard through a gramophone. "Some people prefer that needle noise – the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves. I think there's a sense of warmth and comfort in that.

Rennie Pilgrem, a dance music producer, said he mixed his tracks while listening to them through iPod headphones to cater to the less refined tastes of today's youth. "To my ears iPods are not even as good quality as cassette tape," he said. "But once someone gets used to that sound then they feel comfortable with it."

That last sentence is the kicker. The "comfort factor" that Pilgrem cites is that same phenomenon of categorical perception, which I recently discussed in terms of how the equal-tempered tuning of a piano now conditions us to hear the intervals of the harmonic series as "out of tune."

Much of what I have called the "rhetoric" of performance is a matter of subtlety. It comes from the capacity of a performer to differentiate the present performance from any past performance; but that differentiation can only be appreciated by those with the listening skills to be aware of it. Those skills can only be grounded in the individual listener's own experiences of past performances, which basically means that every performance we experience expands our capacity for being better listeners. "Manufactured" music, on the other hand, is not about any such subtlety of rhetoric any more than it is about performance itself. To the extent that Jamieson's report is an assessment of what the Future of Music Coalition had envisaged, it is a future in which the very act of listening has been displaced by the sort of primal auditory response that, in his derogatory way with words, Igor Stravinsky had associated with ducks and declared to have "no merit." In 2006 I worried about the future of music on the grounds that the need to think in terms of practice was being displaced by exclusive attention to product. Now I see that I must also worry that, however many excellent opportunities there may be for us to learn how to listen, what we experience through those manufactured digital products may undermine the very capacity from which that learning can take place.

The Voices Usually Left Unheard

An important reason for reading Al Jazeera English is that, if, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has claimed, the Obama Administration is truly serious about "vigorous engagement" towards peace in the Middle East, then it (and, for that matter, we the electorate) should take the time to listen to those voices that most media sources choose to ignore. Thus, this morning's news from the Middle East on Al Jazeera English begins with the same material that we can find from the other sources:

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has criticised Israel's plans to demolish dozens of Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem, describing the move as "unhelpful".

In a news conference with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, in Ramallah, Clinton said the demolition showed that Israel was not committed to its obligations towards the "road map" peace plan.

"It is an issue that we intend to raise with the government of Israel and the government at the municipal level in Jerusalem," she said on Wednesday.

However, beyond the formalities of diplomacy, Al Jazeera has a political analyst named Marwan Bishara. His approach to reading between the lines of Clinton's text is likely to differ from interpretations we shall encounter in the American media:

We see an approach by the secretary of state that is completely noncommittal to anything specific [about the demolitions], which previous administrations saw as not only unhelpful, but also as illegal under the fourth Geneva convention.

[Clinton] giving a short lecture on hope but really delivering nothing of substance to give hope, was a bit worrisome I'm sure for lots of her Palestinian listeners.

The road map came out in 2002 under the Bush administration ... that time schedule is over four or five years ago, so the road map has already come to a dead end.

It is peculiar to speak about it [the road map] as if it is something to refer to, rather than referring to international law ... or what [ to do] now after 15 years of peace processes that basically went nowhere ... not only do they have nothing new to say, but they are leaning on something which is passé.

This language is as disconcerting as it is blunt, but its negative tone should not detract from its potential as a reality check. Such a reality check must, of necessity, address the question of who will participate in subsequent conversations about peace in the Middle East. Now that Senator John Kerry is beginning to hint (even if it is ever so quietly) that it would be counterproductive to exclude Hamas from such conversations, we, whose voices the Obama Administration claims it wants to hear, should help Kerry raise his volume. We can do this by gathering and calling attention to data points that can only be found through Al Jazeera. Thus, the Al Jazeera English report includes not only their own analyst but also Hamas representative Osama Hamdan:

There is no change in the United States policy, the signs are not positive. Achieving any kind of peace process or at least a political process in the region [they] need to talk to the main players, mainly in the Palestinian situation.

What she [Clinton] said is not important when you talk about the whole Palestinian issue. Everyone knows that the [Israeli] settlements are being enlarged, they are taking Palestinian land ... she criticised part of this, but she did not talk about achieving a peace agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis. She did not talk about the new change in the Palestinian situation after the war in Gaza.

They [the US] are not ready to deal with this reconciliation [between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas]. They are talking about a government without including Hamas.

Sadly, the only American willing to raise his voice against the rejection of the election through which Hamas became the representative of the population of Gaza has been Jimmy Carter; but his remains a voice in the wilderness. This may well be the week in which the promising rhetoric of both Barack Obama and his Secretary of State are put to the test of whether or not there is substance behind the words. Fortunately, we have Al Jazeera English to help us define that test and interpret its results.

Leahy's Legacy: To Confront the Bush Legacy

During the final months of his administration, George W. Bush exhibited a "surge" of interest in the legacy of his Administration. However, as I observed at the time, the fruits of that interest turned out to be little more than that same distorted view of reality that had been the real legacy of his eight years in office. If Bush was only going to provide simplistic formulas as a substitute for serious reflection, we had to wonder how long it would take for more genuine reflection; and, when that time came (assuming it would come at all), would there still be memories fresh enough to sustain the reflection?

Barack Obama has tried to distance himself from a scrupulous review of Bush Administration practices, taking a public stance that looking forward is more important than looking backwards. Since I continue to subscribe to the conviction that history can always inform how we think about and act in the present, I do not agree with Obama's position: We can only look forward through "knowledge lenses" that are shaped by the understanding we gain through looking backwards. I thus applaud the desire of Senator Patrick Leahy, as reported last night on Al Jazeera English, to review the last eight years critically but dispassionately as a source of lessons to be learned:

The US Senate Judicial Committee is to discuss the possibility of creating a commission to investigate alleged abuses of power during the administration of George Bush, the former US president.

The proposed commission would examine allegations of torture, abuse of power, illegal wiretapping and extraordinary rendition of terror suspects.

The meeting follows a proposal by Patrick Leahy, a senator for Vermont and chairman of the committee, to examine US actions as part of the country's so-called war on terror.

While I have frequently suggested that ours is a culture with little interest in history, it appears that a fair amount of the American public is sympathetic with Leahy's effort:

A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted earlier in February found that 62 per cent of US citizens favour either a criminal investigation or an independent panel to look into allegations of torture.

Indeed, I have been struck how often the word "criminal" and many of its variants have emerged in man-on-the-street interviews showing up on television news (not that such interviews ever constitute a representative statistical sample). Perhaps, whatever our feelings about history may be, we just all want to be Tom Cruise standing up to the Bush Administration's collective embodiment of Jack Nicholson, shouting in our faces, "You can't handle the truth!" (It is interesting, however, to note that these days "Call me Karl" Rove has been trying to take a more sugar-coated approach to addressing critics of the Bush Administration.) Whether or not Leahy will get his wish remains to be seen, particularly when we get down into such details (where the Devil resides) as "the power to subpoena witnesses and possibly grant immunity for officials who testify truthfully." Personally, though, I feel that any present serious effort to move forward can only take place once we have been fully informed about what we see when we look back on the last eight years.

Next Season at Symphony

As I observed last month, David Gockley has planned the 2009–10 season of the San Francisco Opera in a way that shows sensible respect for the current economic hard times, thus reflecting the same strategy that can be observed at London's Royal Opera House. The 2009–10 schedule for the San Francisco Symphony has now been released; and I have to confess that it seems more than a bit more ambitious and risky, particularly for a performing ensemble that has to come up with a new program almost every week over approximately a ten-month period. I have now made my first pass through this list and would like to highlight (with some annotation) some of the events that are likely to be the most interesting and/or satisfying. This list will be nothing more than highly subjective first impressions, so I welcome any points of view that either challenge or support it. First of all, here is the clarification about place and time:

All events are in Davies Symphony Hall except where indicated [the Flint Center being in Silicon Valley]; (m) denotes matinee.

Not counting the material for the opening gala, Gustav Mahler will lead the way at the beginning of the new season:

Sept. 16, 17, 19, 20 (m) -

Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano. Mahler: "Rückert-Lieder," Symphony No. 1.

Sept. 23, 24, 25, 26 -

Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor and piano; Thomas Hampson, baritone. Mahler: "Origins and Legacies," including "Songs of a Wayfarer," Piano Quartet, selections from Symphonies 2, 3 and 7, early songs and Scherzo from Hans Rott's Symphony in E Major.

Sept. 30, Oct. 1, 2, 3 -

Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor. Scelsi: "Hymnos"; Mahler: Symphony No. 5.

This should make for an interesting approach to learning how to listen to Mahler. I am not, as a rule, particularly big on offering excerpts; but, as I hope my writing has made clear, I feel very strongly about the idea of "listening in context." Thus, I am all for providing context through a project like the "Origins and Legacies" program that Thomas has conceived. My knowledge of Rott comes entirely from Henry-Louis de La Grange's massive Mahler biography. Rott was a fellow student at the Vienna Conservatory. De La Grange introduces him to the reader in conjunction with a profile of the Conservatory's director, Josef Hellmesberger, Sr. Here are two sentences that set the context:

This confirmed traditionalist [Hellmesberger] was, needless to say, extremely distressed by the turbulence of such young students as Hugo Wolf, Hans Rott, and Mahler. The last mentioned was often reprimanded for having "behaved insubordinately," and, as for Wolf, he was dismissed outright in March 1877 for breaking one of the rules.

In that respect I also took interest in the idea of coupling Mahler's fifth symphony with a 1963 composition by Giacinto Scelsi, who never seemed to be "distressed" by turbulence in his own approach to composition.

Oct. 22, 23, 24 -

Osmo Vänskä, conductor; Yundi Li, piano. John Adams: "Slonimsky's Earbox"; Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1; Dvorák: Symphony No. 7.

Oct. 28, 30 (Friday 6.5), 31 (Flint) -

Osmo Vänskä, conductor; Vadim Repin, violin. Aulis Sallinen: Symphony No. 1; Sibelius: Violin Concerto; Beethoven: "Coriolan" Overture, Symphony No. 8.

The last time Vänskä came to Davies, I was delighted to experience an understanding that was as adept with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as it was with his fellow Finns, both the more traditional Jean Sibelius and the contemporary Kalevi Aho. This time he will undertake a broader repertoire that will again recognize Sibelius and couple him with Sallinen. Given his versatility, it will also be interesting to hear the approach he takes to Adams.

Nov. 27, 28, 29 (m) -

Ragnar Bohlin, conductor; Malin Christensson, soprano; Marie-Nicole Lemieux, contralto; Lothar Odinius, tenor; Anders Larsson, baritone; San Francisco Symphony Chorus; Ragnar Bohlin, director. Bach: "Christmas Oratorio."

This work is basically a cycle of six cantatas for Advent services, and it is a pity that it is not performed more often. The Symphony has a rather good track record for summoning the proper modern-instrument resources for performing Johann Sebastian Bach; and I was certainly happy when I heard the Chorus sang the BWV 232 mass setting in B minor several years ago. This will also be a good opportunity to become more familiar with Bohlin's conducting.

Dec. 9, 10 (m), 11, 12 -

Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; Emanuel Ax, piano. Schubert/Webern: "German Dances"; Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4; Webern: Symphony; Beethoven: Symphony No. 5.

This may well turn out to be the most interesting program of the entire season by virtue of the decision to couple Ludwig van Beethoven at his most "monumental" with Anton Webern in his capacities as both orchestrator and composer. As is clear from his "Path to the New Music" lectures, Webern attached great importance to the ability to listen to Beethoven with an acutely understanding ear; and he may well have acquired that priority from his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, whose Fundamentals of Musical Composition draws so heavily on Beethoven for examples that the editors included the following Explanatory Note:

All citations of musical literature which do not specify the composer refer to works by Beethoven.

Placing Webern's symphony between two works of Beethoven should provide an opportunity for our understanding of Beethoven to influence our understanding of Webern and vice versa.

Feb. 18 (m), 19, 20 -

Herbert Blomstedt, conductor; Michael Grebanier, cello. Haydn: Cello Concerto No. 1; Beethoven: Symphony No. 3, "Eroica."

Feb. 24, 25 (m), 26 -

Herbert Blomstedt, conductor; Mozart: Symphony No. 36, "Linz"; Bruckner: Symphony No. 6.

Blomstedt's visits are always interesting (usually as much to Symphony members as to the audience). Having experienced Kurt Masur's approach to Anton Bruckner, I welcome the opportunity to compare it with Blomstedt's. Furthermore, now that Thomas has demonstrated his own chops for the "Eroica," Blomstedt's reading should make for a fascinating comparison.

March 11, 12 (Friday 6.5), 13, 14 (m) -

Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; Laura Claycomb, soprano; Katarina Karnéus, mezzo-soprano; San Francisco Symphony Chorus; Ragnar Bohlin, director. Mahler: Symphony No. 2, "Resurrection."

This is another work that deserves regular listening; and Thomas always comes back to previously-performed works with new perspectives.

June 17, 18, 19 -

Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor and piano; Yuja Wang, piano. Poulenc: Sonata for Piano Four Hands; Stravinsky: Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra; Villa-Lobos: "Bachianas Brasileiras" No. 9; Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand; Stravinsky: "The Rite of Spring."

This is such a fascinating assortment that I am really intrigued as to how it will come together as an entire program. It will also provide the opportunity to hear Wang in three different contexts, which is rare for a visiting soloist. I have to confess that The Rite of Spring is one of the first works I heard Thomas conduct after I moved to the Bay Area, and it was one of my most memorable experiences of the work. It is hard for me to resist the opportunity to hear him approach to work again.

Among the "special events," one event stands out among all the others:

Nov. 20-21 -

Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Simon Rattle. 11/21: Brahms/Schoenberg: Piano Quartet No. 1; Brahms: Symphony No. 1. 11/22: Wagner: Prelude to Act I of "Die Meistersinger"; Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 1; Brahms: Symphony No. 2.

As I have frequently observed, there is much to be said for the Brahms-Schoenberg connection. However, Richard Wagner is usually out of place in such a context. It will be interesting to see what Rattle does to present his music as a "prelude" to Schoenberg's chamber symphony, rather than the opera for which it was intended.

The other important visit will take place under the "Great Performers Series:"

May 10 & 11 -

Los Angeles Philharmonic; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano. 5/10: John Adams: "City Noir"; Mahler: Symphony No. 1. 5/11: Bernstein: Symphony No. 2, "The Age of Anxiety"; Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6, "Pathétique.

Having heard Dudamel conduct the San Francisco Symphony, I now very much want to hear him with his "home base." I am particularly interested to hear how he will bring Mahler to "Michael's house." Myung-Whun Chung did this in January of 2008 with the same symphony; and he summoned a compelling performance through what I called "the musical version of stare decisis," all the more interesting because he had applied the same strategy to Olivier Messiaen in the first half of his program. Coupling Mahler with Adams should make for a markedly different context, and I am curious as to how Mahler will fare through this programming decision.

As I wrote in introducing this selection, these choices are all products of the arbitrariness of my personal taste. They all have the potential to expand our capacity for being better listeners, but I have every reason to believe that the same can be said of the concerts I did not include in my list. We all have every reason to look forward to the coming season in its entirety.

The Latest Decision on Prayer in School

School prayer came to the Supreme Court again yesterday; and, even if it involved a rather narrow issue of practice, it deserves to be examined in terms of its possible implications. Here is how Associated Press Writer Jesse J. Holland reported the story:

Coach Marcus Borden used to bow his head and drop to one knee when his football team prayed. But the Supreme Court on Monday ended the practice when it refused to hear the high school coach's appeal of a school district ban on employees joining a student-led prayer.

The decision on the case from New Jersey could add another restriction on prayer in schools, advocates said.

"We've become so politically correct in terms of how we deal with religion that it's being pretty severely limited in schools right now, and individuals suffer," said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organization that focuses on First Amendment and religious freedom issues.

But Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said some parents had complained about Borden leading prayers before the East Brunswick, N.J., school district ordered him to stop and banned all staff members from joining in student-led prayer.

"The bottom line is people in positions of authority, like a coach, have to be extremely careful about trying to promote their ideas, or implying that if you don't pray, you may not play," Lynn said.

Lynn's point is well taken, and it seems to have had the appropriate persuasive effect on the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, another one of his remarks is a bit more disquieting:

Coaches are not supposed to be promoting religion; that's up to students and parents and pastors.

Whether or not he realized it, this sentence carries the strong connotation that "students and parents and pastors" may promote their religion in a public school system, which is a far more serious issue of separation of church and state than a football coach with strong religious convictions. On the surface it appears to endorse student-led prayer as long as it is strictly a student activity; but this raises the same problem of authority brought before the Supreme Court. It just happens to be the authority of all the students on the team and may therefore be just as influential in determining who gets to play. Were any of the team members Muslim or Jewish (or, for that matter, Catholic); and, if they were on the team, did they spend any time off the bench?

The real bottom line is that the only place for religion in a public school is in a social studies curriculum for comparative non-judgmental analysis of religious beliefs and practices. The promotion of any religion is no more the domain of "students and parents and pastors" than it is subject to the authority of teachers and coaches. My guess is that Lynn did not realize the dangerous connotation of his sentence; but it is the sort of proposition that can have ugly repercussions, particularly in communities that take their religious beliefs very seriously outside the walls of any public institutions.

Beyond the Vantage Point of Western Civilization

The essay is entitled "Economically Fueled Upheaval." The author is Michael T. Klare, defense correspondent for The Nation and Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College. The basic thesis may actually be best captured in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 12 given by Admiral Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, whom Klare quoted as follows:

The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications. … Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period.

Klare has provided a graphic illustration of Blair's conclusion:

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically fueled upheavals.

Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania) and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations--none as yet in the United States--your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you're a gambling man or woman, it's a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.

For the most part, such upheavals, even when violent, are likely to remain localized in nature, and disorganized enough that government forces will be able to bring them under control within days or weeks, even if--as with Athens for six days last December--urban paralysis sets in due to rioting, tear gas and police cordons. That, at least, has been the case so far. It is entirely possible, however, that, as the economic crisis worsens, some of these incidents will metastasize into far more intense and long-lasting events: armed rebellions, military takeovers, civil conflicts, even economically fueled wars between states.

I do not dispute either the data Klare has summoned or the approach he has taken in presenting it. However, I am struck by the absence of any part of the Muslim world in that presentation. It seems to me that the biggest flaw in the reasoning (if we can call it that) of George W. Bush regarding our "progress" in dealing with organizations like al-Qaeda and the Taliban was his refusal to acknowledge the international nature of Muslim culture and the geopolitical implications of that nature. The Taliban has thrived on supporting those who have been neglected (if not abused) by Western-supported governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and it has refined a strategy that couples supporting bodies with food, clothing, and shelter with supporting souls through their particular brand of fundamentalism. At the same time we have observed al-Qaeda extend this kind of influence (primarily from a secular stance) from a local to a global scale that Klare has chosen to ignore in examining examples that "are likely to remain localized in nature."

This is not to deny either Blair's thesis or where Klare has chosen to take that thesis. Rather, it is to remind us that both Blair and Klare still live in an ethnocentric world that views social progress in terms of the advance of "Western civilization." Until we recognize that there are other "civilizations" with a "global reach" and recognize those civilizations as equals, rather than as "developing," we shall be as vulnerable as we were on September 10, 2001, back in those dark ages when we thought we were economically secure.

Today's Mess

Continuing the theme of oracles, Joe Nocera seems to have done a fairly good job of prediction in his Talking Business column for Saturday's New York Times:

Next week, perhaps as early as Monday, the American International Group is going to report the largest quarterly loss in history. Rumors suggest it will be around $60 billion, which will affirm, yet again, A.I.G.’s sorry status as the most crippled of all the nation’s wounded financial institutions.

Sure enough, this morning my Google Reader abounds with headlines about that "sorry status" of A.I.G. and its desperate need for more bailout money. I suspect Nocera takes little satisfaction in the thoroughness of the analysis in his column, which was assembled under the dire headline "Propping Up a House of Cards." Ironically, much of Nocera's effort to reduce this mess to terms that we could all understand was assisted by Robert J. Arvanitis, who has been all too willing to facilitate explanation from his vantage point as a former A.I.G. executive. The resulting analysis is fascinating. To appeal to Nocera's metaphor, every "card" in the "house" ultimately involves a violation of Warren Buffett's little witticism about "geeks bearing formulas." It all came down to investing heavily in instruments understood so poorly that they have yet to be managed by a suitable regulatory framework, all on such an enormous scale that Nocera concluded:

It would be funny if it weren’t so awful.

The final blow, however, came when, in search of a good coda, Nocera returned to Arvanitis for his insider's point of view:

I asked Mr. Arvanitis, the former A.I.G. executive, if the company viewed what it had done during the bubble as a form of gaming the system. “Oh no,” he said, “they never thought of it as abuse. They thought of themselves as satisfying their customers.”

That’s either a remarkable example of the power of rationalization, or they were lying to themselves, figuring that when the house of cards finally fell, somebody else would have to clean it up.

That would be us, the taxpayers.

Now we the taxpayers are reading about it in this morning's headlines.

Common Sense Trumps the Oracle

According to his Wikipedia entry, Warren Buffett was endowed with his "Oracle of Omaha" sobriquet by Alex Markels of U. S. News & World Report in a story that appeared in the August 6, 2007 issue. In our present circumstances it is easy enough to say that anything published on such an auspicious date in history would be fated to blow up in our faces; but it would be more productive to recognize that, in this year's annual letter to investors in Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett not only dispensed with the oracular but also owned up to his own errors, being direct enough to declare:

During 2008, I did some dumb things in investments.

While Buffett seemed to be as disposed to seek out targets for blame as the rest of the rich and mighty have been, he also recognized that this was a letter whose readers would benefit more from commonsense lessons learned, rather than the latest proclamations inspired by inhaling the fumes at Delphi. Indeed, one of Buffett's better punch lines came not from the Delphic Oracle but from the Trojan priest Laocoön, to whom Virgil (Aeneid, II, 49) attributed the famous warning about the Trojan horse:

Equo ne credite, Teucri! Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

translated in its Wikipedia entry as:

Do not trust the horse, Trojans! Whatever it is, I fear the Danaans even [if] bearing gifts.

Buffett translated this into:

Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

This is certainly sound advice, even if we remember what happened to Laocoön when he threw his spear at the Trojan Horse. Personally, I would have preferred to dispense with the literary and boil it down to slightly more aggressive plain speaking:

If you don't understand it and no one can explain it so you do understand it, don't put money in it!

Unfortunately, my guess is that most Berkshire Hathaway investors really do not understand what Buffett does with the money they give him, no more than those victimized by Bernie Madoff understood what he was doing. The only real difference seems to be that Buffett can own up to circumstances when the news is bad (which was easier because Buffett only had to own up to making poor investment decisions, while it appears that the only thing Madoff did with the money he received was keep it for his personal use).

The Buffett lesson I most enjoyed, however, was the one about real estate investment:

Enjoyment and utility should be the primary motives for purchase, not profit.

My wife and I have tried to live by this rule for every real estate purchase we have made. (For that matter, in better financial times when we made some investments in art, the only thing that mattered, beyond whether we could realistically afford it, was whether or not we liked a piece well enough to live with it; and we have yet to sell anything we purchased, although one piece has been "banished" to my personal work-room!) Even our current place in San Francisco, purchased when our primary residence was still in Palo Alto, was selected for "enjoyment and utility" with an eye toward being a good place for our retirement years. That is basically what it has now become, and we did not need an oracle to endorse our decisions!

Improvisation, que me veux-tu?

Listening to the violin improvisations that Takehisa Kosugi recorded in September of 1989, which were then released on CD by David Behrman's Lovely Music, Ltd, I found myself thinking about the question of listening as applied to recorded improvisation in general. This seems appropriate in the context of yesterday's anniversary of an occasion in which much of what had emerged from Thelonious Monk's improvisatory work in a combo setting was meticulously reconstructed for a ten-piece band. It seems to me that improvisation involves a delicate balancing act between the exploration of new material, often by letting go of constraints that might normally be imposed by "reason," and a sort of composition manqué. Such "lacking" composition clearly has its place in rehearsal studios (this one included); and there are clearly times when non-performers may be invited into such a studio solely in their capacity as listeners. In jazz we may then proceed to the more intimate clubs, where people come explicitly to listen but where there is always an exploratory side to what the performers are doing. However, what happens when the venue shifts from, say, The Five Spot over to Town Hall (both major locations in the Fifties in New York City)? I raise this question not only with respect to the large-scale arrangements that Monk worked up with Hall Overton but also in terms of the quartet that opened the Town Hall gig before the rest of the large ensemble came onstage.

These days in San Francisco I do not go to any the club settings available to me, primarily because the acts do not interest me very much. The jazz I want comes to me in "concert hall" settings, among which Herbst Theatre, which is probably the City's best venue for chamber music, tends to be my favorite. I thus find myself listening to jazz in the same setting in which I would listen to a violin sonata by Johannes Brahms; and my "physical attitude" probably then has an effect on my "mental attitude" of rapt silence and intense focus. This may be out of place with respect to the background muttering that is so evident on many Monk recordings (not to mention those of Bud Powell); but, to draw upon the living for an example, if I am going to take the time to attend a performance by Ahmad Jamal (as I shall be doing in about a month), my primary interest is going to be in what he has to "say."

Naturally, I take it for granted that there will be an exploratory element to what he "says," which is again the primary reason why I continue to believe that recordings can only prepare us for the "real" listening experience of a "live" performance. However, I can only understand what Jamal "says" if I have some sense of "where he is coming from," the extent to which his own "utterances" are informed by his past experience; and recordings are my primary "window" into those experiences. It is through those recordings that I form my own "mental model" of Jamal's personal approach to that trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric; and, without that model, there would be no resources to "make sense" out of his performance.

How does this apply, if at all, to those, like Kosugi, who practice the more "serious" (for want of a better adjective) side of experimental music? Kosugi is certainly as much a performer as Monk and Powell were; and I can remember a time several decades ago when I could seek out improvisatory performances like his in cities like New York and Los Angeles. These days the Other Minds Festival of New Music tends to offer at least of few of these in the programs it prepares. Nevertheless, the "spirit of exploratory adventure" seems to be in the same short supply that plagues today's jazz scene.

The problem may be that too few recordings are content to serve as nothing more than documents of performances and too many aspire to be performances, themselves. Unfortunately, this just sucks the life out of performance, literally as well as metaphorically; and, as a consequence, the practice also impedes (if not debilitates) our capacity for being (or learning to be) good listeners. Those of us (like myself) who live in a city with a good conservatory will always have the time and resources to keep our listening skills up to snuff; but what does this say about a large portion of the world for whom music is little more than sharing files through iTunes and performance is what is available for viewing on YouTube?