The Bleeding Edge: 7/10/2024

Yes, this article has been released later than usual. Basically, this is a quiet week on the Bleeding Edge. There are only two events to report, both of which are new. The earlier of those events will be preceded by two other events, today and on Friday afternoon, respectively; so, as a result, the Bleeding Edge was “pushed down the queue” for two days. That said, the two events to report are as follows:

Friday, July 12,  7 p.m., Medicine for Nightmares: Once again, Other Dimensions in Sound, curated by reed player David Boyce, will present a two-set evening. The first set be a duo performance by Matias E.A. and Sarah Grace Graves. They will be followed by the Gem Alchemy trio, whose members are Paul Sakai, Leni Kreienberg, and Nathan Chamberlain. Once again, the venue is located in the Mission at 3036 24th Street, between Treat Avenue and Harrison Street. As always, there is no charge for admission, presumably to encourage visitors to consider buying a book.

Cheryl E. Leonard collecting sounds for Polar Resoundings (from her BayImproviser event page)

Saturday, July 13, 3 p.m., San Francisco Public Library, Golden Gate Valley Branch: Cheryl E. Leonard will present a program entitled Polar Resoundings. The “instruments” for her performance will be penguin bones, rocks, shells, driftwood, and kelp. These will be played in an auditory context of field recordings made in both Antarctica and the Arctic. The venue is located at 1801 Green Street, between Laguna Street and Octavia Street. As usual, there will be no charge for admission.

ODC to Host New Kathak Dance Program

Charlotte Moraga, Director and Choreographer of the Chitresh Das Institute (from her home page)

This coming October the Chitresh Das Institute and ODC Theater will co-present the world premiere of a new work exploring the confluence of history, religion, and the environmental degradation of some of India’s most sacred waterways. Invoking the River is a full-length new work in Kathak dance choreographed by Charlotte Moraga. The music is composed by pianist Utsav Lal, who will perform with Nilan Chaudhuri on tabla and Indian classical vocalist Saneyee Purandare Bhattacharjee. The performance will also incorporate multimedia designed by Alka Raghuram, who is both a filmmaker and a visual artist.

Moraga released the following statement about her project:

Invoking the River is our way of telling our inter-related stories. Water flows. Water moves through every living thing and connects us all. It is powerful. It both creates and destroys. It holds memories. The same water that flows today through our rivers and our veins was probably in the blood of dinosaurs. Invoking the River is about this journey through life and time told through movement, music, and our common bonds in the face of urgently needed change to preserve the sacredness of life that is embodied in water.

Invoking the River will be given three performances at the ODC Theater on Friday, October 14, at 8 p.m., Saturday, October 15, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, October 16, at 4 p.m. The theatre is located in the Mission at 3153 17th Street on the southwest corner of Shotwell Street. Tickets will be priced between $20 and $45. As of this writing, tickets are not yet available. When they are ready for purchase, a hyperlink will be created on the Web page of the ODC Theater’s 2022 season.

The Dark Film Behind Thomson’s “Americana”

At the end of last month, I wrote about how the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) had organized a “watch party” for the Memorial Day Weekend that featured the six-movement suite of music that Virgil Thomson had composed for Pare Lorentz’ film The Plow That Broke the Plains. At that time I observed that this film was anything but an offering of “celebratory Americana;” and I decided to reject the context of the “watch party” and focus entirely on Thomson’s score, which I viewed through the DSO Replay Web site, which provided a performance on February 8, 2019 at which Leonard Slatkin served as conductor. At that time I observed that Thomson’s score tended to be more upbeat than the film, providing the listener with a variety of familiar folk tunes.

Nevertheless, his arrangement for the suite included several suggestions of ironic rhetoric; and I was left curious as to how the music had been deployed in the film itself. Fortunately, the film is available for viewing on YouTube; and, as expected, watching the film was far less upbeat that listening to the suite. Even when the music accompanies the “rolling text” that introduces the film itself, there are any number of suggestions that there will be little to celebrate in the narrative that will follow. Indeed, the film begins by showing the vast herds of cattle that grazed on the grasslands of the Great Plains, never even suggesting that those cattle had displaced indigenous cultures that had learned, over many generations, how to establish a working relationship with a vast expanse of land where water was scarce and the elements were harsh.

The opening image of The Plow That Broke the Plains (before the credits), showing the homesteaders heading for the Great Plains to replace the cattlemen (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Instead, the first part of the film dwells on advertising whose excessive optimism (is there any other kind in advertising?) encouraged a new generation of Americans to occupy the plains and grow large wheat crops. Indeed, the outbreak of World War I had created a major market for wheat; and Lorentz was not shy about observing how the back-breaking work of the homesteaders was converted into an economic boom, which was basically enjoyed only by the financiers on Wall Street. The film then follows the fate of those homesteaders into the postwar period, when demand dropped radically at the same time that the land itself could no longer sustain the productive farming of wheat. The final blow came with the outbreak of dust storms, after which those previously profit-making plains came to be known as the Dust Bowl.

It is worth noting as a sidebar that Lorenz made his film in 1936. I would like to believe that one of the viewers of that film was John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939; and, for my money at least, it remains one of the best what-happened-next narratives to follow the conclusion of The Plow That Broke the Plains. Neither of these narratives puts our country’s history in a particularly comforting light. By all rights they should have called out the need for us to learn from our mistakes. Sadly, most cultures never rise to that challenge; and, for better or worse, ours has never been an exception to that state of affairs.

The Dark Side of the American Frontier

My latest visit to the DSO Replay Web site of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) was motivated by the electronic mail I received about a “watch party” programmed for the Memorial Day weekend. Ostensibly, this was a program of “celebratory Americana;” but those familiar with the planned selections probably knew that the “grand finale” was anything but celebratory. I thus decided to view it in isolation, allowing it more “room” to unfold its dark narrative.

That narrative comes from a 1936 documentary written and directed by Pare Lorentz entitled The Plow That Broke the Plains. Virgil Thomson worked with Lorentz to provide music for the film, after which he compiled a six-movement suite for concert performance. That suite was first performed in the summer of 1946 at a concert by the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra led by its founder and first conductor, Leopold Stokowski. There is also a four-movement piano version, presumably prepared by Thomson himself, which I was once agile enough to play.

The original version of the suite was conducted by Leonard Slatkin at a concert given on February 8, 2019; and that is the performance that was captured on video for DSO Replay. Between the movements Slatkin read passages that were extracted from the narration for Lorentz’ documentary. The title of the film might lead one to suspect that it was a celebration of the pioneer spirit. However, between Slatkin’s narrations and the titles of the movements, it is clear that this was a far cry from any tub-thumping patriotism.

The titles of the movements provide a useful abstract of the film’s narrative:

1. Prelude
2. Pastorale (Grass)
3. Cattle
4. Blues (Speculation)
5. Drought
6. Devastation

While the narration never acknowledges that the plains to the west of the Mississippi River had indigenous inhabitants, contemporary historical perspective is less kind to that “pioneer spirit” our country used to be so fond of celebrating. The descendants of those that had worked the fields and forests to the east were initially confronted with grasslands that were not suitable for past farming practices. Nevertheless, the pioneers tried to force the land to yield for their own purposes (ignoring, and frequently eliminating, those that had established a more viable relationship with that land). As the title of the fourth movement suggests, those that worked the hardest were often motivated by speculators for whom short-term profit was all that mattered. Ultimately, the film says little about pioneering and much about those circumstances that eventually led to the Dust Bowl.

Monica Fosnaugh playing one of Virgil Thomson’s cor anglais moments (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Thomson’s score never tries to underscore any point that Lorentz tried to make that was best made in text. Instead, the music draws on familiar folk tunes, which Thomson then arranges with enough ironic rhetoric to make it clear that all was not well in the garden (or out on the plains). His approach to instrumentation is particularly inventive, almost as if he was determined to favor instrumentalists that seldom have much to do. Some of those instrumentalists, such as the cor anglais player, benefitted from the video work. Unfortunately, there were also too many shots that were looking in one section of the ensemble while the “action” was taking place somewhere else. Fortunately, even when the camera work was not up to snuff, Slatkin’s sense of balance always allowed the attentive listener to appreciate the full impact of every emotional gesture that Thomson established in his score.

Ultimately, The Plow That Broke the Plains is a film about environmental crisis, making it a valuable object lesson in the context of our current crisis situation.

Creating and Filming Dance in Antarctica

Madeline Graham dancing in Antarctica with seals in the background (from the SFDFF film description Web page)

On the surface the premise for Dancing on Icebergs sounds a bit like one of those three-people-walk-into-a-bar jokes: A choreographer (Corey Baker), a dancer (Madeline Graham), and a cameraman (Jacob Bryant) decide to go to Antarctica to make a dance film. All three of them are New Zealanders, and Graham is a star of the Royal New Zealand Ballet. The result of this project is a film less than five minutes in duration, “Antarctica: The First Dance.” Dancing on Icebergs is the making-of film for that result, running 78 minutes, including the presentation of the the “Antarctica” film at the very end. The entire project leading up to that result ran for about two years.

I have to say that I found it a bit ironic to be watching this documentary only a few days after having attended a screening of Cunningham, Alla Kovgan’s “3D cinematic experience,” which reviews the creative life of dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham over the period from 1944 to 1972. It would be fair to say that Cunningham was bold enough to pursue experiments based on the premise that a dancer can do anything. It is easy for me to imagine him looking down from Heaven on Baker thinking, “I never thought that ‘anything’ could be pushed that far!”

Nevertheless, I feel it fair to stress that, while the last few minutes present the result of choreographer Baker’s efforts, Dancing on Icebergs is not, strictly speaking, a “dance film;” and, for that matter, one might even hesitate to call it a “making-of-a-dance film.” The relationship and interactions between Baker and Graham may provide the nuts-and-bolts of how the “Antarctica” short was made; but that part of the story amounts to a very small core of a very large apple.

Thus, while the attentive viewer may take great pleasure in watching “Antarctica” and watching excerpts of the rehearsals that preceded any of the filming, Dancing on Icebergs is more about the icebergs than about the dance. Antarctica has become a major object of study in climate science; and the visible (and irreversible) melting of icebergs figures heavily in that study. As a result there is no shortage of footage in which the viewer observes climate scientists explaining to Baker what is happening and why it is happening, followed by any number of discussion scenes over the course of which both Baker and Graham learn just what it means to live on the Antarctic continent for a sustained period of time.

In other words, taken as a whole, Dancing on Icebergs is a very didactic film, whose take-away lessons unfold as we observe how a pair of “greenhorns” adjust to Antarctic life well enough to appreciate getting there (itself a sidebar to the primary narrative), being there, and working there. (Nature film junkies should also be forewarned that there is very little “cute animal” footage in Dancing on Icebergs; but that trope is not entirely excluded from the narrative!) Will any of those lessons be learned in a productive way as a result of watching the film? I would not dare to speculate on the answer to that question. However, I would like to believe that both Baker and Graham came away from this project with a better-informed awareness of the reality of our current climate crisis, even if those viewing Dancing on Icebergs may not “get the message” quite as readily.

Dancing on Icebergs will be given its United States premiere screening at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 8. It will be held at the Brava Theater Center, located in the Mission at 2781 24th Street at the corner of York Street. Individual ticket prices will be $13 and $15. Both single tickets and festival passes may be purchased through hyperlinks on the event page for this film.

The Living Earth Show at the Sutro Baths

Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson (from the Web page for the “Tremble Staves” program notes)

Late yesterday afternoon The Living Earth Show (TLES), the duo of percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews, presented its site-specific performance of Raven Chacon’s “Tremble Staves.” The site was the flooded ruins of the Sutro Baths, located at Lands End and managed by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. As was observed in the preview article for this performance, Chacon’s work is “a synthesis of mixed media installation, manipulation of natural and artificial lights and sound, wordless opera, and theatrical performance.” TLES was joined in this performance by narrator Ashley Smiley, who prepared her own text, a quartet of electric guitars, and a prodigious number of percussionists distributed across the entire performance venue.

Attendance was by making a prior reservation at no charge, handled online by Eventbrite. Those “on the list” received preparatory material through electronic mail, including an account of the conditions at Lands End and a URL for program notes. That page informed the reader that the composition was in six movements, each titled with a noun for a particular body of water. Presumably it was no coincidence that the title of the final movement was “Sound,” thus concluding with a connection between the different categories for bodies of water evoked by the respective movements and the nature of the listener experience itself.

Chacon is Navajo and thus part of a culture that has developed in a context of scarcity of water. However, the issue of availability of pure water has become a global one. “Tremble Staves” is less a Navajo perspective on water and more a reflection on an approaching crisis of water shortage for the entire world, rather than the more modest southwest region of the United States. Nevertheless, contemporary thinking has tended to undermine concepts and value systems of this area’s indigenous population, including the basic precept that, due to its scarcity, water has a sacred value.

Nevertheless, “Tremble Staves” was far from a soapbox for the promotion of cultural perspectives and value systems. As consistently seems to be the case, a TLES performance is ultimately “about” exploring new approaches to performance. Whether what is performed can be called “music” is entirely in the mind of the listener. Nevertheless, no matter how far this duo pushes its what-is-music boundaries, I keep reminding myself of the fundamental question, “Have you got a better word for it?”

In my own approach to yesterday’s undertaking, it seemed as if the music was there to provide context for experiencing the environment itself. While I was free to wander around the space, I was content to remain where I was seated, letting my eyes do the wandering. I had an excellent view of the four guitarists being led by Andrews (who was dressed from head to toe in a mosaic of mirrors), most likely (but not necessarily) following a path through a series of improvisations. One of the many percussionists was sitting right behind me, allowing me the perfect view of Meyerson’s conducting work from a distant corner of the remains of a wall that used to enclose the bathing and swimming areas.

However, the most engaging moments probably came from the fourth (“Channel”) movement. This was apparently about a cello that drowned in the pool nearest to the audience. Meyerson went into the pool to tend to it and then assisted Smiley in bringing it to shore. Rather than attempting artificial respiration (willing suspension of disbelief permeated the entire performance), Meyerson took out a pair of his mallets and began to play the body of the cello as a percussion instrument. It was brought to the space he shared with Andrews, and his solo work evolved into a duet.

For me, “Channel” turned out to be the most memorable occasion of the entire composition. Perhaps that was because, for all of its absurdity, it had the most humane infrastructure. On the other hand it may just have been that it was easier for me to “get the semantics” than was the case in any of the other five movements. Nevertheless, it was the overall experience (including getting from the bus stop to the venue and then finding my way back to the bus stop) that made the deepest impressions on memory. Being there was as much a part of the performance as were any of the contributions by the performers themselves.

Live Music Performance to Return to Lands End

The Lands End trail leading to the Sutro Baths (photograph by Justin Scott, courtesy of the National Park Service, from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy event page)

Those with long memories may recall that, in July of 2017, John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit” was given the sort of outdoor performance that the composer had intended at Lands End. The result was a highly stimulating listening experience in which stimulation had as much to do with the physical setting as with the percussionists performing Adams’ score. The performance itself was enabled through a partnership between SFJAZZ and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

This coming October the Conservancy will venture into another partnership. Those who enjoyed “Inuksuit” will be able to revisit Lands End as a setting for outdoor performance. Those who missed it will enjoy the benefit of a second chance. Once again, percussion will be involved. This time the partnership will be The Living Earth Show, the duo that brings percussionist Andy Meyerson together with guitarist Travis Andrews.

This time the music will be a new work composed specifically with the venue in mind. The title of the work is “Tremble Staves,” created by Raven Chacon from the Navajo Nation. The work is a synthesis of mixed media installation, manipulation of natural and artificial lights and sound, wordless opera, and theatrical performance. The piece is a personal one for the composer, since he has chosen to depict the approaching crisis of water shortage that will impact land from California to the Navajo deserts.

The performance will be set in the flooded ruins of the Sutro Baths, which used to be a swimming pool complex. The performers will use water as a manipulated and amplified instrument. The audience will share this environment with the performers, creating a sonic ecosystem in which all participants are surrounded by water. Audience members will be anchored in a pond of resonance, but they will also find themselves complicit in the draining of the water.

The performance will last for about an hour, beginning at 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 19. The Sutro Baths ruins are located at 680 Point Lobos Avenue. They are best approached by taking the 38R bus down Geary Boulevard to the end of the line and then walking the remaining distance. As was the case for “Inuksuit,” there will be no admission charge. Nevertheless, the event page created by the Conservancy includes a DONATE hyperlink; and all financial assistance for the Conservancy’s activities will be greatly appreciated.

MTT Overloads this Week’s SFS Program

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented the program for the first subscription concerts of the new 107th season. As Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) observed at the beginning of the evening, this program was conceived to complement the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit, which also opened yesterday. He specifically cited the COAL + ICE Project, a documentary photography exhibition, currently on display at the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture. Video designer Clyde Scott selected images from this exhibition that were projected at the beginning of the evening as Abigail Washburn sang two songs associated with coal mining communities in Depression-era Appalachia, “Come All You Coal Miners” and “And Am I Born to Die.” Washburn’s solo account of the first of these set the dark tone for the problems being confronted at the Summit; but, sadly, that tone was undermined by the syrupy accompaniment that SFS provided for her second selection.

Scott’s designs, along with lighting provided by Luke Kritzeck, continued to be deployed throughout the evening with variable results. The impact was greatest at the very beginning of the evening, once SFS has dispensed with its accompaniment duties. MTT opened the main program with the first SFS performance of Inverno in-ver, a series of eleven musical poems depicting winter (which, in Italian, translates as inverno) scenes by the Italian composer Niccolò Castiglioni, a composition that MTT had previously performed with the New World Symphony. He introduced this music by comparing it to the miniaturism of Anton Webern but stressed that Castiglioni’s short movements were unabashedly tonal.

What made the deepest impression was the breadth of Castiglioni’s capacity for invention. Scott’s projections introduced each piece by providing its title in both Italian and English translation, and the attentive listener was quickly aware of how every movement had its own unique approach to thematic material and rhetorical delivery. The only unifying factor was a preference for extremely high registers (which made any appearance by low strings rare and striking when it occurred). Both Scott and Kritzeck clearly grasped the diversity of Castiglioni’s differentiations and complemented the music with an ongoing flow of highly imaginative visual impressions. Admittedly, this was a technology-heavy performance; but it was one of those rare occasions in which the technology reflected on the music, rather than distracting from it.

Inverno in-ver served well as the “overture” for the “concerto portion” of the program, Maurice Ravel’s D major piano concerto written to be played only by the left hand. When it came to matters of deploying an abundantly rich diversity of sonorities in the service of a single composition, Ravel was one of the twentieth century’s leading masters of the craft. His skill was evident from the very opening in which an almost sinister contrabassoon solo emerges from the murky churning textures of the low strings. Given all of that exposure to the highest registers in Inverno in-ver, this concerto could not have provided a better balance for the first half of the program.

Pianist Yuja Wang (photograph by Norbert Kniak, courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon)

The concerto soloist last night was Yuja Wang, whose left-hand dexterity (whose who know their Latin will recognize the oxymoron) rose impressively to every challenge that Ravel posed. This is music in which a single hand must account for establishing both theme and accompaniment, and Wang never faltered when it came to distinguishing which was which. As her salvos of virtuosity emerged from the keyboard, SFS was always there with the full spectrum of sonorities that Ravel had conceived to offset the piano work. This concerto tends to receive less attention than Ravel’s other piano concerto in G major, and the combined forces of Wang and MTT could not have made a better effort to right that balance.

Nevertheless, whenever I approach either of Ravel’s concertos as a listener, I always find myself thinking of the friendship he established with George Gershwin. Michael Steinberg’s notes for the program book overlooked the fact that Ravel began work on both of his concertos in the same year, 1929, developing the two scores concurrently. There is every reason to believe that, by 1929, Ravel was aware of Gershwin’s two major concertante compositions for piano and orchestra, “Rhapsody in Blue,” composed in 1924, and “Concerto in F” (the title deliberately avoiding commitment to either major or minor), written the following year. I can never avoid thinking that Ravel’s concertos constituted his own way of “responding to the call” of these two Gershwin compositions. Gershwin’s three-movement “Concerto in F” was complemented by the G major concerto, also in three movements, while the single-movement structure of the left-hand concerto is almost more of a “rhapsody” than a concerto.

These thoughts were enhanced by the visual experience of last night’s performance. Wang wore a blue gown that was stunningly electric, while Kritzeck lit the stage with just the right shade of blue to complement her outfit. Was Wang trying to remind us that Ravel knew about “Rhapsody in Blue” when he was working on his left-hand concerto? If so, then I admire her for her insight. If not, I can still enjoy my own idle speculations!

As always, Wang treated her audience to an encore before the intermission break. Her selection was the second of the six pieces in Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 67, the sixth of the eight books he composed with the title Songs Without Words. This entailed an abrupt shift from G major to F-sharp minor; but the “main attraction” was Wang’s lightness of touch (the tempo marking is Allegro leggiero), through which she even served up a gracious reminder of one of the tropes the composer favored in his chamber music.

All of this meant that, before the intermission had even begun, those of us on audience side had enjoyed a rich abundance of imaginative music-making. Perhaps it was inevitable that the second half of the evening would be a bit of a let-down. MTT decided that, in keeping with the “environmental” theme of the Global Climate Action Summit, Aaron Copland’s score for Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring” would be appropriate. He also decided that, rather than serving up the usual reduced suite for full orchestra that Copland prepared in 1945, the year after the dance was first performed (accompanied by a thirteen-member chamber ensemble), he would play the full-orchestra version of the complete score. Copland began this effort at the request of Eugene Ormandy and had restored the longest of the cuts, the Preacher’s fire-and-brimstone sermon, in 1954. However, he abandoned further work on the project; and it was only completed in 2014 by David Newman. (This is probably the “Complete Ballet” version that Leonard Slatkin recorded with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for a Naxos recording released in 2016.)

Giving a more through account of the score is something that tends to go down well with fans of Graham’s choreography. (Full disclaimer: I am one of them.) However, for those unfamiliar with Graham’s narrative (and the booklet notes by James M. Keller were inadequately sketchy in this matter), the “full score” can quickly feel like somewhat of a slog. While Graham brought refreshing uniqueness to each of her fourteen episodes, Copland’s score was not quite as imaginative, particularly when it came to the transitions between those episodes, all of which seem to have been spooned out of the same can. The result was that MTT’s interest in providing a more thorough account came of as a rather tiring slog, reinforced by the fact that the final applause did not begin until 10:30 p.m.!

A Benefit Concert has been Announced to Support EcoJustice Weekend

Next weekend the Episcopal Diocese of California has planned a weekend of discussion and action entitled EcoJustice: Safeguarding Climate, Food, & Water. The event will consist of a “Day of Inspiration” at Grace Cathedral on Friday, May 19, followed by a “Day of Action” on Saturday organized around participating in family-friendly service projects. The “Day of Inspiration” will present a panel discussion moderated by Bishop Marc Andrus, whose participants will be john a. powell, who holds the Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion at the Haas Institute for Fair and Inclusive Society, Aaron Grizzell, Executive Director of the Northern California Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Foundation, Nicolette Hahn Niman, owner of Niman Ranch, and Grace Aheron, a board member of Cultivate. This will be followed by a reception preceding the celebration of the Eucharist with Presiding Bishop Michael Curry.

Cellist Robert Howard has organized a Concert for EcoJustice in support of this event. He has planned a 75-minute program, whose details have not yet been announced. However, the current plan is that a broad variety of styles and composers will be represented, including Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert Schumann, Maurice Ravel, Aaron Copland, Sulkhan Tsintsadze, Arvo Pärt, and Andrew Norman. Howard will be joined by Tanya Tomkins, his fellow cellist in the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and Angela Lee, cellist in the Lee Trio. Other performers will include organist Jonathan Dimmock, Owen Dalby, second violin in the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Meena Bhasin, violist in the Decoda Ensemble, and the entire Telegraph Quartet of violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw.

This performance will take place the evening before the “Day of Inspiration.” It will begin at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 18. The venue will be Grace Cathedral, on the top of Nob Hill at 1100 California Street. The suggested donation amount will be $20.

It's Not Just Infrastructure!

Elizabeth Drew's latest article for The New York Review of Books, "A Country Breaking Down," is a must-read piece, even for those who are already aware of the deterioration of infrastructure across the United States. As a writer whose primary domain is politics, Drew pulls no punches when it comes to presenting that deterioration as a consequence of a governmental system that, for all intents and purposes, is broken with little hope of repair in sight. (Even the supposedly neutral Judiciary branch has gone down the tubes as a result of the Supreme Court's preemptive strike against climate-control efforts.)

Nevertheless, the infrastructure problem is not just one of physical deterioration. It also involves the extent to which our government has decimated the public education system. The point is that the repair of infrastructure can only come about from the skills of workers who know how to repair them. While technology has improved the quality of the tools that can be used, it carries the corollary that skills must now be mental, as well as physical. Furthermore, it means that those involved with repairing the infrastructure need to be skilled managers of information regardless of the physical equipment they will be expected to operate.

This is where Nicholas Carr's chicken about Google making us stupid comes home to roost in full force. As I have previously observed, Google has made us, at the very least, downright lazy when it comes to reading and comprehending, simply because (and this is one of Carr's points), Google "predigests" content to make its search capability more efficient for users. The result is that many workers, desk workers as well as physical workers, understand the world only through how it is seen through some form of computer-based display. I was painfully aware of this yesterday when I discovered that the USPS Call Center could not tell me where a package that had been late in delivery was, simply because the Call Center agent's computer did not have access to that information. (It did not even have access to the location of postal facilities in San Francisco.) Until we can restore a work force that is capable of the most rudimentary forms of thinking through problems, neither project budgets nor an influx of powerful tools of all sizes will get us very far in restoring our country's infrastructure.

Will We Survive in a World Without Work?

I see that life is once again trying to imitate art with an international project to alter the trajectory of any asteroid that might crash into our planet. Since anything is possible in a space of infinite possibilities, these researchers have, supposedly, done some mathematics to determine a "mean time to Armageddon" (to cite the title of the movie behind this project). We could then compare that duration with the mean time to the time when life would be unlivable on this planet through either failure to control the dangers of climate change or, worse yet, failure to provide conditions for a life worth living.

Think about that latter option. The idea of gainful employment for all was already being dismantled through the joint efforts of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Long after Regan was out of office, his former economic adviser David Stockman was declaring on National Public Radio the end of salaried employment. Everyone whole be doing piecework. Stockman did not say anything about how living from one job to the next was fraught with insecurity, not to mention the possibility of financial support when health care was involved.

Yet Stockman's prognostication seems to have been an accurate call. Today's generation of youth still believe that they will not be able to compete in the job market without a college education. Yet they cannot reconcile that proposition with the likelihood that such an education will leave them with a debt that, thanks to the changes in the world of work, may not be paid off over the course of a lifetime.

Have we really managed to create a global society in which only the rich are likely to survive? If so, will they continue to survive if their only talent is one of pushing around bits that reinforce fictions of convenience about financial worth? People do not care very much about "asteroid Armageddon," because they do not see it happening during their lifetimes. We used to say the same thing about climate control; but those chickens seem to be coming to roost on the schedule predicted by scientists whose work was dismissed as "only a theory." Add to that a global social class in which the very idea of working hard for a secure decent wage is now obsolete; and the question of whether the planet is worth saving may be more than idle academic philosophy.

Clash of the Idiots

Gary Wills had a great post on NYRblog yesterday. The title was "Holy Ignorance," which he appropriated from Olivier Roy, a French anthropologist who specialized in studying belief systems. The basic argument is that fundamentalists are immune to argument based on reason. They see the use of logic to justify any with which they disagree as a test of the strength of their faith, which makes them hold to their beliefs with even greater strength. Wills wrote this in an analysis of the Pope’s decision to write an encyclical on climate change and its connection to selfishness. Almost immediately five Catholic Republicans who are part of the rush to candidacy in the next Presidential election denounced the Pope for knowing nothing about science, regardless of the fact that they knew even less (even collectively)! Clearly, Wills saw all five of them as evidence of “holy ignorance!”

What is interesting, however, is that a parallel line of argument can be developed about Muslim fundamentalists. This, in turn, may tell us something about what makes IS tick. While they are not necessarily grounded in Islam, their goal is to subvert all Western forms of government in their territory and replace it with a caliphate. This actually turns out to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand they are determined to reinstate a pre-Enlightment approach to governance based on little more than raw power. However, at the same time they know they can appeal to Muslim values to win others to their cause. Ironically, they do all this through some of the most sophisticated Internet advertising (yes, that is ultimately what it is) yet to be designed.

Perhaps the Pope should pay more attention to the book of Revelations. The prediction of the great war of Gog in the land of Magog could well involve Christian Fundamentalists in battle with Muslim Fundamentalists (hence the inspiration for my own choice of title for this post)! That is quite a change from the early nineteenth-denture hasidim, who thought Napoleon was Gog (worth remembering on this anniversary of Waterloo)!

Even Iceland Can't Get it Right All the Time

This morning the BBC News Web site announced that Iceland has made arrangement for a rave to be held inside their second largest glacier, Langjokull. Participation will be limited to 70. Even with that limitation, however, it is hard to imagine that the amount of heat generated by this event will only contribute to melting the glacier faster than current climate conditions have already created. Did anyone stop to think about this being more destructive than it would be "cool" (both metaphorically and literally)?

Sometimes Nature Solves the Problem

This morning the BBC News Web site ran a story (which I had not heard on World Service Radio) about a great white shark in Australia that choked to death as a result of swallowing a sea lion. I found this interesting in the context that Australia is currently carrying out a shark cull (no doubt a product of the same keen minds that just decided to repeal their carbon tax). Still, I should not pick exclusively on Australia. Contemporary man has inherited centuries of philosophy that establish him as the sole agent to determine the destiny of the world. Those who espouse such balderdash need the occasional reminder that nature sometimes takes care of things without man's intervention, and no example could be more vivid than the fate of that great white shark.

Extreme Weather

Watching the news over the last few days, I am beginning to feel as if I am in one of the few parts of the country where the temperature is tolerable. If I expand to the global scale, I also realize that we are also not in jeopardy of severe flooding due to either storms or tidal activity. Fortunately, it doesn't take much for me to remember that we are, instead, facing the prospect of extreme drought conditions. Between our fatuous efforts to try to control everything and our self-indulgent pigheadedness when it comes to recognizing environmental problems, Mother Nature still seems to hang in there and make sure there is enough misery to be distributed to too!

Experimentation Reveals Evidence for Genetic Memory

James Gallagher, Health and Science Reporter for BBC News, filed a fascinating story on the BBC News Web site this morning. In experiments with mice, researches at Emory University appear to have discovered that aversion to a scent (in this case that of cherry blossoms) could result in modification of a specific section of DNA. This would result in offspring sharing that aversion without any past experience of it.

The concept of genetic memory has been a favorite topic in bull sessions about the relationship between environment and heredity. While this experiment involves a highly limited phenomenon is a small sample space, it is still a sign that this concept may be more than a vacuous fantasy. If the mechanism actually works, it can explain how the survival value of avoiding certain toxins can be passed down to future generations. We should be more careful about any phenomena that exist outside of the objective world, but it should not be long before writers of fiction decide to start playing with this concept!

A Modest Proposal for the Bicycle: A Motor Vehicle Without the Motor

Watching Heather Ishimaru's report last night on KGO-TV on expanding the bike sharing program, I found myself thinking again about the extent to which too many cyclists seem to behave as if they were not under the jurisdiction of the same "rules of the road" as motorists. I know this is a hot-button item for all parties involved (cyclists, motorists, and pedestrians). However, I also know that having a system in which bicycle riders are obliged by law (and therefore subject to punishment) to operate their vehicles responsibly to the same degree that motorists are is a major problem that has now crossed the Atlantic Ocean and is invading the United Kingdom as well as the United States.

For this reason I decided to visit the Bay Area Bike Share Web site to see what rules were imposed on members, if any. Fortunately, it was not very difficult to find what amounts to a rental agreement. This is not that different from all those agreements you encounter when you are purchasing software over the Web. In other words it is a very long body of text that just about everyone ignores. In this case I was amused to see that the Web page made use of two colors and three font sizes. It took me a while to work my way down this Web page and to finally land on the following text in the smallest of the fonts:

You represent, warrant, and agree that You are a safe and competent bicycle operator, You are sufficiently fit and physically capable to safely ride a bicycle without any risk to Your health, You are knowledgeable about the operation of a bicycle, and You are knowledgeable about the laws pertaining to bicycles operated within the Counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara. Like any physical activity, riding a Bicycle may cause minor or major injuries or discomfort and may worsen or complicate underlying medical conditions or diseases.

By choosing to ride a Bicycle, You assume all responsibilities and risks for all such injuries or other medical conditions.

From a legal point of view, this establishes that the only person who needs to affirm that an applicant is fit to operate a bicycle is the actual applicant. The idea that any third party should be responsible for validating the applicant's affirmation (as is the case for a motor vehicle operator) is simply not part of the equation.

Like many, I would prefer to see fewer motor vehicles on the streets of San Francisco. On the other hand I have probably seen about as many instances of reckless bicycle operation as anyone reading this text. Isn't it about time that we take the operation of bicycles as seriously as we take the operation of motor vehicles?

First Mother Nature, Then the Human Race

Rather like the protagonist in H. G. Wells' story "The Man Who Could Work Miracles," homo economicus thought he was master of the universe. From his proud tower looking down on Wall Street, he even said so. When the literal tower of his domain was attacked, he survived. When he was hit with economic collapse, he was humble enough to ask for a bailout but not too humble to let go of that master-of-the-universe idea. He held to it even when it meant defying Mother Nature, and Mother Nature hit back with some awe-inspiring displays of what he then dismissed as "extreme weather."

What homo economicus had overlooked, however, was human nature itself. He regarded the human race as a mass of weak and insignificant animals. He forgot that even the weakest of animals has an attack instinct when there is no alternative. So it is that we are seeing that instinct come into play. Because homo economics is more interested in the profit to be gained through the weapons business, he overlooked the fact that those weapons might be used against him, if not directly than against his belief that the world surrounding him was basically a safe place. Warping the old Sixties mantra, those who no longer see being part of the solution as viable are coming up with any number of ways to make the problems worse. Will it be long before, like the sinner man of the old song, homo economicus will discover that shelter and safety can no longer be found?

The Reality of the Natural World

Daisy Bowie-Sell offered up an interesting comment that David Attenenborough apparently made to the London Telegraph:

The United Nations has said that 50 per cent of the population of Planet Earth is urbanised. That means half the people, probably more, are out of touch with the natural world. Some probably don’t see a living wild thing from one day to the next, unless it’s a rat or a pigeon.

This makes me curious as to whether or not Attenborough has had a chance to look at Jim Sterba's recent book Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds, reviewed by Russell Baker in the February 21 New York Review. Sterba's backyards are not strictly urban. However, if we follow the logic of his book, then the efforts of the natural world to reclaim suburban backyards will eventually move into the realm of city parks and perhaps even less "natural" urban settings. (San Francisco has had hawks nest in skyscrapers in the Financial District.)

One point on which Sterba and Attenborough appear to agree is that most of the public is out of touch with how this "natural world" works. Unfortunately, too many of the images from Attenborough's own programs tend to overstress the cuteness factor. (Look at the photograph on Bowie-Sell's article for a perfect example.) Russell Baker had a nice way of trying to reorient the natural world away from a "peaceable kingdom" of cute denizens:

Bambi and Lassie are two of the best-known practically human specimens that warm the popular heart. Those who seek something closer to Darwinian reality may prefer Bugs Bunny.

Sterba's principal point is that Darwinian fitness is not obliged to accommodate the human race, whether in suburban, exurban, or urban settings. We should not think that our scientific thinking can always control how selection works. Thus, we may need to prepare ourselves for new residents in the neighborhood!

Materialism and Teleology

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has a fascinating article by biologist H. Allen Orr entitled “Awaiting a New Darwin.” The piece is a review of Thomas Nagel’s latest book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, which came out last September. Nagel is as disciplined in philosophy as Orr is in biology. Both have a longstanding reputation for the clear exposition of propositions based strictly on logical reasoning, rather than rhetorical showboating. Orr makes it clear that Nagel’s book should not be casually dismissed, but he makes it equally clear that he does not feel that Nagel’s claims have been adequately warranted.

Nagel’s point of departure is a familiar one, based on the nature of human consciousness. Nagel’s position is that consciousness is too subjective to be reduced to a materialist explanation based on the physical nature of brains and neurons (and, perhaps, matter itself). With this as a premise, he then claims that the current Neo-Darwinist model of natural selection cannot explain how consciousness came to be and offers, as an alternative, an approach he called “natural teleology.” Orr tries to clarify this approach with the following sentence:

Natural teleology doesn’t depend on any agent’s intentions; it’s just the way the world is.

Without going into details, I feel it necessary to recognize that, for many (Jürgen Habermas being a particularly good example), teleology is a highly objective process. From a mathematical point of view, one may think of it as the achievement of some goal, which may be represented as a point in some multidimensional landscape. The “world as it is,” so to speak, is another point in that landscape and teleology is concerned with how those two points are connected by a path and how that path may be found. This boils down to the mathematical problem of optimization, which means that Nagel seems to be advocating an objective technique to explain how we arrive at a subjective phenomenon, a materialist stance if ever there were one.

On the other hand the philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written very critically about the inadequacy of optimization (or, in his terminology, Utopian thinking). Berlin’s basic argument, nicely formulated in his essay “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” is that any Utopia, like that point of optimization on a multidimensional landscape, is static, meaning that, one a society or an individual “gets there,” so to speak, there is nowhere to go! Thus, in the subjective world, the only “static state” is death; and in the broader ecological scope of the natural world, even death is not a static point.

At least some of the materialist Neo-Darwinists are aware of this puzzle. Thus, the traditional Darwinian model of evolution through natural selection has given way to what has come to be called coevolution. The basic idea is that there is still a landscape; but the shape of that landscape changes to reflect what its “inhabitants” are doing. As the landscape changes, the “optimum point” on that landscape also changes. This means that, wherever you happen to be on the landscape, you have to keep rethinking the direction you want to go in order to get closer to your goal. This strikes me as what makes “natural” teleology natural, rather than merely mathematical. Back in October of 2011, I suggested that, because of coevolution, there may never be that “ideal” cure for the common cold. Every time new medication comes along, the landscape changes, and the cold virus follows natural selection according to a change in the criteria for fitness. (In that same post I suggest that the common cold is not that different from malware.)

Nagel never mentions coevolution in his book. However, Orr does not cite it either as a materialist school of thought. Many of its advocates came out of early research in artificial life, although Darwin himself described it in On the Origin of Species. To be fair, however, Nagel’s book is a short one, only 130 pages, which he uses simply to establish his position. Here is hoping that he develops that position in greater depth and that his digging will lead him to coevolution!