Michael:

A couple months ago I broke the remarkable story of Gil Elvgren's astonishing burst of painting in a 1938 sabbatical from his career as an illustrator. (My posting can be read here.) Over a few months in that year, Mr. Elvgren, ordinarily a creator of pretty-girl calendar paintings, cranked out a set of masterpieces which anticipated the formal concerns of artists many decades in the future like Frank Stella and Gerhardt Richter.

Shockingly, several more examples of his visionary work have appeared. As a result of my close relationship with the security guard currently watching over these paintings, and my willingness to make a large contribution to his favorite charity—him—I was allowed to take these photos, which have never before appeared anywhere.

G. Elvgren, Black Painting, 1938

The first painting appears to anticipate many of the concerns of noted abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt, as well as the series of all-black canvases produced by a variety of artists in the 1970s. What is particularly uncanny is the use of Reinhardt’s patented square format for the painting, as well as the exploration of the aesthetic subtleties of black on black.

G. Elvgren, Springboard, 1938

The second painting appears to utilize much of Mark Rothko’s compositional apparatus, here making the link between abstraction and landscape painting particularly visible. Some commentators feel that a remarkably early commitment to raising the public’s awareness of the dangers industrial pollution is also a factor in this unusual work.

How to account for Elvgren’s genius? I doubt it’s possible. Still, we’re going to keep on trying. The answers are out there, somewhere.

Cheers,

Friedrich

at April 1, 2004 | perma-link | (0) comments

Dear Friedrich --

The first time I ran across linguistic relativism -- the doctrine that language determines thought -- I reacted with utter disbelief, as I did the first time I ran across philosophers arguing that we don't speak languages, languages speak us. "Ya gotta be kiddin', right?" -- such was my super-sophisticated, instant response.

And yet, and yet ... I'd spent a teenaged year living in France, and it seemed clear to me even then that the French language had something to do with why the French love paradoxes; why they don't understand Anglo-style humor; and why they love logic-pirouettes ("wit"), highly-ornamented music, and haute couture. Language is embedded in, and an important part of, culture. And if culture doesn't dictate what you think and say, well, it certainly has an impact.

I was a young twit who was bad at languages, but even I could tell that my brain operated differently when it was in French mode than it did when in its usual American mode. I was dimly aware that speaking French seemed to lead me into new kinds of conversations; because I was speaking French, I was hearing, thinking and saying different things than I usually did. Or was this happening not because of the language but simply because I was in France?

I'd think about French, English and reality more generally, and I'd go around muttering things like "different combs; same head of hair." After some years, I settled on this way of thinking about language and culture: they don't determine much, but they certainly condition an awful lot. It seemed an accurate, and useful, way of summing up my experience.

So I enjoyed this Philip Ross article for Scientific American about the Berkeley linguistics prof Paul Kay, here. Kay has spent years looking into how various languages attend to matters of color; the larger question he's been probing is, To what extent does language determine thought? I find his answer tres sympat -- as I do the provisional way he tenders it.

Did I ever tell you about the college friend of mine who moved to Italy? She'd always been a charming, gabby woman in a stylized American-girl way. The first time I visited her in Italy, though, I was amazed. Speaking American-English, she was her usual self. But speaking Italian, she was something else entirely. Not only had she picked up Italian quickly and convincingly, she was waving her hands, moving the pitch of her voice up and down the musical staff, and making emotional faces that could be read from miles away ...

When I asked her about the creature she'd become, she responded this way: "In Italy, if you simply say the words, no one pays attention -- no one really hears you. Unless you wave your hands, singsong your voice and make exaggerated facial expressions, you aren't really speaking Italian, at least not as far as the Italians are concerned." The little lesson I took away from this exchange: "language" isn't something you simply speak, and it isn't simply a matter of knowing the grammar and reciting the correct words either. No, instead, it's a complex and ongoing activity you do your best to enter into and take part in. Language isn't just the rulebook; it's the whole damn ballgame.

Suits me for now, anyway. What's your reaction to the people who argue that language determines thought? And what's your reaction to the people who claim that the language they speak has no impact on what they think or what they say?

Best,

Michael

at April 1, 2004 | perma-link | (7) comments

Dear Friedrich --

I’ve raved before about the economics professor Timothy Taylor, whose lecture series for the Teaching Company I’m a huge fan of. (Here’s his page at the Teaching Company’s website.) I’ve been through a ton of intro-to-econ products, and if I were to recommend the best way for a non-math-y person to get started with econ, it would be with Taylor’s series. (And when they’re on sale, they’re fabulous bargains.)

Taylor’s about as good a teacher of intro-to-econ as I can imagine. He's clear; he's organized; he's likable and enthusiastic; and he has an amazing gift for turning this material into plain, vivid, even fun English.

I’ve been through all his series but one, his History of the U.S. Economy in the 20th Century. I’d been putting it off for the sheer retentive pleasure of anticipation. But the other day I caved and finally began listening. Very pleased to report it’s just as top-notch as the others.

Taylor kicks off the series with a review of what life was like in the U.S. in the year 1900. Here’s a sampler of some of the facts Taylor supplies:

• Total U.S. population in 1900 was 76 million people, less than a third the population we have now.

• The U.S. was the wealthiest economy in the world. Per capita income was on a level with Britain and Australia, was twice that of France and Germany, and was quadruple the standard of living in Japan and Mexico.

• Still, most Americans in 1900 were living in what we today would consider poverty. In present-day dollars, per capita American income in 1900 averaged around $5000, less than a fifth the current level. In other words, the typical American in 1900 had about the same income that a typical Mexican has today.

• Only three percent of American homes were lit by electricity.

• Only about a third of American homes had running water; only 15% had flush toilets; and half of farm households didn’t even have an outhouse.

• Most people lived within a mile of where they worked, and depended on their feet to get them around. Only one urban household in five owned a horse.

• Half of all people lived in spaces where they averaged more than one person per room. Taking in lodgers was common.

• Half the population drank alcohol; half didn’t. The half that did averaged two hard drinks and two beers a day; wine consumption was minimal. In Europe, by contrast, people drank twice as much beer, and averaged more than four glasses of wine a day.

• Life expectancy at birth was 47 years, and infant mortality rates were high. Of every 1000 babies born, 140 died in their first year. These days, fewer than 10 do.

• Flu, pneumonia, typhoid, gastritis, and whooping cough were common causes of death.

• 10% of the American population was completely illiterate, and the average adult had an 8th grade education. Only 7% of students would ever complete high school.

• A man’s typical on-the-job work week consisted of 60 hours of work spread over six days. Pensions were rare; men generally worked until they were too feeble to go on doing so. 2/3rds of men over 65 had fulltime jobs.

• Women were 18% of the paid work force. They mainly worked in fields like textiles, apparel, shoes, canning -– fields where you were paid according to how much you produced.

• At home, women spent around 40 hours a week on meal preparation and meal cleanup, seven hours on laundry, and another seven hours on housecleaning. The average housewife baked a half a ton of bread -- about 1400 loaves -- a year.

You can buy this terrific Timothy Taylor lecture series here. It's currently on sale for the really astounding price of $15.95.

Best,

Michael

at March 31, 2004 | perma-link | (16) comments

Dear Friedrich --

Last night, I watched the Wolfgang Petersen/Clint Eastwood thriller In the Line of Fire for the first time since it was released in 1993. Have you seen it? I think it's terrific. I can't say enough good about Jeff Maguire's brilliant script; about the slammin' (though calm) direction and filmmaking of Petersen and his crew; about the superduper, unanxious-seeming performances, even from Clint. And as the rogue-weirdo baddie, John Malkovich added a lot of spice; this was an early version of his virtuosically creepy thing, and it was still startling. Efficient big-budget suspense, but with enough room for character and color. (I notice, by the way, that Jeff Maguire's only produced screenplay since 1993 was last year's bomb, "Timeline." What a business, eh?)

Watching the movie got me thinking about how fond I can be of big squaresville movies … about how rare the good ones are … and finally about how odd it is that Hollywood creates so very few of them. These days, the industry seems to want most of its product to have attitude or edge, or to be conceptual, ironic or hip (in no matter how dippy, inessential or meaningless a way) -- to be anything but a square-shooting, dignified production that wears its straight-ahead competence proudly.

How strange it is that the moviebiz's establishment makes so few such movies. Curious about this, I started compiling a list of recent-ish movies that are solidly entertaining; have well-turned, 3-act scripts; that feature stars confidently deploying skills and charisma; that have convincing direction in a new yet classical style … Nothing rock video-ish, nothing indie or Lynch-esque, nothing "personal," no CGI spectacles or New Age romances, no new-style overproduced exploitation flicks, no computer animation … Just squaresville -- but rewarding! -- Hollywood.

OK: "In the Line of Fire." "The Fugitive." The Gillian Armstrong version of "Little Women." The first of the "Die Hard" movies.

And then I started coming up short. Do I include the first "Terminator"? How about the Jonathan Mostow movies, "U-571" and "Breakdown"? Or the fabulous "Mimic," or "Devil in a Blue Dress"? "My Best Friend's Wedding" struck me as the most original of the recent romantic comedies, and the Drew Barrymore dramedy "Home Fries" was pleasingly bittersweet …

But I wonder. The first of these are really B-movie pleasures, and the two chickflicks are hip, post-'70s-esque things. So I suspect that none of them really belong. This is obviously a far from complete list, and I'm eager for help here. Might the Coppola version of that Grisham novel qualify? How about "Falling Down"? Both were solid entertainments. I'm probably forgetting many other likely candidates.

In any case, thinking about all this led me to a Larger Thought, or at least a Larger Musing. It's about authority. Let's say that Hollywood is the movieworld's authority figure. That seems plausible -- in a world of foreign flicks and indieflicks, of this and thatflicks, Hollywood is everyone's mama and papa. Didn't Bertolucci once refer to the town as "the Big Nipple"?

How odd it is that such a creature so seldom creates authoritative entertainment, no? But isn't this part of a more general gestalt, an American cosmos in which many of our authority figures refuse to act like authority figures? Instead, they want to be taken as irreverent and friendly -- just like the rest of us, if infinitely more successful.

How do you feel about this? I'm a downtown guy with tons of avant-garde tastes and pleasures, but where authority figures are concerned, I'm happiest when they act like authority figures; I don't want my boss to act like my friend, for instance. Loose and informal, sure, but respectful -- that suits me. (I'm not making an argument here, or advocating it as a Good Thing, by the way; I'm just taking note of my own tastes and preferences.) And I find it annoying that one of the characteristics of the new-style standard-issue hierarchy is that so many of the people at the top refuse to assume direct responsibility for their positions and their power.

I haven't got kids and I'm no one's boss on the job, so I don't have many opportunities in life to play Authority Figure myself. I wonder how I'd do if I had the chance. You, on the other hand, have kids and are an on-the-job boss; you aren't just a pissed-off arty college student any longer. What style would you say you've evolved to express Authority?

Judging by my very peculiar NYC circles, there seem to be an awful lot of parents around who are determined not to play traditional parent, as in "take responsibility for guiding, training and raising the children." Did I tell you about the moment I witnessed the other day? There was a young-ish father with his just-older-than-toddler son. The son babbled something loud and incomprehensible. The father's response: "Say what, dude?" In NYC, come to think of it, there are a lot of families that are ruled, in fact bossed, by the children -- an awful sight.

Anyway. A few questions: any nominees for proud, well-done, enjoyable establishment-style movies? (Let's say from the mid-80s on.) And your thoughts about the new-style, non-authority authority figures?

Best,

Michael

at March 30, 2004 | perma-link | (32) comments

Michael:

I was intrigued by your recent posting, Prosperity and Immigration, (which can be read here). This discussed the oddly negative picture the media paint of the fortunes of Middle-America, as described in The Economist:

The economy, it is said, is being “hollowed out” by international competition and the connivance of business and political elites, creating “two Americas”, one rich, one poor. Median income of American households, commentators often say, has been stagnant, though census figures give a rise of one-fifth since 1980. Lou Dobbs, on CNN's “Lou Dobbs Tonight”, is just one media fabulist who makes his living by claiming that, as America is being “exported”, so the well-being of middle Americans is in a parlous state.

In truth, of course, most indications of the collapse of the middle-class are the result of statistical artifacts. America’s uniquely high immigration rate of the past twenty-five years, which has resulted in a large pool of very-low-income workers, has pulled numbers like the ‘median’ wage down. Once immigrants are factored out of the mix, median income—for the native-born—has shown the same growth that it did during the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s.

Partly this resonated with me because I had been hearing stories of the decline-and-fall-of-the-middle-class for years and yet couldn’t find any real-life examples of modern middle-class Americans who didn’t have nicer cars, didn’t have far more toys (for both children and adults), didn’t take far better vacations and didn’t have far larger investment portfolios than my family did when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. (This last wasn’t hard to beat, as we had none.) I’ve also been aware that I ‘ve had to pay employees, junior and senior alike, significantly higher real salaries recent years than I did in 1986, the year I started my business. In short, this analysis confirmed a suspicion that I had nursed privately all along, that the prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s was quite a bit more widely shared than some class-warrior commentators had maintained. And who doesn’t like to be able to say: Ah, I thought so.)

But I was also intrigued by the larger question: why are people so willing to embrace negative views of the world, even to the point of disregarding the fairly evident positive evidence in front of their eyes? (I’m not pointing any finger here—I’m by nature a fairly extreme pessimist, far more inclined to see the glass as half empty than half full. As you can see, I really have no business being an entrepreneur.)

So when I saw that this analysis derived from a book by Greg Easterbrook with the title “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse,” I just had to buy it. I wanted to see the world through the eyes of an optimist for a change—sort of like going on a vacation to a sun-and-sand resort to get away from my own wintry mental landscape.

Just Another Day in Easterbrook Land

Well, Mr. Easterbrook is nothing if not an optimist. The book starts off with a discussion of all the positive trends of the past 30 years, including improvements in the economy, the environment, private virtue, health care, even the international situation (okay, so here the good news, the ‘defeat’ of Communism and the greatly decreased odds of U.S.-Russian nuclear war is a bit dated, but hey, I said he was an optimist.)

Mr. Easterbrook then moves on to a rather once-over-lightly on the reasons why our world view tends to be darker than it probably has any good reason to be. He begins by noting that people’s evaluation of their financial situation focuses less on the where they are at the moment than where they think they’re going. He suggests that our progress has been so dramatic that few of us can imagine equivalent improvements in the future—hence, we evaluate our situation negatively. Mr. Easterbrook also tosses in the observation that people have a strange attachment to what he calls ‘collapse anxiety,’ worrying about disaster scenarios that will tank our entire society. He also makes a fist at the media’s preference for sensational doom and gloom over gradual improvement in life. Finally, he scowls at political activists on both the right and the left who spread ‘going to hell in a handbasket’ scenarios as fund-raising tools. Fair enough.

However, all of this is discussed rather briskly because he has what he considers a better reason for our pessimism in his back pocket. Yes, what Mr. Easterbrook really thinks in his heart of hearts is that our values are screwed up. A confirmed moralist, he seems quite delighted to report that all our material wealth hasn’t really made us happy:

If you sat down with a pencil and graph paper to chart the trends of American and European life since the end of World War II, you'd do a lot of drawing that was pointed up....[B]ut your graphs would lose their skyward direction when the topics turned to the inner self. The trend line for happiness has been flat for fifty years. The trend line is negative for the number of people who consider themselves "very happy," that percentage gradually declining since the 1940s. And the trend line would cascade downward like water over a falls on the topic of avoiding depression. Adjusting for population growth, ten times as many people in the Western nations today suffer from "unipolar" depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did half a century ago....

And why, if we’ve gotten so darned rich (and we pretty much all are, relative to our grandparents) why doesn’t this translate into greater happiness?

Nearly all well-being research supports the basic conclusion that money and material things are only weakly associated with leading a good life. [Nobel Prize Winning professor] Kahneman sums up his research in the simple phrase, “Life circumstances don’t seem to have much effect on happiness.” Veenhoven’s work suggests that the magic number at which money decouples from happiness is about $10,000 per capita per annum. “In the relationship between national happiness and national income,” he says, “we see a very clear pattern of diminishing returns, with the bend-off point at about $10,000 annual income.” Per-capita income in the United States in 2000 was $29,499. Both the United States and Western Europe are long past the statistical point where, on average, money can still buy happiness.

The paradoxical fact that most of us spend our time pursuing financial rewards far in excess of what well-being researchers think does us any good actually comes in kind of handy for Mr. Easterbrook’s thesis. This is because Mr. Easterbrook has a use for all that excess money (the cash that isn’t buying us happiness.) He wants to use it to buy other people happiness. The last few chapters of the book lay out an agenda of Mr. Easterbrook’s suggestions for how the world should be improved:

(1) Make universal domestic health care a reality
(2) Raise all wages to at least a $10/hour living wage with healthcare benefits (to be accomplished voluntarily, somehow, not via governmental fiat)
(3) “[Devise] a system in which corporate leadership is not based on deceit and greed”
(4) Transcend our modern materialism and nihilism (“Gradually moving beyond materialistic obsession, while discarding fashionable theories of pointlessness in order to reclaim a mainly hopeful view of the human prospect, seem two of the leading challenges facing Western society.”)
(5) End Third World poverty (“The nations of the West should take on as their next historic challenge the defeat of global despair.”)
(6) Deal with global warming

As you notice, not all of these involve spending money, but Mr. Easterbrook’s agenda does have a distinct trend in that direction:

These are the sorts of changes men and women must make for themselves, from within, since no law can ever determine what is in our hearts. But there are also areas where the challenges facing the Western nations, and the globe as a whole, are ones regarding the reform of laws and social structures. That leads to a question: Is there still time to change the world?

And we know how an optimist like Mr. Easterbrook will answer that type of rhetorical question—with a big fat Yes! Obviously—well, at least obviously to Mr. Easterbrook, anyway—

…[t]he reason that the problems of the present—such as developing-world destitution, greenhouse gases, or poverty amidst American plenty—seem “unsolvable” today is simply that we have not yet begun the work of solving them.

I grant you, I was a little stunned to hear that we had not yet begun the task of dealing with American poverty, but, well, whatever. Actually, by the time I got to the end of the book, it dawned on me that Mr. Easterbrook’s view of the world is that of an unreconstructed (okay, barely reconstructed) Great Society 1960’s–style liberal. There is no world problem that a combination of income redistribution and virtuous intentions can’t solve. The effect was so strong that when I finished the book at the mall where I was eating lunch I was tempted to go out and buy some Beatles’ singles, beginning with “All You Need is Love.”

So how do I, as a confirmed pessimist, view all this? Well, naturally, I’ve got some questions about it. The first of these questions goes to the issue of whether or not income above $10,000 annually per capita buys us any happiness, or, more broadly, anything of value.

Mr. Easterbrook’s happiness “data” are entirely the result of self-reported surveys—to wit, how you answer when someone asks if you are very happy, happy, not-so-happy, or blue. While not denigrating the idea of happiness research, I think most of us would have to recognize that polls of this type are awfully fuzzy data collection tools. In fact, Mr. Easterbrook even acknowledges this point, albeit in a sort of backhanded manner:

It’s impossible to be certain, of course, precisely what happiness is. Men and women may go back and forth on whether they feel happy; there is no hard metric, like an SAT score or a forty-yard dash time. Much of what is known on this subject from a data standpoint is “self-reported happiness”—what people tell researchers or pollsters…Psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, and a colleague named Amos Tversky spent the better part of two decades trying to devise an reliable, impartial scale of “subjective well-being” and eventually gave up.

Not that such methodological problems slow the good Mr. Easterbrook down for more than a paragraph or two, of course. And there is that data of a reported 10-fold increase in serious depression, which would seem to be a ‘harder’ number, right?

Well…maybe not. As far as I can tell, the notion of a 10-fold increase in serious mental illness is anchored by comparisons with U.S. census data…from 1880! According to an article (that can be read in full here):

The most complete enumeration of severe psychiatric disorders ever carried out by the U.S. Census Office was done in 1880. Because of widespread fears at the time that insanity was increasing, census enumerators were given special forms and extra pay to identify all severely mentally ill people, including querying neighbors of the person in question. In addition, all 100,000 physicians in the United States were asked to report "all idiots and lunatics within the sphere of their personal knowledge," and over 80% did so….A total of 91,997 insane people were identified….The prevalence of insane people, both hospitalized and living in the community, was 1.83 per 1,000 total population….And yet the [large National Institute of Mental Health national] ECA study from 1980 reported a prevalence rate for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that was almost 10 times higher than the 1880 prevalence rate.

Gee, do you think they used exactly the same criteria for mental illness as we do today (somehow, that phrase “idiots and lunatics” isn’t very reassuring.) Which is not to say that mental illness in general, and depression in specific, isn’t increasing—there are various reasons to think so, although similar methodological objections can be raised to any method of estimating the size of the increase.

But even granting the increasing incidence of depression, the question arises: is depression increasing because we are becoming increasingly and self-defeatingly affluent, as Mr. Easterbrook insists? I did a brief web search regarding studies on depression and noticed several findings that would seem to raise doubts about that argument. A Swedish study (based on the entire population of the country between 1996 and 1999) revealed that:

…with increasing levels of urbanisation, the incidence rates of psychosis and depression rose. Those living in the most densely populated areas had 68%-77% more risk of developing psychosis, and 12%-20% more risk of developing depression, than those living in the least densely populated areas.

Well, there has been a continuing increase in population density over the past century, so presumably a chunk of any increasing depression has come from that source. Another article (from the Medical Journal of Australia, which you can read here) looked at the effects of religious faith on depression and other mental illnesses:

The reasons why people with a sense of religious commitment are less likely to become depressed may include a feeling of social connectedness, exposure to messages about healthy living, or perhaps the reduced exposure to drug-taking behaviour. However, studies controlling for these factors have still found religiosity to be independently protective. So there may be other reasons, such as the comfort that comes from believing in a benevolent and caring God, the view that justice always prevails in the end, or that adverse events always have a meaning and a message. Such attitudes would buffer enormously against the ill-effects of life stresses and the depression that often follows.

Unquestionably, there has been a measurable decline in religious activity over the past century, which would seem to have resulted in another net increase in depression and other mental illness.

And if increasing depression were chiefly the result of excessive materialism and the burden of earning a high income, why is it that the incidence of depression is more common at the bottom end of the income distribution? A paper studying the relationship between socioeconomic status and depression among middle-aged sister and brother pairs in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) reveals that:

There is only moderate sibling resemblance with regard to depression. The depression factors for siblings are correlated between r = 0.09 and r = 0.16; that is, between 9 and 16 percent of the variance in depression is common to sibling pairs. This weak correlation lends support to the hypothesis that depression, at least as measured by the CESD, is primarily situational, rather than a characteristic: a state, rather than a trait. However, the causal model suggests that lower levels of depression are related to a relatively enduring measure of [high] socioeconomic status…Regardless of gender, individuals with more accumulated wealth tend to have lower levels of depression. [emphasis added]

Now, a correlation between low social and economic status and depression can be interpreted several different ways, but at least one of those ways is that higher wealth and accomplishment functions as a (at least partial) safeguard against depression. So perhaps all that getting and spending that Mr. Easterbrook attributes to ‘keeping up with the Jonses’ and to mindless materialism might actually have some significant real-world benefit. After all, the disparity between all the furious effort involved in making ever larger sums of money in society and the absence of any reported ‘happiness’ payoffs is a kind of giant blinking red light announcing that something doesn’t add up here.

Okay, I grant you, my pessimistic world-view has accomplished very little other than to raise no doubt niggling objections to Mr. Easterbrook’s agenda for universal human happiness. Sigh. Well, maybe I picked up one insight into the way.

In his book, Mr. Easterbrook takes a brief detour into the world of ‘positive’ psychology, which is devoted to the study of what makes people happy, good, productive, etc., in opposition to that field’s traditional emphasis on pathology and psychological dysfunction. Again, being the highly moral individual that he is, Mr. Easterbrook interprets the findings of such positive psychologists as Martin Seligman to suggest that an increase in community-oriented activity would make people far happier than an increase in their already bloated income. And that may very well be true. However, being the annoying pessimist I am, I noted another aspect of Dr. Seligman’s thought might explain the surprisingly high rates of depression and lack of joy from all our economic success even better than our rotten values. This is his theory of depression as a form of ‘learned helplessness.’

Back in the 1960s, when Dr. Seligman was a standard-issue behavorist studying the conditioning of dogs via electric shocks, he discovered that it is possible to educate dogs into a state of helplessness by restraining them while forcing them to endure painful electric shocks. Thereafter, the ‘conditioned’ dogs made no effort to avoid the shocks (which were eminently avoidable), apparently already having been convinced that such an effort was futile. Dr. Seligman expanded this into a theory of depression, which he noted resembled such a state of learned helplessness and resignation. He pointed out that in humans, of course, such a state of learned helplessness had less to do with electric shocks and more to do with habitual modes of thinking about failure and the futility of attempts to fix problems.

I’ve often wondered if the low rates of entrepreneurship and the preference for relatively traditional employment models isn’t a function of societal training—to wit, if it’s not a form of ‘learned helplessness.’ It would certainly take a lot of the joy out of making money—even big money—if in the back of your mind you were always convinced, like those poor conditioned dogs, that your ability to make that money was dependent on the sufferance of or on the continuing acuity of your bosses. And if their ability to make good decisions came at the sufferance of or depended on the continuing acuity of other, higher authority figures—like government officials. Gee, I can see where that would make anyone anxious. In fact, I can even see where it might give them a form of collapse anxiety!

Well, maybe I didn't learn so much, but I did get my vacation in the land of the optimists. Hmmm, how are you feeling these days?

Cheers,

Friedrich

at March 29, 2004 | perma-link | (11) comments

Dear Friedrich --

In my years of following the arts, the biggest story has seemed to me to be the digitification of culture. (Have I ever just come right out and said that? I certainly should have.) It may be fun to argue about whether this novel or that show of new paintings is any good. But as topics they seem to me dwarfed, to say the least, by the question of what's happening to culture generally as it goes digital.

I went into the culture field wanting to yak about books and movies (etc), and to add some product of my own to the culture stream. Instead, wham: along came computers -- and for the last 15-20 years, what's been most visible in the arts is the way that the various fields are reconfiguring themselves as digital waves sweep through them. We wouldn't have rap music if music hadn't gone digital. Magazines, ads and television wouldn't look the way they do if it weren't for computers. Bookselling superstores depend on databases. Copyright, distribution, the final experience of culture itself -- all are up for grabs because of digital technology

Sigh: I've got no inborn interest in this process. I didn't enter the field knowing that culture would be going digital, and I never would have chosen to spend my adult life deep in the midst of these matters. But we're in a period of transition, and that's all there is to it. Perhaps in 50 years the process will finally be near-complete, and culture will have settled down enough so that people will be able to return to having civilized chats about stable-but-evolving artforms. A little late for me, but there you have it.

In any case, it's inevitable that many of our interactions with culture– 70%? 95%? -- will be mediated by electronics. How will that affect the experience of culture and art? It can be helpful to ask these questions. What are we gaining? What might we be losing? How might artists and audiences respond? (IMHO: the most important thing artists can do these days is to take active part in the creation of digital culture, to make sure that art values aren't lost in the process. Artists: good lord, at the very least, put up a website!)

I've learned a lot from the many discussions that have taken place on this blog about digital photography. We've compared notes, we've floated responses and ideas, and we've done a little theorizing and speculating. Many of us have used digital cameras, if in modest ways, so we can speak from hands-on experience. Jimbo loves the detail his Canon digital SLR delivers. Felix puts his Casio in his shirtpocket and pulls it out at parties. Lynn loves taking nature shots with her Canon. I bore everyone with worries about about whether digital photos have the magic film photographs sometimes do. And we all seem to love the convenience and fun.

The other day, a very interesting and informative email about digital photography arrived from Toby Thain, who lives in Melbourne, Australia. I asked Toby if I could run his note as a Guest Posting; he kindly agreed.

Toby has interests in typography, photography, graphic design and computer science, and he's been working in the field of digital graphic art for 18 years. He's also got 13 years' experience as a photo retoucher, separator, color corrector, finished artist, designer and art director. In recent years, he's worked with digital studio images too, and he's been able to make many comparisons between film-based and digital-based photography. He's got a lot of knowledge and experience to call on, and as you'll see a lot of passion too.

Here's Toby's note. Read and learn.

Dear Michael Blowhard:

You wrote that a Kodak engineer told you a top-quality film image contains the equivalent of about 13 million pixels. That is about correct. The information in a 35mm image can usually be summed up in 10-15 million pixels. But this makes digital photography's long march to parity with film seem much shorter than it really is:

1) The story isn't just pixel count; quality of optics, dynamic range, sensor noise, etc, all put digital at a great disadvantage.

2) That resolution figure only applies to 35mm images. Any professional or semi-professional photograph (the minimum standard required, e.g., for advertising) is medium format (2 1/4", or 6x7cm approx). Film of this size carries (measurably) ten times the data: or 100-150 megapixels equivalent. Then there is 5x4" film, which quadruples the data again; and then 8x10" (still used), which would amount to well over 2 billion pixels to approximate. Why would anyone bother?

You can confirm my estimates here.

I've been working in digital pre-press, graphic reproduction, photo retouching and professional photographers for around 18 years and making chemical photographs for around the same length of time, so I have a reasonable perspective on the issue. I've even learned to use a drum scanner (which is the only device that can satisfactorily capture what's on a piece of film).

Everybody who has an opinion on the quality of digital should do two things before they enter the debate: do a few years of chemical (b&w;) photography, including darkroom work, and try to find the true limits of film; use a medium format (6x6cm or larger) camera and a good lens; and carefully examine a few dozen high-resolution drum scans from film (I've probably assessed more than 5,000).

I am not holding my breath waiting for digital to catch up; and nobody has to. Film has been nearly perfect for 50 years and thank God, you can still buy it. Like all "revolutions," digital photography regresses the field (quality, integrity) as much as it progresses it in others (freedom, ease). It's a marketing triumph, not a technological one ...

The quality of digital imagery will asymptotically approach film. Only digital boosters (e.g. photographers who've just leased $100K of the latest digital doodads) make whacko remarks such as "better than film."

In my experience, the "better than film" remarks invariably come from photographers trying to justify their investment in the new technology. I have personally never seen a digital image of quality "better than film" -- whether in detail, or colour fidelity, though it is conceivable that the best digital hardware can beat a mediocre film image.

Besides, there's a qualitative difference between film imagery and digital photography. McLuhan has plenty to say on how TV/electronic culture has changed modern perception -- "the balance of the senses." (This process is also reflected in magazine design trends described in your recent piece on "tables of contents.") The internet goes far beyond TV to place us all in a field of simultaneity -- the latest manifestation of his interconnected "global village." Perhaps he can help explain why digital media "feel" different?

I tried to find the right McLuhan quote from "The Gutenberg Galaxy." HMM restates his thesis in enough slight variations throughout the book to make it possible to pick and choose just the right nuance for the occasion! OTOH, McLuhan is a dense jungle of prose, so the best I can offer here might be a paraphrase: "Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity." If you substitute the words "Digital media" and "Photography" for Typography and Language, I think it says something relevant. (HMM is very amenable to paraphrasing, his stock in trade being the elastic analogy.)

The main advantage of digital images seems to be portability; and "perception" and "exploration" seem to have been overlooked in the frenzy of convenience and the thrill of buying new pieces of silver coloured plastic. Another McLuhanism that rings true: "Every technology contrived and outered by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization." Both these quotes are from "The Gutenberg Galaxy."

My technical gripes against digital photography have two main foci.

The first, and simplest to grasp, is that it has dramatically reduced image quality at the low end of photographic applications. (Like most revolutions, it does not deliver on the promise that things will be "better" for everyone!) Even a Polaroid camera produces better images than many digital snapshots I have seen offered in a professional context. The typical digital snapshot -- whether taken at home, or by a company employee on site at an engineering project, or by a journalist shooting their own interview portrait, pick up any trade magazine for a hundred examples -- now suffers from BOTH the perennial photographic blunders (lighting being the usual problem) AND computer-related faux pas.

The path of an image from camera to audience is now subject to numerous new process pitfalls involving resolution (how many snap-shooters know how many pixels are enough? for print? for the web? for a poster? can their camera and lens even deliver what's needed? on the whole, they simply don't know), colour (how many Photoshop users understand the difference between Adobe RGB and sRGB colour profiles? how many can colour correct a random image to a commercial standard? in RGB? colour separate it?) and format (e.g. excessive levels of JPEG compression). Most images suffer in more than one of these areas.

These are new hazards for photographers, because chemical photography left many steps of the process in professional hands (few photographers do their own processing and darkroom work). Now, everyone has to understand image processing and colour science to get decent results. This is perfectly analogous to the effects of desktop publishing on typography.

The fruits of the digital photography "revolution," for most users? Pallid JPEG pixel-porridge. They'd often be better off with negatives or slides or Polaroids -- the extra effort still buys more quality. Digital is only defensible when one must cut corners for convenience or cost; and, in my observations, there is a commensurate loss in the end result.

But it's the blatant overselling in the high-end and middle markets of photography (e.g. art, advertising) that really irks. I won't labour the point other than to say that, besides the subjectively noticeable shortcomings of dynamic range and sharpness, scientific and objective measurement puts digital one or two orders of magnitude behind film transparencies. This makes perfect sense to me: Anyone who has handled film and admired the engineering of a professional lens, camera and drum scanner will be less willing to dismiss the decades of development that has gone into the analog process. It's a minor miracle the way optical, mechanical and chemical engineering come together to deliver such a nearly perfect reproduction of nature!

I am not saying that digital won't approach film, eventually; but right now, the hype does not stand up to scrutiny.

Interestingly, just this evening I am chatting with some film people and they are complaining about the quality of digital, even high-end digital, movie cameras because it's harder to do keying and matting due to the artefacts (and probably loss of dynamic range). So they say shooting 35mm film is best, but more expensive than digital. Admittedly the only digital films I can recall seeing in a theatre are "Buena Vista Social Club" and "Festen" -- I don't see many mainstream movies. I didn't find the digital "look" was a problem in either, although the artefacts were sometimes noticeable.

My friend Mark Allen (LA writer/director) says: "HD feels more crisp and sharp and less organic -- so it isn't suitable for a lot of types of movies ... I have seen some films which were shot HD and looked awful, but I think HD can be shot acceptably ... the most powerful solution for mid-budget filmmakers might be the hybrid solution of shooting on film and finishing on HD (which can then be transferred back to film) because it gives a greater range of post-production control."

Mark also says, poignantly: "Have you ever edited on a flatbed or Moviola? Not easy to do, and it rips your fingers to shreds. And takes 3 times longer." All that pain, for the authenticity and integrity of film -- purely emotional payoffs? It sounds like Mark has weighed the alternatives and finds HD digital expedient: cost, and convenience. The same old mantra. You are right to ask, what is given up when we strike the digital bargain?

"Less organic" -- "crisper" -- "cleaner" -- "clinical" -- all are subjective terms which describe a gut feeling that many people have about digital. But the other forces -- marketing, economics -- do not listen to gut feelings! George Lucas and the whole Progress battalion will march right over the Digital Revolution's malcontents.

At least, so my pessimistic side says. I think Mark has it in a nutshell with the word "acceptably." Digital is "acceptable" for a certain type of work; for a certain quality level and certain styles. But why not demand more than just "acceptable" results! Film aims for sublimity. Some favourite examples: The cinematography of "Solaris" (Tarkovsky); any of Bertolucci's work; David Lynch's dark worlds rely on film's ambience; the astonishing black and white work of Kurosawa; all these have enormous emotional appeal, and only the most ruthless reductionist could argue "digital can do as well." My hands have been in too many developing tanks to accept that. And then we can discuss still photographers: Snowdon; Arbus; even the Apollo astronauts used film expressively (as Michael Light's very hip book "Full Moon," which you can read about here, shows).

OTOH, my father, a Fine Artist all his life (painting, drawing, sculpture, and then digital art for the past 25 years -- see his 3D sculpture gallery here ) -- reminds me that "quality" is also context-dependent: on the web, for instance, digital photography is a perfect fit. Most of what I have written assumes print or advertising or movie or Fine Art photography.

I know I can get emotional about this and come across as a hand-wringing, old-fashioned traditionalist -- which is half true. I don't have much to say on the subjective, qualitative issues; other than, I personally can't live without grain. There is an elusive quality of mood (je ne sais quoi!) that is not easily available through digital means.

You can often see this quality, for example, in innumerable shots taken by Lomo camera users around the web -- it's a lo-fi "anti-technique" (my words) subculture all its own. Here are some examples; and here and here and here.

The irony of course is that we can only experience these images through a digital medium -- the web -- and the ubiquitous, all-conquering JPEG! Perhaps there is a subclique of purist Lomo photographers who insist on authentic physical presence in authentic physical galleries to observe actual prints ... maybe these same kind of arguments occurred between theatre lovers and cinéastes in the early days of motion pictures?

Perhaps there is something to the idea that film requires greater discipline, too. Having wrestled with technique over the years, I am still floored by a flawless shot -- whether a still or in a movie. Despite all this I fear it is inevitable that digital will simply take over; and the qualities of film will become unavailable through simple economics. It's painful to contemplate.

Best,

Toby Thain

"Pallid JPEG pixel-porridge" -- hey, I’ve made more than my own share of such gummy images.

You can see some of Toby's own terrific photography -- chemical and digital -- here.

Our thanks to Toby Thain, and may the conversation continue.

Best,

Michael

at March 28, 2004 | perma-link | (21) comments

Dear Friedrich –

Do we give light entertainment the respect it deserves?

I started wondering about this question today as I was finishing the first book I’ve read by Ngaio Marsh, a mystery called Tied Up in Tinsel. (I listened to it on audiotape; it's rentable here. Hats off to the book's astoundingly good reader, Nadia May, by the way. I've listened to her read probably a dozen audiobooks, and she's never been less than clear, crisp and terrific. She has a flawless instinct for when it's appropriate to do some acting and when it makes more sense simply to read. When the time comes to act, she's dazzling: able to juggle scads of characters, as skillful with men's voices as well as women's, and able to score with dry humor as well as crude, knockabout farce. What a performer.)

Do you know Ngaio Marsh's work? She's considered one of the half a dozen greats of the Golden Age, by which is meant the era ('20s-'30s) when audiences and writers had a taste for puzzle mysteries: Mr. Mustard in the cloakroom with a dagger, that kind of thing. She was born in New Zealand; although she was Anglo, her first name is a Maori one, and is pronounced "Nye-oh." She painted and wrote plays, and after she found her stride as a novelist split her adult life between NZ and Britain. Her writing has a lot of theatrical zing. She's one of those rare fiction writers whose characters stand up and walk around on their own; nearly all of the characters in the book I read were bursting with life. What she's most prized for is her dazzling social satire; when people get grumpy about her work, on the other hand, what they tend to say is that her novels are sparkling comedies of manners -- and then the crime happens, after which the books bog down. In any case, a not-bad way of describing "Tied Up in Tinsel" is P.G. Wodehouse meets Agatha Christie, with an added soupcon of malicious sexuality.

Which is immensely high praise, at least in my cosmos. Reading the book, I had the following sequence of reactions and thoughts. At first: "This is brilliant! This is amazing! Wow! Who knew?" Then: "Well, harumph, let's be adults here: excellent though this book is, it is mere first-class light entertainment, after all." And, a while later: "Why the hell am I slamming on the brakes like that when this book is giving me so much pleasure? Isn't calling a book this good, this -- harumph, harumph -- phenomenal mere first-class light entertainment an act of condescension? And where do we get off condescending to something that's fantastically enjoyable?" When I emerged from the novel, I'd worked myself into quite a state of indignation about how dismissive we can be about light entertainment.

To be sober for half a sec: it doesn't hurt to remember that we don't want to discuss the frothy stuff we love in ways that ruin or betray the kinds of pleasures it delivers. So perhaps making straightfaced, grand claims for it is exactly the wrong thing to do. On the other hand, what fun is discussing the arts unless we occasionally throw caution to the winds?

Why are we so damn shy about acknowledging how much pleasure light entertainment can give? Do we value pleasure so little? Perhaps it's that we're confused, and that the confusion makes us cautious. It seems to me that we may scramble two different indices. One of them is purely descriptive: light entertainment and tragedy are both points along this line, and are simply two different kinds of art. The other index indicates worth, and on it "light entertainment" is seen as trivial where "real art" is something else entirely, deep and perhaps worthy of immortalizing. But when we scramble these two indices, what we wind up convinced of is that light entertainment can't be terrific art.

But what is light entertainment anyway? It seems like one slippery category, if category it is. As a conversation starter, here are a few art-things that I don't mind seeing labeled as light entertainment.

* Cary Grant
* The work of Jay Ward, who created "Rocky & Bullwinkle" and "George of the Jungle"
* Carole Lombard
* Gilbert & Sullivan
* James Thurber
* Cole Porter
* P.G. Wodehouse

Amazing stuff, no? All of it's work that has given me tons of pleasure. Looking at this list, I find it hard to imagine doing anything but enjoying and marveling. Yet there's always that one voice that pops up and says, "Yes, but it isn't 'Lear'." I confess that I'm dumbstruck by this voice. What kind of person says such things? Is the point of this person's rankings-obsession to associate himself with nothing but the best? Is he desperate to play arbiter and judge?

Anyway, here's a question. Is tragic or straightfaced art by its nature to be granted a little extra room for "greatness"? If so, on what basis? Indulge me for a sec and watch why I don't think such a claim can hold up.

If Cab Calloway is light entertainment, then why not Fats Waller? If Fats Waller, then why not Art Tatum? If Art Tatum … Well, if I remember FvB's tastes accurately, I'll get no disagreement from him when I assert that American artists don't get greater than Art Tatum. So in a matter of a few EZ steps we've moved from the hi-de-ho entertainer Cab Calloway (whose work I love, by the way) to one of America's very best. At what point along this continuum did the art stop being "light entertainment" and start being "adult, substantial work that might deserve to be called great"?

Why not continue this game? If, say, Noel Coward is light entertainment, then why not Oscar Wilde? If Wilde, then why not "Lucky Jim"? If "Lucky Jim," then why not Jane Austen? If Jane Austen, then why not Moliere? And if Moliere, why not the comedies of Shakespeare?

Perhaps there really is a line, and to the left of it everything is froth and will never be anything but mere froth, while to the right of it everything is adult, substantial, and has the potential of being found great. But where does that line get drawn? And who gets to make this decision?

It often seems that many people want to reserve critical kudos and in-depth appreciation for works that are turbulent, rounded, even painful. For these people, work that wants to amuse and divert simply can't qualify. But what does this imply? Are we meant to conclude that it's only when we're deeply moved by a work that we can begin to consider it important and worthy of grownup acknowledgment?

But even if we accept that premise, I think we've still got a problem, because there's more than one way by which a work can move us. On the one hand, Bambi's Mom might die -- we're moved (or we might be moved) by what's happening to the characters. On the other, we might be moved by what the work itself represents -- the kind of thing it is, as well as the care and love it expresses.

Let me try to explain. Here's Life, a thing full of beauty, frustration, boredom, tragedy, waste, delight, etc. An artist chooses a response (or simply has a response) to this thing, "Life." One artist chooses to try to portray this panorama in its fullness. Another wants to rub your nose in the pain of it all. Faced with chaos, another artist chooses to show off his brilliance.

But what about the artist whose response to the confusing mishmosh that is Life is to supply moments of diversion and amusement, of relief and contrast? Who can claim that this is a less admirable response than the others I've described? And who can explain why it's any less deserving of deeply moving us? In my own personal ranking of these responses, in fact, I'm far more deeply moved by this response than I am by the others. To want to give pleasure strikes me as touching; to succeed in doing so strikes me as beautiful. I'm as moved by fluff that works as I am by a Raymond Carver alcoholic hitting bottom.

Do we grant more potential-greatness slack to works that have more cultural influence? That doesn't seem to stand up: has the lauded lit-writer Tobias Wolff (whose books I like) had anything like the influence of "Airplane"? Perhaps the Faulkners and the Joyces deserve straightfaced appreciation because they're just better writers than the lightweights. But in what sense can it be said that Wodehouse or Marsh have anything whatsoever to apologize for? They're both brilliant virtuosos, equipped with awe-inspiring amounts of fiction-writing firepower -- they're masters, really. And why not admit, if only for a sec, to being impressed by the amount of high-quality entertainment both P.G. and Ngaio created. Didn't Wodehouse write around 100 books? Marsh wrote about 40.

Well then, how about the difficulty of the stunt? Isn't it simply much harder to write a "Sound and the Fury" than it is to write an amusing murder mystery? But how do we know this for sure? If it's really so easy to pull off a light entertainment, why are there so few successful romantic comedies? (Chefs have told me that there's little harder in the cooking game than making topflight pastries.) Why is there only one "Importance of Being Earnest" while there are tons of well-praised, high-minded, autobiographical family dramas? The best light entertainers are juggling intangibles: the chemistry between performers; hard-to-nail-down matters of style and tone; impossible-to-analyze matters like humor and wit. And what's easy about juggling intangibles?

Our disrespect for easy pleasures and light entertainment steers us into too many bad corners. An example: Jim Carrey, who received far more praise for "The Truman Show" than he ever did for "Ace Ventura" or "Dumb and Dumber." Yet (IMHO, of course) weren't his performances in "Ace" and "Dumb" just about peerless? Who else could have put those movies over? While I can easily think of a half-dozen actors who'd have been fine in "Truman."

In any case, isn't viewing light entertainment dismissively rather like criticizing a sushi dinner for not being a meat and potatoes meal? It's missing the point. And in a culture of abundance where none of us is exactly starving for entertainment or art, and where we get to choose our own pleasures, what's the point in being exclusive?

So a couple of questions. A) Do you think we give light entertainment the respect it deserves? And B) How might we best discuss and appreciate light entertainment without betraying the nature of the pleasure it delivers?

As for Ngaio Marsh's "Tied Up in Tinsel"? Seriously good light entertainment.

Best,

Michael

PS: Thanks, by the way, to Will Duquette, whose book review (here) is the most straightforward and appreciative light-reading website I know of.

at March 26, 2004 | perma-link | (46) comments

Dear Friedrich –

I don't doubt that some of the people who visit the hot new gallery-art shows or read the latest hot "literary" novels do so out of simple enjoyment. I've got one friend, for instance, who, when asked what his cultural interests are, responds quickly, "Gallery art and graphic novels." Hey, he knows what he likes, and I see no reason to question his word. Our occasional Guest Poster Turbokitty is another example of someone who enjoys the hot-new-gallery-art scene. Her enthusiasm about it is winning and genuine.

At the same time, I have zero doubt that some of the people who keep up with what's hot are doing so … well, for other reasons. They aren't reading, looking or listening simply because they love the stuff. Perhaps they're there out of curiosity. Perhaps they're there because they think "keeping up" is important, god only knows why. Perhaps – fools! -- they think something of immense cultural import is happening here and now, and they've got to, they've just got to, be part of it.

Once upon a time, I followed a fair amount of the new, high-end hot stuff myself; I did it partly because I was curious and partly because I didn't know better, but mostly because I was being paid to "keep up." But I haven't been a pro for three years now. These days, interacting with the arts like a normal person (ie., choosing my cultural matter according to interest, whim and mood), I'm enjoying the arts far more than I did in my keeping-up days. I also experience them differently than I did during the pro years -- but that's for another posting.

Which leads me to what I find myself wondering about today: if all the juju around the new and the hot cultural thing -- the hype, the cultural pressure, the pretences -- if all that evaporated, how many people would remain in the audience? How many would still be visiting that art gallery or buying that novel, let alone commissioning that piece of starchitecture?

No way of knowing the answer for sure, of course. And in self-defence let's make all necessary noises about how people are grownups, are responsible for their own decisions, and are doing things for their own reasons, etc etc. Still, it seems obvious that a lot of what sustains these worlds and these phenomena is cultural pressure: newspaper and magazine babble, peer-group urgency, and whatever oomph the arts industries themselves can manufacture.

Make those pressures go away, make the juju lose its magic, and how big an audience would remain? Some kind of audience, obviously. But how much of one? Me, I'm guessing that 80% of the audience for the new hot cultural thing would vanish if the hype and pressures sustaining it were to disappear.

What would your guess be?

Best,

Michael

at March 25, 2004 | perma-link | (18) comments

Michael:

Thanks for the reference to an amazing website, “DetroitYes!” with its remarkable subtitle: “Home to the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.” (You should check this out, here.)

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. However, after reaching the ripe old age of 18, I only lived in the Detroit metropolitan area (on and off) for three more years prior to leaving for good at 26. Possibly because of youthful callowness and self-centeredness, I don’t think it really struck me at the time or even after my relocation to California that the period of my “blossoming” into adulthood had coincided with a truly remarkable collapse of my old home town.

Oh, sure, even while growing up in Detroit it was known as The Murder Capital of the U.S.A. Heck, during my first job out of college when I was working downtown I myself was kidnapped at gunpoint while being relieved of my wallet and my car. (Nobody took this too seriously, not even me.) And the city was known for its racial tensions, what with the ’68 riots, white flight to the suburbs and the fights over forced bussing in the Nixon years. And in my few reflective moments during my stint working downtown (1976-8) it struck me as odd that whole swaths of downtown had been demolished as a result of something called urban renewal and didn’t appear to be slated for rebuilding anytime soon. (Few cities I’ve visited since combine skyscrapers with sudden patches of uncut grass growing in vacant lots a la Detoit.) And it did seem peculiar that some of the city’s worst neighborhoods were housed in large, stately structures that must have once verged on mansion-hood.

But the true dimensions of what was happening didn’t really register, at least not consciously. After all, in many ways metropolitan Detroit was (and I assume remains) a wealthy area. During my youth, I recall, it was the third largest (media? retail?) market in the country. The auto industry was a huge money pump, and not only to its large executive class: in the late 1970s semi-skilled (if unionized) labor on the assembly line was paid $40 an hour (counting benefits, anyway). The suburbs, at least, continued to expand, swallowing up farmland north and west of the city. If you focused on that part of the story, things didn’t look so bad.

But when I opened this website, I realized what a remarkable story had been unfolding under my nose. The creator of this website, Lowell Boileau (a painter) is a long-term Detroiter who has kept his eyes open during the past 30 years. He tells how he became a chronicler of ‘the fabulous ruins of Detroit’--

In the summer of 1971, I returned to Detroit after two and a half years in Africa, the Middle East and Europe where I had visited numerous ancient ruins.

Detroit was restive, as the social revolutions of the late 60's played out their effects, and in transformation as its population began vacating the city to the surrounding suburbs.

Still, Detroit seemed little changed from its model developed in the teens of the 20th Century when it became the preeminent industrial city in the world with its accompanying wealth and large home owning middle class.

Unseen to the eye, during that hazy summer, immense economic, social and political forces, that had been set in motion years prior, were to render large sections of the city and its industrial structures into ruination. Could one be instantly transported from that time forward twenty year it would appear as if large areas of the city had been carpet bombed leaving behind huge hulking ruins -- ruins larger and more extensive than those I found in my travels to Zimbabwe, El Tajin, Ephesus, Athens, or Rome.

Put aside their negative image, so sensationalized by a self flagellating media, and view them, for a moment, as you might one of the celebrated ruins of the world. Then you may come to understand why I call them The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.

Mr. Boileau photographically catalogs a number of now-empty but once beautiful buildings that may be on the verge on either restoration or demolition:

New hope has arisen that the Book Cadillac Hotel, once grandest of Detroit's downtown hotels, will be restored. Intense negotiation and serious activity are combining to assemble resources to renovate this Detroit legend into combination hotel and condominium complex. Let's take a look around…

L. Boileau, Book Cadillac Hotel, Exterior and Grand Ballroom, contemporary

It felt like exploring the Titanic, but not underwater. The elegant Grand Ballroom of the Book Cadillac, ravaged by time, elements and scavengers, underlined both the challenges and promise that restoration of Detroit's most famous hotel holds.

Book Cadillac Exterior 1945; Grand Ballroom 1930s

I’ll admit, I never understood the grandeur that my home town had once possessed (and, in a High Romantic life-among-the-ruins sense, still possesses today) before checking out this website. It makes me feel like an ancient Egyptian transported by time machine to the ruins of Luxor.

I take my hat off and vote a “Blowhardy” to Mr. Boileau and his website, “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.”

Cheers,

Friedrich

P.S. I’m also going to have to introspect a little on the ways the whole experience of living through such a decline-and-fall—even if not consciously noticed—has molded my outlook. Have you ever considered how the ‘drama’ of your natal city may have influenced how you think about the world?

at March 24, 2004 | perma-link | (20) comments

Dear Friedrich –

Long ago at Camp Massaweepie, my Boy Scout chums and I would occasionally gather in a tent and ponder The Big Questions. "Nothing" was one of our faves. If Nothing were really Nothing, then how could we talk about it? Yet here we were talking about it. Didn't the fact that we were managing to discuss Nothing prove that Nothing has a Something sort of existence, if only as a topic of conversation for a bunch of Boy Scouts? And if Nothing is Something, well then … At this point, one of us would toss himself onto the ground and let out a holler of bewilderment and consternation. We loved that.

Graybeard though I may now be, I'm having a Massaweepie Moment.

Not long ago, I went through a couple of intros to relativity and quantum mechanics, and at the moment I'm in the middle of a Brian Greene introduction to string theory. Whee: is my head spinning. Have you had a wrestle with string theory? It's -- and I'm happy to admit that I speak here as nothing more than someone partway through a Brian Greene book – an attempt at a Theory of Everything.

The basic challenge string theory is meant to meet is this. On the one hand, there's relativity, which does a good job of explaining things at a big scale; while on the other hand, there's quantum mechanics, doing a fine job of explaining things at the subatomic scale. Two sets of circumstances; two sets of equations. This situation is apparently intolerable; it seems to rubs theoretical physicists the wrong way. They look at black holes, where the two sets of equations go haywire, and they want something to bind relativity and quantum mechanics together. Even better would be to arrive at the one Equation of All Equations that underlies both relativity and quantum mechanics. There must be such a thing, if only for the sake of … elegance, or something.

String theory is an attempt to be that Equation of All Equations. It's the idea that matter and forces both are made up of minuscule vibrating loops of energy; differences in vibrations account for differences in matters and forces. According to Greene, string theory is what the best young theoretical-physics minds are excited about at the moment. They find it promising and attractive, if not without its problems. My mediocre and arty mind finds it appealing too; I enjoy playing with the obvious connection between vibrating strings and ancient ideas about the Music of the Spheres. Why does music hit us the way it does? Why should it exist at all? Perhaps it really is an emanation of the basic Nature of Everything!

In any case, it's an exciting moment: we may be on the verge of something really enormous. My heart goes pitty pat … and then my feet start to drag. Not that my reactions could matter less, of course. Nonetheless, I'm feeling reckless tonight and will forge on.

Do you struggle, as I do, with the very idea of a Theory of Everything? I do for two reasons, neither one of them (as far as I can tell) theological or mystical. First reason: how can a Theory of Everything … account for itself? How can a Theory of Anything account for itself, come to think of it? Isn't it a terrible and insurmountable problem that the reality a Theory of Everything would want to explain has to include the very Theory of Everything that's doing the explaining? Wouldn't such a theory in fact have to account for its own discovery? And how could anything explain its own existence, let alone its own discovery, within the general fabric of Everything?

My second reason may be even more basic. It's this: when "explanations" become mega-abstract, they seem to cease functioning as explanations at all and start to behave like models instead. Am I wrong in having the impression that one of the lessons of chaos theory is that at a certain point you have to abandon the idea of a stable explanation, give over to complexity, let the algorithm rip and see what follows? When this happens, it seems that some general phenomena can be observed and that some general principles can be loosely sketched out. Which of course is impressive, and potentially fascinating and helpful. (Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order, anyone?) But to what extent can such observations and loose principles be considered explanations?

I'm confusedly aware that I'm wrestling here with an old problem: do explanations and theories precede what they explain? If so, in what realm do they exist? If not, then what the hell are they? How useful is it to imagine that, say, equations underlie what we see enacted around us? Or is "enactment" (and our perceptions of "enactment") all that can really be said to be occurring? Are equations really explanations or merely ways we (OK, the brighter among us) have of making these enactments discussable? I feel the presence of David Hume among us as I type such words.

Any help with any of this? I'd be grateful for Camp Massaweepie-style musings too.

What I really find myself thinking here is along the lines of: Hmm. It seems as though the desire to achieve the Big Explanation -- the one that's going to touch existence on such a deep level that reality is going to unfold before us -- is the drive that powers much progress. Yet will such an achievement ever in fact occur? Can it even occur? Which isn't to quarrel with or deny the amazingness of progress. Nonetheless: odd, no? The coexistence of a strong desire to reach a Promised Land with the strong possibility that such a Promised Land doesn't exist? The relativity/quantum mechanics duo seem to meet their Waterloo in black holes; can anyone guarantee that string theory, even if it stands up, won't meet some Waterloo or other too? We want the Big Explanation so badly, and we're so very driven to pursue it -- yet it may be possible that such a thing simply doesn't exist. Who inflicted this predicament on us? And what purpose -- in an evo-bio sense -- might such a quandary serve? Does it exist in order to fuel progress? But progress towards what?

To return to earth for half a sec: I'm thrilled to see that Denis Dutton is continuing to post papers at his website here. Be sure not to miss this one here. It's about The Literary Mind, a Mark Turner book that I love. (I wrote a brief posting about Turner here; the book is buyable here; Turner's own site is here.) Dutton does a fabulous job of presenting and examining Turner's argument, and I'm glad to see that Dutton finally buys it, as do I. Turner's thesis, in a word, is that people imagine language mistakenly. The Chomsky idea that there's a Deep Grammar embedded in the brain misses the point, as do the attempts of philosphers to inspect language for its ability to fix (or miss) truth. Instead, language is all about story -- but go read Dutton for more. And please let me know how you react. I'll shut up about the fact that I see intriguing and provocative correspondences between my gab about Theories of Everything and Dutton's essay, which is (ahem) entitled "Which Came First, The Language or Its Grammar?" ...

Best,

Michael

at March 24, 2004 | perma-link | (17) comments

Michael:

Many people have wondered why it has taken so long for the corporate scandals of the past few years to result in convictions. Perhaps they should take a closer look at the the ‘fine print’ of our nation’s securities fraud legislation.

The importance of this ‘fine print’ is currently on display in the trial of Tyco CEO L. Dennis Kozlowski and former chief financial officer Mark Swartz. The two men are accused of stealing $170 million from Tyco to finance their lavish lifestyles by taking unauthorized bonuses and abusing company loan programs as well as reaping an additional $430 million by inflating Tyco stock prices via improper accounting and then dumping their shares from 1995 through 2002.

A conviction requires that the men were motivated in these activities by ‘criminal intent.’ It appears that the definition of this critical ‘term’ is stumping the very people who most need to understand it: the jury. From an A.P. story on the trial:

NEW YORK - Jurors at the Tyco International grand larceny trial asked a judge Tuesday to explain the term “criminal intent,” the second time they have requested that explanation in four days of deliberations.

In making the request, the panel asked state Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus to “go slowly” this time in giving his explanation.

On Friday, under protest from prosecutors, Obus informed the jury that criminal intent was meant to describe a defendant’s state of mind, and that there was no separate definition of the term.

“That’s what the law says,” Obus told the prosecution on Friday. “I know you’re not crazy about it, but we just work here.”

Adding in impossible-to-objectively-prove criteria like “criminal intent” is a wonderful way to let legislators appear to be doing something about the bad guys without, um, actually doing anything about the bad guys. (Where would the law--that paradigm of intellectual precision--be without its metaphysical mysteries like 'intent' and 'the reasonable man'?)

Truth-in-advertising applied to the legislative process would reveal that an amazing amount of the laws on the books are riddled with this kind of semantic nonsense. Of course, the heavy campaign contributions of the securities’ industry to Congress wouldn’t have anything to do with this sort of clever drafting, would it?

I can hear the objections now. I mean, haven't most of us--at one time or another--ended up with some large fraction of $600 million in our pockets as a result of forgiven corporate loans, bonuses granted during informal board meetings where no minutes were kept and as a result of regrettably inflated financial results given out to the investing public? And that surely didn't mean that we had 'criminal intent,' right? It was all just an honest mistake!

If eliminating intent, criminal or otherwise, as a requirement for securities fraud seems too draconian for you, I have another suggestion. Let's get rid of securities fraud as a crime. The way it currently is, the public is duped into thinking that having their money stolen by crooked management is a crime, and it probably isn't--unless the light-fingered managers happen to go in for tape-recorded soliloquoys on their motives while they're putting their hands in the till. At least with no securities fraud laws, we'd know where we (currently) really stand.

Just remember the next time you invest in the stock market: it’s perfectly safe--the government is on the job.

Cheers,

Friedrich

at March 23, 2004 | perma-link | (8) comments

Dear Friedrich --

Sad to report, but we've hit a small landmark. We've now banned over 200 evil IP addresses from posting comments on our blog -- well, really, from comment-spamming us.

There oughta be a law. Well, maybe not. But some tactical nuke-ing would suit me fine.

Best,

Michael

at March 22, 2004 | perma-link | (5) comments

Michael:

I just read a story in the L.A. Times of March 21 that gave me amazingly mixed emotions. “Out of the Picture” discusses the significant cutbacks in the L.A.-based animation workforce. (I planned to link to this story, but unfortunately, this content seems available only to paying L.A. Times subscribers who are willing to go through a lot of rigamarole. Sorry.)

While there is no shortage, apparently of animation work, particularly for television, a lot of animation now involves CGI 3-D animation (and a different set of skills). In another negative trend, jobs in ‘traditional’ animation are being outsourced to shops in cheaper international markets like Australia, Korea, Taiwan and India (for a cost savings to the studios of around 50%.) The net effect over the past three years has been a loss of around 1,000 jobs, representing roughly 40% of the American animation workforce at its maximum.

Naturally, this has resulted in a lot of bitterness among traditional animators who have been tossed into the boneyard. One who is profiled in the story is Eddie Goral, now working at the checkout counter at local grocery store Trader Joe’s:

“Before this?” he’ll explain, if you press him as he runs bottles of “Two-Buck Chuck” through the price scanner. “I was an animator.” Suddenly whimsy drains away. Anger flashes in its place. “Until Disney got rid of all of us.” Once upon a time, not so long ago, Goral worked “cleanup” on a variety of big-screen Disney products—from “The Fox and the Hound” and “The Great Mouse Detective” in the ‘70’s to “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “Mulan” in the ‘90s. He averaged about $1,200 a week, not high-end animator money, but Goral had no complaints—he was doing what he loved. But then worked slowed, eventually dried up, and Goral joined the growing ranks of the newest displaced Los Angeles employee—the out-of-work animator.

It’s impossible not to feel for these people, since it is clear that collapse of Disney animation, at least, was hardly the fault of its lower-ranking employees. The Eddie Gorals of the animation world didn't screw up. No, clearly, the ‘suits’ are to blame here for bad business and artistic decisions (like the last four or five Disney animated movies, with the notable exception of “Lilo and Stitch.”)

And yet, is it really fair to blame the ‘suits’? Is it really the responsibility of the ‘suits’ to ensure that the Eddie Gorals of this world are employed at reasonably well-paid salaries doing what they love? Isn’t part of the problem that the Eddie Gorals of this world want to beaver away at their craft, and don’t want to be bothered to think about raising money and launching new projects that would ensure that they stay employed?

I know the tradeoff Eddie thought he was making—the ‘suits’ would get the big bucks and he would settle for a middle-class life-style coupled with a steady-stream of craftsmanly job satisfaction. But that didn’t take into account the more-or-less inevitable outcome: that the suits (to whom Eddie had effectively outsourced the ‘business’ issues he preferred not to focus on) would screw up! It took them awhile, but they managed it. And he (not they) paid the price.

So again, I return to my perpetual cry in the wilderness: to wit, you can’t trust the suits. Any suits. You can’t ask other people to do the messy ugly ‘business’ work in the world while you focus lovingly on your craft. Life (or at least life in a capitalist economy) just doesn’t work that way; contrary examples are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. And trying to live as though this weren’t the truth only ends up giving you less security and smaller financial rewards.

In the end, in a capitalist economy, the ‘entrepreneurial’ task—peering into the future and placing bets on how things will work out—falls on everyone. Avoiding that task rather than tackling it doesn’t really work, and leads to…jobs at the checkout counter of local supermarkets.

Wage-slaves of the world, disabuse yourselves of your illusions. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Cheers,

Friedrich

P. S. OK, I’ll grant you, this ‘law of gravity’ has been suspended in the world of very big corporations and in the world of very big government and its gatekeeper professions (law, medicine, accounting), but that’s the subject of another post.

at March 21, 2004 | perma-link | (12) comments

Dear Friedrich --

* Kevin Drum, formerly the Calpundit, is now chief bloggeur at The Washington Monthly, here.

* Alan Little (here) points to this excellent and helpful Ken Rockwell piece (here) comparing digital point-and-shoots with digital SLRs. Alan wonders how Itunes might better handle classical music, here.

* First-class online filmcrit: New Zealand's Adrian Hyland (who did a Guest Posting for 2Blowhards here) has an archive of reviews here, and Boston's Mark Delello has stashed some of his own film writing here. Both guys have ferocious minds, turn a snappy phrase, and (best of all) are great fun to compare notes with. During a recent tour 'round the website of the firebreathing architecture and suburbia critic James Howard Kunstler (here), I was surprised to learn that he's also a terrific movie reviewer. Here's a page of his short reviews. I suspect that no one's ever accused Kunstler of being coy about his opinions.

* In recent weeks, Steve Sailer has been even more of a brainy, brave dynamo than usual. Check out these two essays, here and here -- and be sure not to miss his blog, which is the yellow column on this page here. Steve also points to this excellent John Leo piece here about bogus "hate crimes."

* "Anyone who isn't a socialist at 10 has no heart, anyone who still is at 20 has no brains," writes Aaron Haspel here, who grew up a lot faster than I did.

* Where does women's much-noticed cattiness towards other women come from? The Discovery Channel offers a new point of view, here, wisely using a woman writer to deliver the news.

* I found this Atlantic Unbound q&a; about race (as in blacks and whites) with the author Debra Dickerson refreshing, here. In this chat here with the Chicago Tribune, Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr. says many similar things. I wonder if we're at a turning point in thinking about black/white racial things. (Links thanks to Gavin Shorto, here.)

* Are you still the Rubens buff you once were? If so, you'll probably enjoy this Sebastian Smee review for the Telegraph, here.

* Did I ever link to this page here of games before? They're sweet and simple, but I also find them beautiful and poetic.

* Terry Teachout (here) finds Keaton funnier than Chaplin; George Hunka (here) prefers the guy with the moustache and the cane.

* The standard thing was once to assume that Anglo-Saxons completely overran the native Britons. New evidence reported here suggests that the invading force may have been far smaller than was thought.

* I love Fenster Moop, a new culture/politics blog, here. Fenster has a searching mind, a firm hand on the wheel, and tons of horsepower under the hood.

* The British designer Neville Brody was one of the most influential visual people of the 1980s -- think The Face magazine. DesignObserver's Rick Poynor takes a look back at Brody's significance here.

* The talented young horror-film director Eli ("Cabin Fever") Roth gives an amusing interview to the Telegraph, here.

* I know you're dying to read more about the Post-Autistic Economics network, a ragtag group of heterodox economists I learned about thanks to Jimbo. Like behavioral economists, the Post-Autistics dare to ask, "Well, what if we aren't completely rational?" Here's the group's home page. Here's a good Peter Monaghan introduction to the movement for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

* Most of us have probably spent time looking at paintings by schizophrenics. But how many of us have seen a building designed by a schizophrenic? The very-intense Junker House can be eyeballed and read about here.

* Mike Snider writes here about how his relationship with his daughter fell victim to Recovered-Memory craziness. Both the posting and the sonnet Mike has included are heartbreakers.

Best,

Michael

at March 19, 2004 | perma-link | (19) comments

Dear Friedrich --

You won't want to miss John Massengale's brilliant posting about Modernism, here. John has managed to squeeze several books' worth of thinking and knowledge into a few thousand words. Long live the blogosphere: where else are you going to find this kind of to-the-point, essential (and free) cultural history? IMHO, of course -- but, grrr, disagree with me at your peril.

John got my own thoughts, such as they are, firing off in a variety of directions. The one that's making the most noise is a question that's been ricocheting around my head for years now. It's this: can Modernism ever take its place as just one style among many?

The obvious, level-headed, easy, and probably correct answer is: Sure, why not? John thinks so, and it's certainly to be hoped that he's right. But I can't help wondering if this Modernism-thing isn't a bit more complicated than that.

Why? Because of the nature of the grip Modernism had (and still has) on some people. For many years and for many people, it functioned as ideology, as vision, as credo -- really, as a substitute religion. Although Modernism was meant to be an approach that suited a post-religious age, it quickly took on all the characteristics of a traditional religion, not that it was ever able to deliver the satisfaction and happiness traditional religions sometimes manage to. Like those other 20th century pseudo-religions Marxism and Freudianism, Modernism depended for its zing and popularity on the promise of redemption. Over time, it developed religious trappings too: a priesthood, a gospel and a doctrine, sacred spots to which believers made solemn pilgramages.

Modernism was art as a way, or rather art as The Way. Buy into it sincerely enough, pray hard enough, submit to its imperative to go on finding new ways to defy tradition and -- who knows? -- Greatness might strike. The Self would find liberation and fulfillment, the masses would be set free, bliss would be attained ... Probably not, of course -- gotta keep the masses supporting the cause and kowtowing before the Genius we all serve, after all. But you never know, do you? Maybe life really can be transformed in its very nature. And gosh, we all sure hope so, don't we? Don't we? Thwack!

My question seems to boil down to this: does enough remain of this kind of pseudo-religion when the spark goes out of it to constitute a viable style? Does Modernism -- Modernism simply as a style -- have enough going for it to stay alive as one option among many? It seems to me that styles that have staying power resonate; they've got some real appeal, something that not only fascinates but pleases, and perhaps even serves. If Catholicism, for instance, were to lose its hold, I'm sure that the "culture" created in its service would still transfix; it's a mighty rich one.

But of course Catholicism is a real religion. How about a pseudo-religion like Modernism? How do its cultural goodies compare? Flatness, abstraction, truth to materials -- by themselves, are these qualities powerful and pleasing enough to appeal and beguile? In a light-camp kind of way, sure: I can easily imagine a Modernist room being looked at fondly as this silly, dear kind of thing that people inexplicably once took seriously. But in any longer-lasting way? What valuable part of life did Modernist style-things ever serve? Besides the need to believe, I mean.

(BTW, and a propos of very little: I remember a discussion I once had with a modernist-painter friend, a very bright and talented guy but a Modernism believer nonetheless. I foolishly went off on some tangent about how I wonder how much longer the whole "flatness of the picture plane" thing is going to go on hypnotizing artists. Would it be in five years that arts people would start looking at the phrase "the flatness of the picture plane" and simply say "well, duh!" Or would it have to wait another 20 years? I was gabbing mirthfully along about the inevitability of this development when I caught his expression -- he was horrified and indignant. I'd slandered his religion. So I swallowed hard and let him semi-berate me for not understanding that the "flatness" thing was art's equivalent of the discovery of Relativity, blah blah. My mistake, once again.)

Hmm: how about a comparison? What remains, for example, of Marxism and Freudianism? As creeds, they still seem to be hanging on, if by aging and brittle fingernails. But how about as styles? What goodies have they bequeathed to the cultural menu? A few icons -- Freud's cigar and couch, Marx's beard and fist. An attitude of red-flagged, dire, over-fervent suspicion and paranoia, perhaps. And, y'know, there were those great revolutionary graphics from early on; those seem to me to be keepers.

But much else? Of course, Marxisim and Freudianism were never much concerned with arty matters like look and feel; that was more the business of art-Modernism. I asked John what his hunch is about all this, and he emailed back that he does indeed have the impression that, to non-architects at least, Modernism has become nothing but a style option.

So maybe that's all there is to it, and wouldn't it be lovely if it were true. It's more than possible that I'm being a hysteric; perhaps, having lived through the final flowering of Modernism, I'm terrified that we'll never really be done with it, that it'll keep coming back like the monster in "Alien" unless we go on bashing it. On the other hand, Modernism did have virus-like qualities for far too many decades; it did seem to have the power to seize hold of perfectly good minds, drain them of all common sense, and even then not let go. So maybe it makes sense to keep up our vigilance.

Hey: on the third hand, maybe John's polite, reasonable suggestion that Modernism be taken as just one style among many is a strategic move. Hmm: if so, that's pure genius. How can anyone object to the suggestion? And then, once it's been allowed that Modernism is nothing but a style after all, the juju vanishes and the whole Modernism enterprise collapses into thin air, just like the old Soviet Union did ...

Anyway, your thoughts here?

Best,

Michael

at March 19, 2004 | perma-link | (24) comments

Michael:

You may remember my email to you of a few weeks ago:

What, no response to my crack about a chimpanzee being able to direct a Hollywood feature? At least one equipped with (1) a ‘radio drama’ script in which all the key information is conveyed via the soundtrack and (2) a cinematographer who could expose the film correctly, get enough basic coverage (i.e., ensure you can see everyone talking and acting) and deal with basic continuity (keeping the actor on the right on the right and the one on the left on the left as you switch shots).

Actually, that raises an interesting question: what exactly is the difference between such a chimpanzee (or, say, Rob Reiner) and someone who knows how to use a camera (say, in his 'Warrior' days, Walter Hill or Carl Dreyer)?

Well, as you recall, I ended up answering my own question with a reference to something I called camera-space. I meant the use of visual elements (cinematography, lighting, art direction, sets, locations and the staging of the action) to suggest the feel of the ‘space’ in which the film takes place. Such space can seem claustrophobic (Carl Dreyer’s “Day of Wrath”), menacing (Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”), vast & existentially empty (Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”), intoxicatingly fluid (Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game”), mechanistically deterministic (Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”) etc., etc. Directors who create a consistent and emotionally affecting sense of this ‘space’ in a film constitute, to me, the elite of their profession.

A brief aside to fans of Rob Reiner: I’m not criticizing Mr. Reiner or his films, some of which I like. I used his particular name in vain because he is fairly representative of modern Hollywood directors in having no obvious visual preoccupations in his films other than a desire to make sure that the audience can clearly follow the action and see the actors deliver their lines. (He also deserves some abuse for having directed the late, unlamented "Alex and Emma.")

However, our discussion got me wondering whether or not my ideas—based on my college-student film-buff experiences, now several decades in the past—still held up, or whether I was just talking through my hat. So I decided to take another look at a movie that, according to my memory anyway, seemed to have a strong sense of such a ‘camera-space.’ Being a man of action, I quickly implemented this decision by bugging my wife to add the DVD of Fritz Lang’s “M” to our weekly order from Netflix.

A few days later I watched “M” and was remarkably pleased to see that even in 2004 I still thought that the film was a masterpiece and that it not only possessed a ‘camera-space’ concept but one clear enough to demonstrate how the director went about the task of creating it.

To make this discussion intelligible, I need to explain a bit about the film. The 1931 “M” is a sociological study masquerading as a suspense film. Its real subject is the social response of an unnamed German city to the predations of a serial killer focusing on children. (The film is generally considered to derive from the real-life case of Peter Kurten, who terrorized Dusseldorf in 1930, although the film was actually shot in identifiable neighborhoods in the eastern part of Berlin.)

Although “M” has a number of memorable characters including the serial killer Hans Beckert (played by Peter Lorre), the ‘old-pro’ police inspector ‘Pop’ Lohmann (Otto Wernicke)--who was based on the real-life policeman Bennat who headed the Kurten investigation--and my favorite, the ever-resourceful crime-boss Shraenker (Gustaf Gründgens) who organizes the underworld to track down the killer, it is anything but a character-driven movie.

The Murderer (Peter Lorre) As Victim

In fact, it goes far beyond being even an ‘ensemble’ piece, as it features literally dozens of vivid characters who are ‘picked up’ by the narrative, given a few moments of camera time, and then discarded for new faces. At times it utilizes documentary techniques, such as a remarkable sequence in which the police chief briefs an impatient mayor via telephone on the progress (and difficulties) of the investigation. One part of that sequence has the chief explaining to the mayor that the cops are using handwriting experts to study a note the murderer sent to the newspapers; we then cut to such an expert dictating a memo in which he maintains that the writer of the note possesses the character of an actor; we then cut to a shot of the murderer himself making faces in his bedroom mirror; we then cut back to the police chief continuing his explanation, and so forth. Later in the same sequence I was giddy with delight as the film made the widening scope of the investigation concrete by showing a hand literally drawing circles with a large compass on a map of the metropolitan area. “M” is a dramatic film, but one with strong spiritual affinities to blueprints, schedules and diagrams.

As a consequence the film is not organized in a typical dramatic fashion, i.e., focusing on the psychological development of one or more key characters. No, in “M,” mothers worry, detectives detect, authority figures (governmental and criminal) plan, innocent bystanders get caught up in the manhunt and complain about how inconvenient it all is, but there's no suggestion that anyone's behavior is going to be different in the future—nobody learns any ‘life lessons’ in this film. Even the dramatic conflict is remarkably impersonal as everybody—cops, criminals, politicians, prostitutes, ordinary citizens, serial killers—are basically just doing their jobs.

So how does Lang (and his cinematographer, Fritz Arno Wagner) visually organize such an unusual film and give it such a strong artistic character?

Well, several consistent features pretty much leap out at you:

1. The film has no close-ups (at least, no facial close-ups that I can remember.) It has a remarkable number of shots of people seen from behind. Both of these tendencies match the ‘sociological’ rather than ‘psychological’ thrust of the film.

2. Lang seems to shoot most of the movie with fairly wide-angle lenses, or at a minimum to frame his compositions so that the characters are presented along with their environment. These environments almost always include sociological background information on the character being presented (e.g., we see gangsters in smoky but luxuriously furnished rented rooms, rumpled police inspectors sitting at cluttered desks, laundresses in their working-class apartments, underworld-dive owners standing in front of well-stocked bars, etc.)

Laundresses and Crime Bosses In Their Respective 'Environments'

3. In the same spirit, one suspects, that Lang avoided close-ups, he also avoids ostentatiously quick cutting (which doesn’t prevent the film from moving along quite briskly). He had several motives, I suspect, for this approach. First, with such a large cast of characters, often linked together more intellectually than in conventional dramatic fashion, he needs to keep the audience oriented in time and place, and quick cutting would be too disruptive. Also, not having much time to spend with each character, he has to present a lot of information about them visually, so the clues ‘planted’ in their backgrounds, context and clothing need to be extremely clear and legible; again, quick-cutting would not have served him well. Finally, given the sociological and intellectual treatment of his subject, he conveys a great deal of the emotional content, his ‘tone’ so to speak, via visual tropes and symbols, and he needs you to take a good look at each composition or you’ll miss the metaphor.

Visual Metaphors: Children Play At Selecting 'Victims' and the Shadow of a Killer

4. Although the links between shots are often inventive and amazingly efficient (particularly for a director working for the first time in sound) and he makes an effective, if restrained, use of a moving camera, the effect is not fluid, exactly: it’s more as if each shot is a solid little brick of meaning, the film itself is the wall the bricks are inserted into, and the film’s meaning emerges from the pattern they make.

5. His compositions are nearly always based on, and reinforce, the one-, two- or three-point perspective underlying the space being presented, and the resulting three-dimensional effect is usually clarified rather than erased by his lighting, however dramatic. This has a tendency to reinforce the viewer’s awareness of the constraints and limits that the physical architecture (and by extension, the entire social environment) imposes on the characters. This echoes and is echoed by the content of the film where characters are repeatedly immersed in situations (traps, really) that they desperately want to escape, or are facing limitations they would love to break through. (I refer to this effect as Lang’s ‘Geometry of Fate.’)

Trapped in the Geometry of Fate

6. The camera almost never takes a ‘subjective’ shot; pretty much, the film’s action is presented from a point of view shared by none of the characters. This is reinforced by Lang’s great fondness for high-angle, looking-down-from-on-high shots. These characteristics help give the film its note of extreme objectivity; Lang has chosen to present a great deal of the material from what might be described as God’s point-of-view.

All of these features help to create the film’s central oddity: it’s a sociological study that Lang's use of ‘camera-space’ turns into a rather grim metaphysical or religious vision. Of course, that's why the ending is almost a bit flippant—the only real ending for the film would have required God to show up and be cross-examined on the nature of good and evil!

Good and Evil from God's Point of View

I hope all this illustrates a bit what I meant with my little neologism, camera-space. I’m sort of tempted to rent films by other directors with a strong sense of camera-space; it would be interesting to see where the visual approaches of various directors were similar, and where they were different.

Cheers,

Friedrich

P.S. It seems kind of hard to avoid the notion that directing silent films must have been an excellent way to develop one’s sense of camera-space; equally, that today’s directors are rather seriously handicapped in that regard. Or is there another explanation I'm missing for the general lack of visual distinctiveness in today's movies?

P.P.S. Michael Blowhard asks, in a comment, "Which filmmakers working today whose work you know would you say have some genuine interest in this kind of camera space?" Since he is too cagey to share his list of such contemporary filmmakers, does anyone out there have any nominations?

at March 19, 2004 | perma-link | (13) comments

Dear Friedrich --

The Economist runs a cheery article this week, the gist of which is that Americans are economically far better-off than our anxiety levels about jobless recoveries and outsourcing would suggest. The article leans heavily on Gregg Easterbrook's recent "The Progress Paradox" and is readable here. Some of its more interesting facts:

• "Among native-born Americans, poverty rates have declined steadily since the 1960s. In the case of black families, median incomes have recently been rising at twice the pace for the country as a whole ... Indeed, for the nine-tenths of the population that is native-born, middle-income trends continue their improvement of the 1950s and 1960s. For these people, inequality is not rising, but falling."

• "Between 1980 and 2002 Americans in work rose by over 40%, a far brisker pace than the 26% growth in the population. Some three-quarters of the adult population are now in work, close to a record and some ten percentage points higher than in Europe."

• "Most Americans have at least two cars and their own house, and they send their children to college. Certainly a bigger share of household income is being spent on things that did not feature 50 years ago, such as high-tech health care. But it has brought the benefit of a longer and better life, and not just for the old: since 1980, infant mortality has fallen by 45%."

• "The typical American dwelling now has two rooms per person, double Europe's level or America's half a century ago."

• Americans now spend $25 billion a year on boats and jetskis, and nearly half of their food dollars in restaurants.

While it appears in a magazine that's relentlessly enthusiastic about high immigration rates, the article also admits that the current "scale of immigration into America [is] outpacing all immigration in the rest of the world put together," and that the country's cheery growth picture exists only if you "strip out immigrants."

Not knowing quite what to make of this, I read the magazine's next article (not available online). Its subject: how many immigrants to the U.S. are bypassing the big cities and settling in suburbs instead. Important matters, especially seeing as how an Urban Institute study estimates that one in five children in American today is the offspring of an immigrant, and that by 2015 one in three American children will be. Suburban hospitals are stressed, suburban crime rates are rising ...

But not to worry, the Economist is quick to add. Why? Because the percentage of the country's population that is foreign-born -- about 11% -- has been bigger at other times. And didn't we manage fine then? What the article's writer doesn't see fit to acknowledge is what's obvious in the chart that accompanies the article: that the absolute number of foreign-born people in the country's population right now (over 40 million) is about three times higher than it was during previous big immigration waves. Not to mention, of course, the fact that the country's population is considerably larger than it was in, say, 1910.

What to make of all this? Do we praise the Economist for being frank about immigration-related challenges? Or do we scold them for refusing to reconsider their stance on immigration rates?

Best,

Michael

at March 18, 2004 | perma-link | (7) comments

Dear Friedrich --

I was at the health-food store eyeballing the huge selection of low-carb bars on display when one of them caught my eye, The Z-Carb Bar. Its tagline (or whatever you call the ad-ish line that pitches the product):

Sure makes me want to chow down!

I hereby nominate the Z-Carb Bar for an Oscar for Least-Appetizing Sales Pitch Ever.

Best,

Michael

at March 18, 2004 | perma-link | (2) comments