The floor (standing room) for Here
Lies Love is sold out for the entire run! Most of the audience will be
on the floor— there are only a small number of balcony seats for those who
can’t stand throughout the show, so this news is pretty thrilling. I did hear a
rumor that the show might get extended through the end of May; so more tix may
become available soon.
Here’s the LuEsther space where the show will take place. (This
is from about a week ago when construction was still in progress.)
The “action” takes place on the small stages and platforms
one can see all around the edges. The audience stands in the middle. Balcony
railings are not in yet.
It is a mystery to me why the U.S. newspapers (the Times in particular) did not run this
piece that was the result of a lot of investigative journalism by the UK Guardian. This is the same newspaper that kept digging into the phone
hacking by News Corp/Murdoch folks, even when Scotland Yard mysteriously got
lackadaisical with their own investigation. This is what we will miss when
newspaper budgets and staff get slashed.
Anyway, it seems like a major story that reveals why the
Petraeus sex scandal suddenly caused his removal— he had approved torture all
over the world. The piece totally proves what many already suspected—torture
was not the exception, the behavior of a few bad apples, it was not only
approved, but managed from the top. It also links the torture in Iraq and
elsewhere and the dirty wars the U.S. funded and managed in Latin America for
decades.
**This was posted a week or so ago, and I got a lot of reactions to it—positive and sort of negative. Some of the latter were more in the area of factual errors I might have made, rather than “you’re totally wrong”, so I’m re-posting now with some of those corrections incorporated. All edits and reactions are in blue.**
How does one react to laws and practices that seem to be unfair or bordering on immoral? What is unfair and immoral depends on one’s point of view, of course. Scientists and philosophers argue whether we have a built-in evolved sense of morality that our laws are meant to reinforce and uphold- that may or may not be, but many laws and behaviors while legal may, in retrospect, be considered immoral.
As I think about how laws and behaviors get changed I suspect we should be following, amongst others, the example of Gandhi or the Civil Rights activists in the Southern U.S. who sat at lunch counters where they weren’t allowed and refused to ride in the back of busses—or automatically give up their seats for white people. Rosa Parks is a good example.
And these folks were sometimes willingly and peacefully hauled off to jail as a result—all very peaceful and civil though they were often also harassed by locals. Here is a policeman harassing folks who want to sit at a lunch counter in Oklahoma.
Draft resisters who opposed the Vietnam War similarly voluntarily went to prison. All of these people opposed laws that were accepted, on the books, but that they decided were unjust. Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Dept. employee who eventually decided to distribute what became known as the Pentagon Papers described the moment when he decided that he had to take action in response to what he felt was an unjust war:
“And he [Randy Kehler, a draft resister] said this very calmly. I hadn't known that he was about to be sentenced for draft resistance. It hit me as a total surprise and shock, because I heard his words in the midst of actually feeling proud of my country listening to him. And then I heard he was going to prison. It wasn't what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed that he was a stellar American, and that he was going to jail as a very deliberate choice—because he thought it was the right thing to do. There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger.” Source
Ellsberg decided to release The Pentagon Papers. These were documents that made clear the hubris and hypocritical decisions made by politicians and generals that were affecting soldiers on the ground in Vietnam. Though many of us suspected that what was contained in these documents was already common knowledge, to make it public and verifiable was a big step. I would argue that his actions—and the subsequent publishing of the papers in the NY Times and Washington Post—hastened the end of the Vietnam War (as the Wikileaks data leaks have, in my opinion, hastened the ending of the U.S.-backed invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan). I cheered both of these revelations, partly because I too felt that both wars are unjust and immoral.
Ellsberg was, like his inspiration Kehler, willing to face the consequences and publicly surrendered to the Boston DA’s office, facing charges that carried a maximum sentence of 115 years. In admitting to giving the documents to the press, Ellsberg said:
“I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.” Source
Civil Disobedience in the Internet Age
Is there a contemporary equivalent to these actions? If we, as citizens, feel an injustice, an immoral act is being committed in our name, in our nations name, are these models effective ways to draw attention to it? To eventually effect change?
Passive resistance is sometimes dangerous—a young woman who sat down in front of some Israeli bulldozers as a protest against illegal settlements was killed. That’s worse than the threat of going to prison. My mom was threatened when she protested the invasion of Iraq.
One key aspect in the success of non-violent protest is the fact that it relies on media being present. Otherwise, it doesn’t draw attention to the issue, and similarly, the action has to be done publicly. Transparency is key. Me privately deciding not to pay taxes that go to the invasion of Iraq, to take a hypothetical example, doesn’t serve as a very effective protest unless I crank up a publicity machine, let everyone know I’m doing this as a protest, and then willingly face the consequences.
I’ve been following the canonization of young Aaron Swartz—the coder, hacker, and digital rights activist—after his recent tragic suicide. For those who haven’t been following this, it seems he surreptitiously set up his personal computer to download many, many academic papers from the academic database, JSTOR, through MIT’s open network. Why did he do this? Do we know? Was it a crime?
It took a little poking in the Internet, but it seems this theft of data was Swartz’s own form of civil disobedience. Here is what he wrote:
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.” Source
Later in his manifesto he suggests a mass movement devoted to “liberating” this data that is “locked up”:
“Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.” Source
So, we can assume he covertly downloaded the data to draw attention to a perceived injustice—that he felt that the academic papers in the JSTOR archive were unfairly behind a paywall and should be available to all. Following the imperative of his manifesto one might assume he was going to give them all away—to make them free, as he thought they should be. But he didn’t. (He certainly wasn’t going to sell them himself.)
He hid his face from library cameras, so he didn’t want to get caught in the act—though maybe he thought it was going to be OK and he wouldn’t actually get caught. Sort of an unreasonable assumption given that someone makes money on this stuff (but given his skills as a coder maybe it was not an unreasonable assumption). We also might assume that he was then going to proudly and publicly announce that he had “liberated” these documents to draw attention to his position. Transparency, as mentioned above, is key to the effectiveness of this kind of protest. This publicised “liberation” would also be a sort of “come and get me” action. Like the Civil Rights activists, he would, one might assume, be willing to face the consequences in order to draw attention to this perceived injustice. I don’t think he did that either. He was a disturbed young man, and seems to have hesitated in carrying out the typical civil disobedience MO.
What bothered him so much about this archive of data behind a paywall?
What’s the deal with these academic archives? How do they typically work?
Like music and movies that are legally controlled by copyright holders—typically movie studios or record companies—many academic databases contain papers and other material that are proprietary. Institutions or individuals therefore have to subscribe to access them or pay a fee to get to download these papers. LexisNexis is one such academic site in which the material is protected by a pay wall; Swartz downloaded his documents from a similar database called JSTOR. Needless to say, he didn’t pay for them.
Where does the money that subscribers pay to these services go? Do the poor academics who did the research and wrote the papers get some part of those fees? It has been pointed out to me [by Cory Doctorow] that this never happens—they never get paid for their contributions to these journals. Academics get paid a salary by their institutions, and are obliged, but not paid, to publish papers like the ones stored in JSTOR. Part of the deal is also that they hand over their copyrights as well—worse than the record business!
They don’t get paid for publishing these papers, but they have to publish in the journals to eventually get tenure and keep up their academic standing. They usually publish their work first in various academic print journals, and it is often these journals that by default post their papers on JSTOR or similar sites. The academic is, one might say, coerced into placing their work behind the paywall. Record companies who own the copyright on many of my recordings place those recordings in places where I might not wish them to be—it’s an ongoing battle… and another story. JSTOR and others funnel their income to the print journals who own the rights to the papers. One hopes the journals would pass some of that income on to the writers. This reminds me of my own pathetic income from Spotify and other services that record companies (who own the copyright on some recordings) place my recordings on—the income I get is so small that it’s essentially nothing. The record companies get the lions share.
I can empathize both with academics who might either want to monetize their research or those who might want to make it freely available to all—and the choice, ideally, should be the authors’. One would assume that this is one of the issues young Swartz was trying to draw attention to.
LeeAnn Rossi writes—in the case of JSTOR, institutions pay a one-time Archive Capital Fee (which fluctuates based on size of institution and amount of access to documents granted) plus an Annual Access Fee. From the breakdown of their 2008 tax documents, it looks like they [JSTOR] made $43m and had expenditures of $35m, giving them an $8m profit (they're registered as a non-profit organization). Of those expenditures, $8.3m were under the line item "Publisher's Fees and Payments", though there is no breakdown for how the Publisher accounts to the Author on the backend. From this article—it sounds like the name of the game in the academic world is that authors and scientists don't get paid for their peer-reviewed work in journals or on databases at all. Another anti-academic publishing article ironically ends with a nod to this article, which you can't read because it's behind a paywall.
Ultimately that is all irrelevant, the point is the owners of this material have their work behind these pay walls. The authors were coerced maybe, unfairly, probably, but there it is. It’s legal. Unfair maybe, but legal. Swartz, as I understand it, was an advocate for “free”—that all of this information (and presumably much other copyrighted material) created by others should ideally be free and available to all. Information, especially scientific and academic information, should, in this view, be intrinsically shared. Information, like that contained in these papers, is what scholars use to inspire themselves and it often serves a foundation for their own research. They therefore don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they begin some avenue of research—which would cause research to proceed at a snails pace. I agree with this idea—with the added clause that whether something is free or monetized should be entirely up to the author.
Archives like JSTOR also, according to Swartz, buy up research and papers that are in the public domain, then lock them up and privatize them, as a way of profiting from works that were once available to all. While I can see that there might be some minimal admin charge for organizing and storing all this data, this seems incredibly greedy. Orphaned works should, I agree, enter the public domain—and stay that way.
LeeAnn writes again—He was mostly fighting against what he saw as corporations owning and profiting off of something that was produced and owned by individuals who not only never recieved any compensation for their work, but also never produced it with profit in mind in the first place.
There is a big difference in my opinion between using someone else’s work as inspiration and as a stepping-stone and using that work—or work that incorporates that work—as a way to make money. I am happy, for example, for people to slice and dice my recordings—recordings they have legally obtained—and play around with them to their hearts content as long as they don’t decide to make money from that new work—either directly or indirectly. I am, I think, quite open about sharing income if someone builds on my work—but the crucial concept is “share”. (I have to point out that even posting songs on YouTube these days is in fact selling something—it is often monetizing someone else’s work. YouTube makes money on the ads that are all over their site. It’s not an altruistic “sharing service”.) I have no problem, for example, if someone performs a Talking Heads song or creates a video with their cat that uses it. But the fact is that all these services like You Tube and Facebook are filled with ads now, so someone is making money somewhere. It’s ripping off not just me and the corporate owner of that recording, but the filmmaker with the cat as well.
But back to civil disobedience. Swartz stole the material, pure and simple, and he seems to feel that he and others have, in this case, the right to steal because they are beholden to a higher moral standard. I am sort of fine with this if he’s willing to accept the consequences, as Ellsberg and the Civil Rights activists were. I sort of feel the same way about Wikileaks—though much of the data they make available wasn’t “stolen” by them directly, though they do know that under many nation’s laws disseminating that data is illegal. (Significantly, the NY Times and Washington Post were not prosecuted for printing the Pentagon Papers—though Nixon tried to do so—and these same papers were not thrown in jail for printing Wikileaks excerpts. So when is dissemination a crime and when is it not? What’s the difference between Wikileaks disseminating stuff online and the NY Times disseminating that very same stuff on their own website?) And as much as I’m glad these files made the horrors of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq obvious, Assange might face jail under U.S. law—though I’m happy that more corporate and military misbehaviors are made public.
If Ellsberg and the civil rights activists were willing to go to jail, should Assange and Swartz and formerNY Times editor Bill Keller and (Oh jeez, am I writing this?) poor Bradley Manning also be publicly willing go to jail too?
I’m going to shift the subject for a minute.
I wonder where one draws the line with the claim of “higher morality” as a justification for breaking the law.Conversely, when do acts based on one’s personal moral indignation become unjustified? I empathize with many of the actions above, but there are many acts made by those who similarly claim to be impelled by a higher moral calling that I find repellant and horrible.
Lots of religious fanatics also claim to be acting based on higher moral standards—and they’re quite public about it: lunatics, building bombers, abortion clinic bombers. Lots of wars have been fought by the U.S. and others based on claims that God is on our side—as an argument it’s pretty risky. Anyone can make it. In the case of civil disobedience, a lot depends on public opinion and how the media delivers the news of the action to that public. It also depends on that transparency, which allows one to hold the moral high ground. In some cases, it is assumed that the civil disobedience is not doing a lot of harm. Unlike the morally justified abortion clinic bombings mentioned above, no one was harmed by Rosa Parks, but I’m sure the Nixon administration made a case that Ellsberg’s leaks damaged national security—as the Obama administration has done with the Wikileaks material.
In civil disobedience actions it’s critical how the acts play out in public—that the perception be that the consequences are good, not harm.
This reminds me of the way the entertainment industries often overreacted to kids and grannies who were busted for file sharing (downloading copyright material without paying for it). By overreacting, the institutions helped folks to empathize with those they were prosecuting. The grannies weren’t engaging in civil disobedience though.
However, Swartz wasn’t totally transparent and he fought back. If Swartz had admitted the theft and publicized his willingness to go to jail, as did the civil disobedience activists mentioned above, thereby bringing attention to the inordinate punishment he was about to receive and to the inequities of databases like JSTOR, then he might have better made his point—in my opinion. He was, as I have read, a disturbed young man who maybe sadly wasn’t quite psychologically ready to be a Gandhi figure—should he have realized this ahead of time? Hypothetical and impossible to answer now, as his tragic suicide has clouded the issue.
I am reminded how Jean Valjean, who stole a loaf of bread in the novel Les Mis, was unfairly punished by the authorities—which eventually highlighted the need to overthrow the royalty. He didn’t steal the bread as a form of civil disobedience, but I seem to remember it functions in the narrative in much the same way.
Swartz’s actions as a form of civil disobedience are very confusing for me. It’s not like he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong. He hid his laptop and hard drive in a little closet at MIT and hid from security cameras when he went there to retrieve his data trove. Imagine, as MIT seems to have briefly done, that it was the Chinese or North Koreans or some other entity stealing this data (and it very well could have been)—the “higher moral grounds” defense would then seem pretty ridiculous. Cory Doctorow has pointed out that China or North Korea wouldn’t need to steal this particular data, but my point here was more about the sneaky way that Swartz went about obtaining data that was supposedly gathered in a legal and upstanding way.
I don’t disagree with many of Swartz’s points. I can certainly see the point that much academic data, when freely available, can have a greater chance to spur insights and creativity from researchers and scientists around the world than if it is locked up behind paywalls. Withholding cancer research from academics who can’t afford access because a big pharmaceutical company “owns” the data doesn’t seem like a very morally defensible position—even if it is what the law might say is perfectly legal.
But who then decides what data “deserves” to be stolen and “liberated”? There are all sorts of data. Some of it is—though I hate to admit it—possibly essential to our security, and some is strictly personal and deserves to stay that way. It’s complicated, and this particular case seems messy—though Swartz’s points are mostly valid… but maybe his method was sloppy.
How does one react to laws
and practices that seem to be unfair or bordering on immoral? What is unfair
and immoral depends on one’s point of view, of course. As I think about this I
suspect we should be following the example of Gandhi or the Civil Rights
activists in the Southern U.S. who sat at lunch counters where they weren’t
allowed and refused to ride in the back of busses—or automatically give up
their seats for white people.
And these folks were sometimes willingly and peacefully
hauled off to jail as a result—though they were often also harassed by locals.
Here is a policeman harassing folks who want to sit at a lunch counter in Oklahoma.
Draft resisters who opposed the Vietnam War similarly voluntarily
went to prison. All of these people opposed laws that were accepted, on
the books, but that they decided were unjust. Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense
Dept. employee who eventually decided to distribute what became known as the
Pentagon Papers described the moment when he decided that he had to take action
in response to what he felt was an unjust war:
“And he [Randy Kehler, a draft resister] said this very calmly. I
hadn't known that he was about to be sentenced for draft resistance. It hit me
as a total surprise and shock, because I heard his words in the midst of actually
feeling proud of my country listening to him. And then I heard he was going to
prison. It wasn't what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the
example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed that he
was a stellar American, and that he was going to jail as a very deliberate
choice—because he thought it was the right thing to do. There was no question
in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to
continue and get larger.” Source
Ellsberg decided to release The Pentagon Papers. These were
documents that made clear the hubris and hypocritical decisions that were
affecting soldiers on the ground in Vietnam. Though many of us suspected that
what was contained in these documents was already common knowledge, to make it
public and verifiable was a big step. I would argue that his actions—and the
subsequent publishing of the papers in the NY
Times and Washington Post—hastened
the end of the Vietnam War (as the Wikileaks data leaks have, in my opinion,
hastened the ending of the U.S.-backed invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan).
Ellsberg was, like his inspiration Kehler, willing to face
the consequences and publicly surrendered to the Boston DA's office,
facing charges that carried a maximum sentence of 115 years. In admitting to
giving the documents to the press, Ellsberg said:
“I
felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer
cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this
clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences
of this decision.” Source
Is there a contemporary equivalent to these actions? If we,
as citizens, feel an injustice, an immoral act is being committed in our name,
in our nations name—is this a model of an effective way to draw attention to
it? To effect change?
It’s sometimes dangerous—a young woman who sat down in front
of some Israeli bulldozers as a protest against illegal settlements was killed.
That’s worse than the threat of going to prison. One aspect of this kind
non-violent of protest is the fact that it relies on media being present.
Otherwise, it doesn’t draw attention to the issue, and similarly, the action
has to be done publicly. Me privately deciding not to pay taxes that go towards the
invasion of Iraq, to take a hypothetical example, doesn’t serve as a protest
unless I crank up a publicity machine, let everyone know I’m doing this as a
protest, and then willingly face the consequences.
I’ve been following the canonization of young Aaron Swartz—the coder, hacker, and
digital rights activist—after his recent tragic suicide. For those who haven’t
been following this, it seems he illegally hacked his way into an MIT database
that contained many, many academic and technical papers and downloaded them
onto his hard drive, rather than paying for access. Why did he do this? Do we
know?
It took a little poking in the Internet, but it seems this
theft of data was Swartz’s own form of civil disobedience. Here is what he
wrote:
“Information is power. But like all power, there are
those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and
cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is
increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private
corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the
sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed
Elsevier.” Source
Later in his manifesto he suggests “liberating” this data
that is “locked up”:
“Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly
by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating
the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark,
hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of
knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its
crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded
by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.” Source
So, we can assume he covertly stole the data to draw
attention to a perceived injustice—that he felt that the academic papers in the
JSTOR archive were unfairly behind a paywall and should be available to all.
Following the imperative of his manifesto one might assume he was going to give
them all away—to make them free, as he thought they should be. He didn’t. (He
certainly wasn’t going to sell them himself.)
His theft was done surreptitiously, so it seems he didn’t
want to get caught in the act, though maybe he thought it was going to be OK
and he wouldn’t actually get caught. Sort of an unreasonable assumption given
that someone makes money on this stuff—but given his skills as a coder and
hacker, maybe not an unreasonable assumption. We also might assume that he was then going to proudly and
publicly announce that he had “liberated” these documents to draw attention to
his position. This public “liberation” would also be a sort of “come and get
me” action. Like the Civil Rights activists, he would, one might assume, be
willing to face the consequences in order to draw attention to this perceived
injustice. I don’t think he did that either. He was a disturbed young man, and
seems to have hesitated in carrying out the typical civil disobedience agenda.
What bothered him so much about this archive of data behind
a paywall?
What’s the deal with these academic archives? How do they
typically work?
Like music and movies that are legally controlled by
copyright holders—typically movie studios or record companies—many academic databases
contain papers and other material that are proprietary. Institutions or
individuals therefore have to subscribe to access them or pay a fee to get to
download these papers. LexisNexis is one such academic site in which the
material is protected by a pay wall; Swartz downloaded his documents from a
similar database called JSTOR. Needless to say, he didn’t pay for them.
Where does the money that subscribers pay to these services
go? Do the poor academics who did the research and wrote the papers get some
part of those fees? One would hope so, but I have my doubts that they get very
much of it. Academics get paid by their institutions, and are obliged, but not
paid, to publish papers like the ones stored in JSTOR. They don’t necessarily
get paid for publishing these papers, but they have to do so to eventually get
tenure and keep up their academic standing. They usually publish their work in various
academic print journals, and it is often the journals that by default post their
papers on JSTOR or similar sites. The academic is, one might say, coerced into
placing their work behind the paywall. Record companies who own the copyright
on many of my recordings place those recordings in places where I might not
wish them to be—it’s an ongoing battle… another story. JSTOR and others funnel
their income to the journals who own the rights to the papers. One hopes the
journals would pass some of that income on to the writers. This reminds me of
my own pathetic income from Spotify and other services that record companies
place my recordings on—the income I get is so small that it’s essentially
nothing.
While I can empathize both with academics who might either
want to monetize their research or those who might want to make it freely
available to all—the choice, ideally, should be the authors’. One would assume
that this is one of the issues young Swartz was trying to draw attention to.
LeeAnn Rossi writes—in
the case of JSTOR, institutions pay a one-time Archive Capital Fee (which
fluctuates based on size of institution and amount of access to documents
granted) plus an Annual Access Fee. From the breakdown of their 2008 tax
documents, it looks like they [JSTOR] made $43m and had expenditures of $35m,
giving them an $8m profit (they're registered as a non-profit organization). Of
those expenditures, $8.3m were under the line item "Publisher's Fees and
Payments", though there is no breakdown for how the Publisher accounts to
the Author on the backend. From this
article—it sounds like the name of the game in the academic world is that
authors and scientists don't get paid for their peer-reviewed work in journals
or on databases at all. Another
anti-academic publishing article ironically ends with a nod to this
article, which you can't read because it's behind a paywall.
Ultimately that is all irrelevant, the point is the owners
of this material have their work behind these pay walls. The authors were
coerced maybe, unfairly, probably, but there it is. It’s legal. Unfair maybe,
but legal. Swartz, as I understand it, was an advocate for “free”—that all of
this information (and presumably much other copyrighted material) created by
others should ideally be free and available to all. Information, especially
scientific and academic information, should, in this view, be intrinsically
shared. Information, like that contained in these papers, is what scholars use
to inspire themselves and it often serves a foundation for their own research.
They therefore don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they begin some
avenue of research—which would cause research to proceed at a snails pace.
Archives like JSTOR also, according to Swartz, buy up
research and papers that are in the public domain, lock them up and then privatize
them, as a way of profiting from works that were once available to all.
LeeAnn writes again—He was mostly
fighting against what he saw as corporations owning and profiting off of
something that was produced and owned by individuals who not only never
recieved any compensation for their work, but also never produced it with
profit in mind in the first place.
There is a big difference in my opinion between using
someone else’s work as inspiration and as a stepping-stone and using that work—or work that incorporates that work—as a way to make money. I am happy, for
example, for people to slice and dice my recordings, for example, recordings
they have legally obtained, and play around with them to their hearts content
as long as they don’t decide to make money from their work—either directly or
indirectly. I am, I think, quite open about sharing income if someone builds on
my work—but the crucial concept is “share”. (I have to point out that even posting
songs on YouTube these days is in fact selling something—it is monetizing
someone else’s work. YouTube makes money on the ads that are all over their
site. It’s not an altruistic “sharing service”.)
But back to civil disobedience. Swartz stole the material,
pure and simple, and he seems to feel that he and others have, in this case,
the right to steal because they are beholden to a higher moral standard. I am
sort of fine with this if he’s willing to accept the consequences, as Ellsberg and
the Civil Rights activists were. I sort of feel the same way about Wikileaks—though
much of the data they make available wasn’t “stolen” by them, they do know that
under many nation’s laws disseminating that data is illegal. (Significantly,
the NY Times and Washington Post were not prosecuted for printing the Pentagon
Papers—though Nixon tried to do so—and these same papers were not thrown in
jail for printing Wikileaks excerpts.) And as much as I’m glad they made the
horrors of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq obvious, Assange might face jail under
U.S. law—though I’m happy that more corporate and military misbehaviors are
made public.
If Ellsberg and the Civil Rights activists were willing to
go to jail, should Assange and Swartz and (Oh jeez, am I writing this?) poor
Bradley Manning be willing go to jail too?
I’m going to shift the subject for a minute.
I wonder where one draws the line with “higher morality”
used as a justification for breaking the law. When do acts based on one’s moral
indignation become unjustified? I empathize with many of the actions above, but
there are also acts made by those who similarly claim to be impelled by a
higher moral calling that I find repellant and horrible.
Lots of religious fanatics claim to be acting based on
higher moral standards—and they’re quite public about it: lunatics, building
bombers, abortion clinic bombers. Lots of wars have been fought by the U.S. and
others based on claims that God is on our side—as an argument it’s pretty
risky. In the case of civil disobedience, a lot depends on public opinion and
how the media delivers the news of the action to that public. In some cases, it
is assumed that the civil disobedience is not doing a lot of harm—unlike abortion
clinic bombings mentioned above. No one was harmed by Rosa Parks, certainly,
but I’m sure the Nixon administration made a case that Ellsberg’s leaks damaged
national security—as the Obama administration has done with the Wikileaks
material.
In civil disobedience actions it’s critical how the acts
play out in public—that the perception be that they have done good, not harm.
This reminds me of the way the
entertainment industries often overreacted to kids and grannies who were busted
for file sharing (downloading copyright material without paying for it). By
overreacting, the institutions helped folks to empathize with those they were
prosecuting.
However, Swartz fought back. If Swartz had admitted the
theft and publicized his willingness to go to jail, as did the civil
disobedience activists above, thereby bringing attention to the inordinate
punishment he was receiving and to the inequities of databases like JSTOR, then
he might have better made his point—in my opinion. In my opinion this was a bad
move. He was, as I have read, a disturbed young man who maybe sadly wasn’t
quite psychologically ready to be a Gandhi figure—should he have realized this
ahead of time?
I am reminded how Jean Valjean, who stole a loaf of bread in
the novel Les Mis, was unfairly
punished by the authorities—which highlighted the need to overthrow the
royalty.
In much of the recent discussion, Swartz is portrayed as a
martyr. The fact that, yes, he is also legally a thief, is almost never
mentioned. The emphasis tends towards lauding his advocacy (see higher
principals, above) and there is often mention of his known mental instability,
a fact that made him particularly susceptible to the kinds of harassment the
Feds seem to have engaged in.
I don’t disagree with many of Swartz’s points. I can
certainly see the point that much academic data, when freely available, can
have a greater chance to spur insights and creativity from researchers and
scientists around the world than if it is locked up behind paywalls. Withholding
cancer research from academics who can’t afford access because a big
pharmaceutical company “owns” the data doesn’t seem like a very morally
defensible position—even if it is what the law might say is perfectly legal.
But who then decides what data “deserves” to be stolen and
“liberated”? There are all sorts of data. Some of it is—though I hate to admit
it—possibly essential to our security, and some is strictly personal and
deserves to stay that way. It’s complicated, and this particular case seems
messy—though Swartz’s points are mostly valid… but maybe his method was sloppy.
Before we arrived in Australia there
was a long drought, followed by brush fires that raged all over the continent.
Tasmania was hit hard. Hundreds of people lost their homes, and a massive
amount of forests and farmland were turned into weird surreal landscapes of
black dead trees surmounting hills of ash. Here is what’s left of a home maybe
70km from Hobart:
The hills beyond are all burnt trees. I
think the fires swept through so fast that the tress were not consumed, not
turned to dust—but their bark and all the brush is gone. Here’s a bit of woods
bordering the road where the power lines (the light green bit) have fallen and
the power lines themselves dangle over the trees!
Sometimes a house reduced to cinders
would be next to one that seemed relatively untouched; sometimes one side of
the road was covered in ashes and the other side was green. The fires took
weird destructive paths, sometimes jumping over hills and even across some
bodies of water.
So, a week before we arrived in
Tasmania, when we were already in Australia, I got an email from Jherek
Bischoff—bass player, composer and arranger—who was touring with Amanda Palmer,
but was now is supporting her husband, Neil Gaiman. He was already in touch
with the festival folks and it seems there was an initiative to do a hastily
organized benefit for the fire victims the day after our show. It happened that
I was planning to stay on for a couple of days anyway, to check out the day
hikes not too far from Hobart, so I agreed to participate. Annie joined as
well, singing harmony. We were the opening act—joined by a string quartet, the
drummer from Midnight Oil, and Neil. I had some string charts emailed from my
office in NY and Jherek hastily composed an arrangement for “And She Was”. It
wasn’t super well rehearsed, but it felt great and seemed to go over well. The
bigger rock acts followed later in the evening—some big names from the Aussie
rock pantheon chipped in.
Scenery
The following day I did manage to get
in a couple of hikes. Down to the nearby Tasman Peninsula I drove, past the
fire damage. There’s a national park there and spectacular scenery. This arch is right off the road near Eaglehawk
Neck:
Further on I took a dirt road to some
less visited hikes.
On this one I was the only person on
the 1½ hour hike to a lookout near Waterfall Bay. I thought to myself, “No
twisted ankle or injury—as no one is likely to come by here and there’s no cell
service.” Here’s a chimney viewed from the cliff walk:
After fish and chips at a café in
Nubeena, I headed for another hike at the very base of the peninsula—Cape Raoul.
Quite a long hike this one—4 hours, and I didn’t make it to the end. I got as
far as the flat area in the distance, and then realized I’d have a long uphill
slog on the way back, so I didn’t proceed to the point. Spectacular.
Nearby, forking off this trail to the
cape, was another 2-hour trail that leads to one of the most famous surf breaks
in Australia—Ship Stern Bluff. There it is, at the point.
How surfers found it is a wonder—maybe they
saw it from a boat or from these cliffs and hiked down with their boards. God
forbid anything happened to them on a day with big waves, as there’s no way in
or out except hiking. Look at the size of these waves! You’ve got to be
kidding!
Lots of road kill visible on the roads
down here—sadly some small kangaroos and other critters. A bounty for the Tasmanian
devils, who like their meat dead and have jaws strong enough to crunch through
bone.
A couple of years ago I was told about this wild museum in
Tasmania called MONA, The Museum of Old
and New Art, by English record producer Nick
Launay (he just did the Yeah
Yeah Yeah’s new CD). It’s the vision of David
Walsh, who made his money coding odds-based programs—for betting on (and
usually winning) horse races, amongst other pursuits. He’s banned from quite a
few casinos.
He decided to collect art of many sorts with his newfound
wealth, and a few years ago opened this museum just a few miles upriver from
Hobart. From the land, the building seems a modest, two-story structure with
a slightly incongruous tennis court in front… and a silver reflective entry
portal.
We arrived by ferry, though, and the view from the water allows
one to see that the building is actually a massive structure dug out into the
hillside.
The inside has few windows and has been described as being
like the lair of a super villain in a Bond movie or the ultimate Batcave. That
does give some idea—it’s a pretty cool bunker that is part quarry, part temple.
There are no wall labels. None. One is provided with an iPod
touch on entry that, via a kind of
Mona GPS, can tell where you are. You then tap on a thumbnail of a piece if you
want to know more about the art in front of you. “Know more” is divided into
various subcategories. Ideas is a
sentence or two about the work beyond who made it. Artwank, is, as you might expect, some scholarly essay on the piece
or the artist—the symbol for this category is a cock and balls. The Gonzo button usually led to a more
personal reaction to the piece from Walsh or Elizabeth Mead, who helped in
collecting a lot of the stuff. It might be a poem, an amusing anecdote or
something that seems almost completely off topic—like trouble with a boyfriend.
Lastly there is Media, which often
consists of a casual audio interview with the artist, but sometimes could be
something else entirely. One media file connected to an assisted suicide
machine consisted of Walsh talking about how a similar machine was used by his
brother, who had terminal cancer. It was blunt, straightforward and very moving.
As you can see, there are also love and hate buttons. I
pressed “love” quite a few times. I NEVER pressed hate once. These tallies of
like and dislike elicit more information—how many other people liked too, for
example. There is an amusing rumor that if a work becomes too popular Walsh
will remove it. If you offer up your email address, the thing will track your
visit via GPS and then send you a link to a website showing you what you saw.
Here’s mine:
You can also find out from this site what you missed—I think
I saw most of it.
The collection itself is pretty eclectic, something I found
admirable and inspiring. In keeping with the name of the museum there were
Egyptian mummies next to contemporary art, work by indigenous artists next to a
Brancusi. It wasn’t random, there was a sensibility behind the mixing and
matching, and it seemed to appeal to all sorts of visitors. This was a museum
that folks who are suspicious of contemporary art could and do love.
That said, much of the contemporary work
did benefit from the little iPod explanations—there was often some narrative or
story that illuminated the work beyond just its visual appeal. The Santiago
Sierra piece listed above, for example, showed the skin color of the folks who
work at a museum in Caracas. These were then arranged dark to light, a kind of
gray scale of skin. The light to darker skin tones corresponded, not
surprisingly, with class, position and income. This you wouldn’t have known
unless you read a bit of the ancillary material. That said, these “conceptual”
works mostly weren’t insular works that only referred to the art world, as some
works of this type do.
The current show, which is in addition to the regular
collection, is called “Theater of the World” and occupies a whole floor. It was
organized by an outside curator, and he more or less colored within the lines—mixing
things in Wunderkammer
rooms, in which work from a variety of sources were grouped together, sometimes
by material or theme. Here is one such work—a chest of drawers with bones on
the outside, an indigenous ritual piece from Papua New Guinea also made of
bone, a Marina Abramovic video (installed like a somewhat disturbing digital
family album on the chest of drawers), and a painting at least 100 years old.
An eclectic mix, but with a guiding principal.
Some actual old cabinets were filled like real Wunderkammer, as well. They’d typically include ritual objects, geological specimens, bones,
contemporary Chinese porcelain pieces, and maybe an Egyptian funerary urn.
A group of us spent about 3 hours there, and we could have
taken longer, but we had a sound check to get to.
Did it work? Does this popular museum serve as an example
that others might follow, or is it one man’s eccentric indulgence?
It’s not completely unprecedented. I remember a show at the Pompidou
called “Magicians of the Earth” that mixed and juxtaposed work by indigenous
artists with contemporary works that seemed similar in their evocations of
ritual and spirituality. In that show you had Richard Serra steel slabs
alongside non-representational tribal work. Or maybe a feathered mask from the
Amazon would be juxtaposed with a Rebecca Horn piece. In that show all the
pieces were, despite their disparate origins, contemporary—they were all made
recently. It was a show that
claimed to be “against exclusion”. The show at Pompidou was the work of Jean-Hubert Martin, who, not
surprisingly, did this one at MONA as well.
It was controversial, as I remember. Some felt the work by
indigenous artists was being romanticized or taken so far outside of its
original context as to risk obliterating the piece’s true meaning.
One could say the same for most of the art in museums—art
that is more than 200 years old anyway. More recent art was made to be
displayed museum-style, but a Renaissance painting ripped from an Italian
church altarpiece is just as out of context as the indigenous art at MONA, as
are Grecian urns and the Roman statues (without their once garish colors) in so
many big-city museums. While the notion that many of these pieces lose some
meaning out of their original context might hold true, it’s also true that
works shorn of context are what museums (except contemporary ones) are all
about. I, myself, love the juxtapositions—as one could easily claim that a lot
of contemporary art is essentially our own ritual objects, when they’re not
self-referential or simply status baubles for the uber rich. (Full disclosure—I
did music for some films that were done for the “Magicians of the Earth” show.)
Did the lack of wall labels hurt? I don’t think so. Although
some works only made sense when you knew more about them, the lack of labels is
an attempt to urge us to engage with the piece, if only for a moment, without
the words leading the way. That said I did spend a fair amount of time checking
the iPod—listening to the artists talking about their own work, and to Walsh
and others giving their very personal, non-academic commentary. These audio
commentaries were often a little irreverent. One of our group said they heard
one in which a phone rang in the background, then the artist being interviewed
was told by some unnamed person, “You’ve got a call”, and the interview
abruptly ended. In a way, this whole museum is an installation—a massive piece,
an experience unto itself. Almost anything installed here becomes part of the
MONA experience. It’s certainly not as faux-neutral as a place like MOMA or the
Tate. Art in those places becomes part of those experiences as well—it just
happens to be the white-room-experience we accept as given. The lighting here
is moody and the architecture is present—not at all white-cube-invisible (as if
white cubes are invisible).
It was MONA that sponsored our visit to Hobart—they have been sponsoring
a music and performance festival that runs for about a week there every January.
It’s curated by Brian Ritchie, from the Milwaukee band Violent Femmes. He’s
doing a great job. A couple of days before us were Dirty Projectors, as well as
a woman who played drums while being submerged in the river (she wore scuba
gear and kept playing).
Word has gotten out, and
lots of folks flock from Melbourne (the nearest really big city) to catch stuff
that is outside of the regular touring circuit. So many people came to our show
that they opened the sidewalls of the venue (it was in a giant shed on a wharf)
so that people outside the hall could see and hear. None of them fell off into
the water as far as I could tell, though drinks were consumed. There was a big New Yorker article on Walsh and MONA a few weeks ago, so the museum as an attraction is only going to get bigger. Titling
the New Yorker piece “Tasmanian
Devil” rather than say, “The Future of The Museum” might lead one to not take
the whole thing seriously, but the article isn’t as sensational as it sounds. Overall
it gives the impression that MONA is something really special, deeply moving,
personal, and worth travelling to see—though Tasmania is a long, long way.
Had a day off in Sydney before heading to Tasmania, so I took
advantage of our being part of the Sydney Festival and got a ticket to Verdi’s Masked Ball
directed by La Fura dels Baus,
a longstanding Barcelona-based experimental theater group.
First of all, the opera house is NOT the building that is
usually pictured in the postcard views of Sydney—that is the symphony hall. The
opera house is the smaller, almost identical building that is often hidden
behind it. In the photo below, the opera house is on the left.
The production was set in some indeterminate Orwellian
dystopia. As the pit orchestra played the overture, a pretty spectacular film
of body parts with texts and mirrored masks was projected on a scrim. This flew up to
reveal the giant set which consisted of industrial columns that could move up
and down (where is the fly-space in this building?). When this part of the set
was down it resembled a concrete freeway underpass—a weird urban dead zone out
of a J. G. Ballard novel. A false ceiling of fluorescent panels flew in; it
looked like office lighting. Like the columns, the fluorescent ceiling could
also be raised and lowered—sometimes with “watcher” characters on board,
looking over railings above the lights.
All the actors wore business suits that were visibly
numbered, as well as weird headpiece appliances that covered their ears and
made them all look like bald clones. I liked it.
This being a Verdi opera, there were plenty of catchy tunes.
(Maybe the piece had been compressed a little? The running time was only 2 ½
hours.) The hits came about every 10 minutes. I left singing a particularly
ironic one in my head, which is what is supposed to happen. (This particular
tune was ironic because the tune itself is jaunty, but it’s sung by some
conspirators who are up to no good—it’s a foreshadowing of bad things to come.)
Of course I’m watching all this thinking, “Budget!”. It’s no
accident that “experimental” or “downtown” composers and theater directors
angle to get gigs in the opera world—where else could one have the budget to
indulge in a vision like this!
What does the dystopian vibe have to do with Verdi’s opera
and its narrative? Not a whole lot, though the opera is certainly set in a
royal court full of intrigues and political (and sexual) rivalries—not much has
changed. And one could argue that the “masks” could be viewed, metaphorically,
as the face one puts on to one’s peers and to meet the public.
Does Verdi need updating? Probably not, though the spectacular staging
was part of what one was paying to see. Did it give the piece a new
contemporary resonance and meaning? I dunno about that either. One ultimately
wishes for new works with the tunefulness of Verdi, or equivalent musical
impact, that fit a staging as revolutionary as this one.
The temperature today was 44˚C—which is 114˚ F. It’s scary.
A group of us went by ferry to Manly
for a bike ride and a hike to the cliffs. We didn’t go all the way to the
headlands, though—it was too hot.
Bari sax player Jon Natchez did some digging on why the area is called Manly and found out the beach was named by Capt. Arthur Phillip for the indigenous people living there. Phillip wrote that "their confidence and manly behavior made me give the name of Manly Cove to this place." (Source)
After getting completely sweaty, we had an incredible meal
of oysters and what they call bugs at the Fish Café, adjacent to a small fish
market.
Bugs are from Moreton Bay, up north where it’s more
tropical. They’re like something out of H.P. Lovecraft. A
creature that has survived from another slightly weirder era, possibly derived
from an extraterrestrial spore—definitely somewhat prehistoric.
They are very tasty. They are served sliced right down the
middle—the meat fills the back half, which like a lobster or shrimp, curls
under. However, the front half and underside more resembles a crab.
Then we went for a brief swim. We had just come out of the
water when the lifeguard made two announcements. One advised to be careful of
the rip currents. He said, “You may be a good swimmer in a pool, but that
doesn’t mean you know how to swim in surf.” The second announcement advised
that the change in wind was bringing in some Bluebottles (stinging jellyfish)
and he went on: “Unless you have a high threshold for pain we suggest you get
out of the water immediately.” Not everyone did, but we sure weren’t going back
in.
Here is where I should have my next publicity picture done:
I’ll have to make do with this self-portrait taken in one of
the Anish Kapoor sculptures on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art that
are here as part of the Festival.
Yesterday a group of us were
invited by Pete Lawler of the band Weddings Parties
Anything to visit the Percy
Grainger museum here in Melbourne. A group of us grabbed local bike share
bikes ($2.70 for 24 hours!) and mandatory helmets ($5 at the local 7-Eleven,
with a $3 rebate if you return your helmet!) and headed towards the university.
We were met by Monica Syrette and Brian Allison, curators at the museum, who
explained a little about the museum and Grainger before we began our viewing.
Grainger was a turn of the last
century composer, most known for some band arrangements that almost every
school band learns.
He was also a lot of other
things—among them a famous concert pianist who played worldwide. Band students
aren't told about all the varied aspects of his life, however he stipulated
that it should all be laid bare when his life's work was presented in this
biographical museum. His idea was that every aspect of a creative person’s life
has some bearing on their work. So this museum has rooms about his dad, who
built bridges and civic buildings around Australia (when he was sober), and his
mother, whose dresses are on display. It’s an admirable idea—to include more
context in the presentation of an artist’s work—though how much of his
attachment to his mum and her tragic suicide shows up in his composing is
questionable.
In his later years, Grainger
developed an aversion to English words with Latin roots—so the word “museum”
was, in this system, to be replaced with the term “Hoard House”. He hoped this
was what all museums would henceforth be called. I agree. The Guggenheim Hoard
House, the Hoard House of Modern Art—let’s be honest about what these places
are.
He lived in England for a while
and is remembered there as a folk song collector, and some of his compositions
show this influence. One of his famous tunes was called “Lincolnshire Posy”. In
the U.S. he is remembered as a concert pianist and composer. and in Australia
he is virtually unknown (this could be disputed, as most in Australia are at
least familiar with his arrangement of the folk tune “Country Gardens”). We
have, it seems, many biographies.
He had many diverse interests and
felt that artists were always in danger of being pigeonholed for one thing—I
have to agree. Here is a quote from him:
“The artist is not (as so many so called ‘inartistic’ people seem to
like to believe) a being supernaturally gifted with skill for some branch of
art. To sing, make music, paint, draw, carve and dance is natural to all
humanity, and it is only a lopsided civilisation, mad on ‘specialisation’, that
scares the ‘tame cats’ of humanity into abandoning their natural right to an
allround manysided life.” Source
Here’s another quote—a sort of
early idea regarding emergent art forms:
“I don’t especially
value ‘originality’ in art, as I consider the communal development of folksongs
is no whit inferior to the original achievement of a great outstanding
‘original’ genius. It is the universal that pulls me in all matters and I am
more thrilled by these points that all people have in common than in the
special achievements and specialness of individuals.” Source
He was the definition of an
iconoclast. At one point he and his wife had the idea to design clothing made
of towels.
This was not just some idle wacky
whim. Grainger had a thorough justification for these outfits:
“My mother was devoted to Lafcadio Hearn’s stories of Japan and she
worshipped many aspects of Japanese civilization—for instance its cleanliness.
And she and I often discussed the filthiness of European clothes: men’s coats
in which the sweat of years is allowed to gather, our shoes that bring the dirt
of the streets into our homes. And around 1910 (after we had both been fired by
the beauty of Maori and South Sea island clothes and fabrics seen in museums in
New Zealand and Australia) my mother mooted the idea of clothes made
of Turkish towels – cool in summer, warm in the winter, and washable at
all times.” Source
He actually wore these outfits
while teaching and writing, and he was assisted in making them by both his
mother and his wife.
“Between
1910 and 1914 I wore these clothes while giving many of my lessons in London
and continually during my composing holidays in Denmark. In 1932 or 1933 my wife and I took up again this
idea of clothing made of towelling and when in Australia in 1934 and 1935
we were amazed by the beauty of
the bath towels on sale in Australia—some imported from England, Chekoslovakia
and America, but most of them (and among them the most beautiful ones)
manufactured in Australia.” Source
And here he proposes a proto-Bauhaus
idea—the beauty and practicality of machine-made objects:
“Here was
a chance to show what could be done with the beauty born of machinery—a beauty
as rich and subtle, in its own way, as anything made by hand or loom. The
problem was to use the towels with as little cutting and sewing as possible,
and in this skill my wife shone.” Source
Now, you might be thinking, “Hold
on, this guy is crazy!” You might also be thinking, “This guy is straight?” One
could say he simply had the courage to indulge in his own very forward and
original ideas. The kinky sex part will come later.
In later years he got fed up with
performing, claiming—like Glenn Gould would many years later—that the music he
conceived was not translating accurately into scores or performance. The music
he was writing was getting quite complicated, and was often scored for unusual
instruments. Here’s a piece for an imaginary ballet:
His idea was to “free” music.
Some of his compositions at this time were free of a central tonality and were
in this sense way ahead of their time. These avenues of inquiry eventually led
to the invention of a host of oddball electronic instruments—including one that
plays via rolls of cardboard, which he called the Kangaroo Pouch machine. Here
it is in the Graingers’ house in White Plains, NY:
The cardboard rolls scrolled from
one side to the other, and the sheets were cut much like a range of hills and
valleys. Small rollers ran along the crests of these “hills”, which caused the
attached arms of various levers to go up and down and effect a change in the
pitch of 4 oscillators. The resulting music was a bit like a series of sirens,
all going up and down at different times. Not as unpleasant as it might sound.
You can hear a recording here.
Following Grainger’s wish that
nothing in his life be left out in the Hoard House we come to the biggest
surprise—the "Lust Branch". He left a trunk that he stipulated wasn't
to be opened until 10 years after his death, so the University held a big
ceremony for the trunk opening. What kind of wonders and unpublished musical
scores might be inside?
When they opened it up it was
filled with, amongst other things, bloody shirts, a large collection of whips,
diagrams showing various ways to be whipped, and photos of his naked backside
covered in bloody whip welts.
...they quickly put it all back
in the box. But by deeming that the lust collection be included in the Hoard House
it was clear that he wasn’t ashamed of his both sadistic and masochistic
leanings.
“I am a sadist & a
flagellant—my highest sexual delight is to whip a beloved woman’s body… To a
lesser degree I enjoy being whipped myself (& before marriage used to whip
myself every few weeks)…” Source
He knew the contents of the box would cause an uproar, but he wasn’t
trying to hide it and didn’t seem to think it was sinful or anything like that.
His wife even aided him in his painful desires or was the willing victim in
some cases one might assume—so it was a family arrangement. Here he wrote to
his future bride, "I shall thoroly thoroly (sic)
understand if you cannot in any way see yr way to follow up this hot wish of
mine." (Source) But she did manage his
hot wish, and they got married in a ceremony that capped a concert at the
Hollywood Bowl!
Grainger had what we would
now define as a dark side. Ever since he was a boy he was enamored of Norse
myths and tales, and he felt that these were obviously the product of an
extremely creative people. Not to take anything away from the Scandanavians,
but Grainger had a theory that Northern people were more creative than
Southern. By Southern he meant the Mediterranean people. He felt that Italian
composers and operas were overrated—this included the Semitic people and
composers whose symphonies were popular.
Grainger went so far as to take a
series of pictures of the eyes of composers and musicians he came in contact
with to show that the blue-eyed ones were superior. Oddly, this odd theory or
prejudice didn’t diminish his respect and admiration for other groups outside
of those he disdained—he was a big Duke Ellington fan in later years, for
example. He brought the Ellington big band down to his classes at NYU to
expound on the ingenious and novel approaches the Duke had taken to
arrangements. This was well before jazz was taken seriously in academia.
To further these ends Grainger went so far as to develop “Blue-Eyed
English”—a version of the English language purged of all Latinisms. Of course,
so much of our language has Latin roots that what he ended up with was
something truly bizarre. I’ll wrap this post up with this glossary
“translation” of many common words into Blue-Eyed English:
Here is a NY Times
photo of the children of the Mullets—the Amish clan in Ohio where 16 members,
led by charismatic elder Samuel Mullet Sr., went on a tonsorial rampage,
cutting off the hair of many of their neighbors, whom they claimed were
deviating from the true path. This has nothing to do with the hair style often
referred to as the mullet. At least I don’t think so.
Part of that is the similar dress, but a big part is the
composition and POV, which seems to be a slightly elevated, psychologically
objective view. Whether the photographer or editor was aware of this
coincidence—consciously or subconsciously—and chose the picture and cropped it
accordingly, is a puzzle. The prevalence of these similarities makes me think
that there might be archetypical visual compositions we unconsciously gravitate
towards. It’s not a new idea. John Berger, the writer and art critic, wrote
about this phenomenon many years ago, noting the striking similarity
between this picture of the murdered Che and the Rembrandt painting of an
anatomy lesson:
Do we have artwork pre-existing in our brains? Have we
evolved to find certain patterns and images more resonant than others? It
sounds ridiculous when I put it that way, but these similarities occur over and
over—the images are powerful, memorable, and iconographic.
Oliver Sacks, in his new book, Hallucinations, goes further. Sacks suggests that religious imagery
and popular, powerful iconography come from neurological processes which are
sometimes the result of damage or injuries or other phenomena that happen
fairly frequently. The kinds of images the brain creates—sometimes abstract
shapes and sometimes emotionally evocative scenes—fall into recognizable patterns.
Angels, spiders, doppelgangers (some of whom are imagined to be bent on
replacing oneself), witches and their cats, tunnels with light at the end, out
of body experiences, fractured stained glass-type patterns, and cubist
fragmented reality—they all, Sacks implies, have natural, though sometimes
extraordinary, explanations. We often ascribe spiritual explanations to these
phenomena, as they are so peculiar and moving—no other explanation is
available.
Does this explain the similar composition in the photo of
Che and Rembrandt’s Lesson? What
about the seemingly elevated out of body POV in the photo of the Mullet
children and the Bruegel painting? Are there neurological explanations as to
why we find ourselves drawn to these images?
But back to the haircuts.
The folks who were inspired (but not directed, Mullet Sr.
claims) by their elder all belong to the extended Mullet family, who live in a
rural area of Eastern Ohio. They felt that some of their neighbors were
straying from the path, getting too influenced by the “English” (their word for
American mainstream culture), and needed to be punished as a way of getting
them to straighten up. In Amish culture, as in some other religious groups,
one’s hair and beard are sacred. They are not just hairstyles but symbols of
one’s faith, and they are an important part of one’s personal standing in the
community. To have them violated is a grave and profound humiliation, a
disfigurement, a mark of shame. So, to make their point these enforcers
kidnapped their victims and cut their hair and beards.
Obviously, as with the recent child molesting issues in the
Brooklyn Hasidic community, they wanted to keep these matters within their community. They hoped that their system of justice would handle it quietly and
no outsiders would catch wind what was going on.
Something
went wrong in Ohio, though, and the haircutters got arrested.
Because of the profound effect these attacks had on the
victims, they were considered hate crimes, and these people are facing serious
jail sentences. As outsiders, we can understand punishing someone for
kidnapping—that seems to be accepted as a serious social infraction—but haircutting?
Look at those haircuts! In another context one might think that having an
acceptable Amish haircut would be humiliating all by itself! One is asked to
imagine the damage the hair and beard cuts did to those within the community
and not just consider what they would mean to us.
A friend wonders what will happen to those dancing children.
If
all of the accused go to jail, then the whole community is not only left
without moms and dads, they are left without caretakers and breadwinners—no
sources of income. Won’t the communities then collapse, and are the children
therefore being punished for the misbehavior of their parents?
Well, yeah, and my thought is “That’s what happens when a
parent goes to jail.” The difference here is that this is a whole community
that is being gutted, while we assume that other parents in jail result in
isolated cases of families being destroyed, not a whole community. But that’s
not true—the majority of dads in jail in the U.S. are black and Hispanic. One
could certainly say that those communities have been similarly gutted, and that
their children have been forced to grow up in extraordinary circumstances.
I tend to believe that one has to live in a way that doesn’t
harm others, and that if harm is done then the society can be empowered to deal
with it. That means that—in my view—gay sex, plural marriage, punk songs sung
in church, and bad haircuts don’t really do any harm—probably none at all if both
parties are consenting adults. But the kidnapping and lack of consent regarding
the haircuts does indeed cross a line.
My friend, who is a mother, might see things from a mother’s
point of view, and automatically think “What will happen to the children?” She might think that the long-term damage done to them is possibly
worse than the damage inflicted by the kidnappings and haircuts. That’s
probably true, but only because they were just—in our “English” eyes—haircuts.
If these guys had physically maimed their victims or worse, then we’d feel that
justice must be served to preserve the greater welfare and order of society—and
possibly that the destruction of their community is justified as collateral
damage.
Now we get into a really sticky issue—is the charismatic
elder, Sam Mullet Sr., who didn’t participate and (he claims) didn’t encourage
the kidnappings and haircuts, also guilty? The court says he helped plan the
crimes, so he’s guilty of telling someone else to do something.
The fact that, like Charles Manson, he didn’t actually
participate in the crimes, raises, for me, the question of free will. In its
verdict, the court believes that the perps were obliged in some way to obey the
suggestions of Mr. Mullet, and that they were therefore not in full possession
of their moral and reasoning facilities. They are excused, in some sense, as it
is accepted that they somehow felt that they had to commit these acts—they had no choice. It is assumed that our
leaders have us hypnotized.
There it is. Do we have a choice as individuals? Could these
guys have said, “Hold on a minute, we could get in serious trouble for this.”
Or “Those guys are blasphemers, but disfiguring them isn’t going to help.”
Could the Manson girls have similarly said, “No, we might be outlaws and
outsiders, but we don’t kill innocents.” Do soldiers have a similar
responsibility? We don’t hold soldiers on either side responsible for the
murders they commit—we tend to hold their leaders, the Sam Mullet’s of their
nations, responsible. (The exceptions are when the war crimes are committed by
our side, as with My Lai or Abu Ghraib—then the little soldiers become the fall
guys.)
I would like to believe that we all as individuals have the
power to step back, examine our actions, and determine whether or not they
adhere to, not just the laws of the land, but to a moral code that allows a
society to function. What if, as John and Yoko suggested, our soldiers in
Afghanistan said to themselves “Hell, they don’t want us here. We’re not doing
any good, not really. Let’s put down our guns and go home.” Granted we might
not know whether a product we buy is produced by child labor, but we certainly
know when we’re kidnapping or killing someone.
Well, it’s not a soldier’s job to see the big picture and
make individual decisions. If they did there’d be chaos and endless discussions
on the battlefield or in the drone control centers. Like a sports team, the
only way there can be success on the battlefield is if everyone pulls together
and refrains from questioning the action. Cooperation absolves one of responsibility,
it seems. If one wins a game, the whole team wins; if the team loses, it’s not
one player’s fault.
Likewise, the overly strict Mr. Mullet assumes that he is
helping the Amish community cohere, survive, and achieve spiritual unity by
punishing strays. In his view, only by cooperation can the team “win,” and
sometimes that cooperation needs to be coerced—as it does in the military
(where deserters are often shot).
