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Big brouhaha as Google and Verizon propose an arrangement which, in my understanding, constitutes a second Internet, a faster Internet, that would be created for medical, industrial and…here it comes…entertainment usage. This 2nd Internet would not be open to the public, at least not for free. So, when your streaming movie stutters and stops because little sister is video Skyping her boyfriend in the next room, you’ll say to yourself, “Hey, I thought the Internet bandwidth was, um, just there, like air.” Despite Moore’s Law the recent exponential growth expansion of some online capabilities is slowing down in certain areas. I noticed when traveling on a tour bus with wi-fi (pretty good that we had wi-fi!) that when some band members began using video Skype to chat to their loved ones, pretty soon the rest of us couldn’t get even an email in or out. Does Net Neutrality mean whoever gets to the table first gets the whole pie? I realized that with all these companies that are making a business out of the — up til now — unlimited use of high bandwidth media (YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, Apple TV…well, you get the idea), all that data sucks up most of what is in the pipeline. HD streaming movies soon to come? Forget it. Does anyone remember the days when you’d yell out, “Don’t wash the dishes, I’m going to take a shower!”? (For those who don’t, it was because a typical residential hot water heater didn’t hold enough hot water to provide for both usages simultaneously.) I’m not sure the two-tiered model is the best idea — but I’m glad they are beginning to face up to this inevitability. More and more businesses are emerging based on an assumption that consumers will be able to upload and download limitless amounts of data for a fixed monthly cable fee to their heart’s content. It’s like charging a flat fee for water, and then one day some segment of the population decides they’re going to water their golf course-sized lawns and also add a pool. The reservoirs, the farms and local industry would dry up and shrivel instantly. Phone companies have tiered data plans — if you watch a lot of TV using a mobile network on your phone, you will pay for it. I’m not sure why the same sort of idea isn’t acceptable for regular Internet. Not that the phone companies should charge if you use wi-fi on your phone — but a kind of metered data use for Internet might be reasonable. Maybe wi-fi should be free for the whole country in a capacity that allows for basic emails and some browsing, but for heavy media usage and data transfer a meter could start clicking? Danielle Spencer, Todomundo Studio Manager, responds:
Net neutrality is primarily about whether the Internet Service Providers can prioritize different types of data. The issue of tiered pricing for consumers' bandwidth usage is related but that's not the main question right now. You ask, "Does net neutrality mean whoever gets to the table first gets the whole pie?" But in fact without net neutrality it's the large corporations who are already at the table who will get the whole pie and then some. When the Fox News website streams to your household twenty times faster than the local TV station's, it'll be because Fox has paid Verizon to give consumers faster access — and that will be a barrier to entry for smaller and less wealthy corporations.
DB:
I still feel that some sort of tiered system is inevitable…but yes, one hopes it doesn't prioritize Fox or anyone else. Maybe the answer is a pricing tier for customers (not providers) in which access to content is equal at each level? Then the customer decides to pay for extra speed, not the provider. That preserves neutrality, in the sense that big companies don't have an unfair advantage.
DS:
We already have tiered pricing for consumers. For wired internet (dialup, cable, DSL, fiber optic) we pay very different rates based on maximum bandwidth usage. For mobile phones, we tend to pay based on total data usage. Now, we could implement plans for wired internet based on total usage rather than bandwidth, and it wouldn't violate the principles of net neutrality. Indeed what you describe — that at a given level everything is equal — is the fundamental principle of net neutrality. The key distinction is whether you the consumer are paying more for more speed/data, or are you paying more for the same amount of data coming from Wikipedia than from Fox because RCN Cable has decided to charge different rates? See also: "You Get What You Pay For"
We’ve seen way too many articles recently about newspapers in financial trouble: closing bureaus, cutting back on commissioned pieces that require in-depth reporting, and erecting paywalls for their online editions in an attempt to reverse the exodus of subscribers expecting to get all their news for free. While the physical print model of news journals might disappear relatively soon — which will instantly eliminate any such news source from the 1/5 of Americans who rarely use or have access to the Internet, and don’t use smart phones — it doesn’t mean that what they do also needs to end. As the future of these institutions seems increasingly in peril, I recently began to notice some of the incredibly important things they do and have done.
In the midst of further research for Here Lies Love (someday it will see the light of day as a performance!), I read that it was the San Jose Mercury News that exposed the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth. (This would have been in the ’80s.) The Philippine press was, of course, heavily censored at the time, so they couldn’t research or write about such things. This story, which of course filtered back to the Philippines, wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back over there, but it was significant in opening the eyes of the Philippine populace to what was going on behind the curtain of the New Society.
In July there was a massive series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America” (it sounds like a Team America sequel, but it’s real) detailing the massive spending and expansion of a big-beyond-belief series of agencies and outside contractors all engaged in “anti terrorist” activities. It’s hugely expensive, out of control and unaccountable. Also ineffective. It’s a huge exposé, and all the information was already public knowledge, though it required years of digging and organization to assemble a collection of coherent articles.
Just today The New York Times ran a piece about little Portugal managing to power 45% of its grid using sustainable energy after only 5 years of work (on solar, wind arrays and restructuring state utility companies). The obvious implication, to me — from the almost editorial-like nature of the article — was, “Why can’t we, the richest nation on earth, do this?” (Sustainable energy use in the US is barely 5%, and at present rate and with present policies might not catch up to Portugal in our lifetimes.) The article, as I see it, is a goad, a prod, a provocation — and proof that yes, it can be done. But not when you give oil companies massive tax breaks and offer them huge financial incentive programs; not when you don’t enforce the off shore drilling regulations that exist; and certainly not when oil guys were running the government.
These are just three examples. None of this information — or rather, the organized presentation of this information — would have come through other institutions. They simply don’t have the resources that print or TV have.
So, as we watch print media and the press struggle financially, I wonder what is to become of this segment of our democracy that is sometimes referred to as the fourth estate. This country and many others were founded on the idea that a free and open press constitutes, effectively, a separate wing of the government — keeping the other branches honest, and exposing stuff that the government, lobbyists, the military or large corporations would prefer to keep hidden. Checks and balances.
Not everyone agrees that the fourth estate is a positive force. Sometimes it’s likened to a mob, sometimes to a pack of gossips, muckrakers and scandal mongers who simply stir things up for their own pleasure, and throw their critical weight around as a way of exorcising personal psychological demons. As a performing artist I’ve had moments of agreeing with this latter assessment. But what if no one, no agency or medium, had enough popularity, readership or weight to expose situations or inform the public about some of this stuff? — never mind biased music writers. An ignorant public is a gullible public, a bunch of suckers, ripe for plucking.
The broadcast press — radio and TV — who could have picked up the slack have mostly imploded as far as serving this function. (NPR and PBS don’t have the budgets, and PBS was also under politically motivated attack.) The provocations and lies of Fox, and the celebrity focus and lack of investigation of most of the rest, render what could have been a real alternative to print invalid.
Where there used to be the occasional in-depth series on TV news shows, now there is rumormongering, inciting fear and outright lies. Most Americans get their news from TV, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they think all Muslims are somehow guilty for 9/11 or that Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda.
Although we emphasize freedom of the press, shout about it and hold it up as something worth fighting for, that freedom is worthless and irrelevant if it’s rendered nearly invisible and virtually inaudible. As they used to say in Soviet Russia: when nothing was permitted, everything was important, and now that everything is permitted, nothing is important. In the Soviet days of samizdat pamphlets, “news” carried weight, and people met and talked about what they’d heard or read. But with Russia approaching Italy’s standing as a land of media awash in bimbos, game shows and corruption, most serious news that isn’t propaganda is next to invisible in the capitalist fog of anything for entertainment.
It’s not exactly true that everything is permitted anymore, what with Putin’s crew assassinating any dissenting politician or critical journalist, but you get the point: freedom of the press approaches meaninglessness as any serious work increasingly becomes discouraged because it doesn’t sell, and the lowest common denominator of journalism takes over. Dictators don’t need to take repressive measures to silence criticism, they just need to be more entertaining.
What about the Internet? Are there web institutions or investigative sites that will step in when print journalism can’t afford to fund years of investigation and research anymore? Drudge Report? The Smoking Gun? Wikileaks? Huffington? It’s a running joke to think that you might threaten someone who had wronged you or who was harming others by saying, “Beware the power of the blogosphere!” — though we know the blogosphere has indeed righted some wrongs and uncovered injustices. But it’s not as powerful and doesn’t have the resources that the press once had.
I’m glad these online institutions exist, and the Wikileak of the Afghan material will speed the end of an invasion whose plan and purpose was never thought out in the first place. But sometimes it’s not enough to leak, cull and aggregate. Research and analysis that takes time (and money) can have a larger effect on the public and their representatives than the biggest mountains of data.
Once again though, if 1/5 of the country doesn’t or can’t or won’t use the Internet, then when and if these online alternatives become the main source for news, those people will instantly be completely disenfranchised. They will be like serfs who aren’t taught to read because, well, why bother?
If one accepts that a democracy without an informed citizenry isn’t a democracy and shouldn’t refer to itself as one, then do we need to rethink how a democracy can work in our culture the near future? Some think the hive mind and self-regulating social networks are a model — that when everyone can speak and everyone is connected then the intelligence and the checks and balances will emerge all by themselves — but I’m not sure I’m ready to believe that millions of people with very little insight and almost no information can somehow magically turn into one smart collective entity.
That said, our cells don’t know what we (think we) know — individual cells don’t all “know” how to make a whole person, for example — but in a structural sense, actually, they do. The DNA for a whole person is contained in every cell, but it’s maybe less a complete blueprint than a small (relatively, for what it accomplishes) set of rules. Like swooping, flocking birds, fish or thousands of other creatures, the behavior of some groups appears to be intelligent, but it’s not. Not in the sense of being self-aware. Is that the model for a future society of “idiots” — a kind of emergent evolutionary structure? Everyone would be given a few basic rules to follow — as if instinctively — and then a whole society eventually emerges from that? It’s more like an ant colony than what we have now. It works for them. Do we want to be more like the ants?
Part I: No More News
I mused about all this before, in a previous blog post, so this is a return to and extension of that one.
I recently read a long article in Archaeology called “Should We Clone Neanderthals?” It’s serious — various bone fragments and other bits have been found in recent years, and as gene sequencing and cloning technology have gotten faster and cheaper, it’s not pure science fiction anymore.
When I saw that headline online, I thought to myself, “Didn’t they already make that movie?” (No, I think that was about a frozen caveman.) And then I remembered, “Hey, didn’t Neanderthals have a larger brain capacity than us?” They did — not by much, but they did have bigger brains. Some scientists discount this, saying they had more body mass as well, but that was largely made up of muscle mass — in other words, they were stronger than us too. It goes on — their bones were thicker, too. One theory is that those muscles and strong bones were crucial because in their world, the taking down of game was often hands-on, with only the aid of stone tools, which were used at fairly close range. I would maintain, though the scientists don’t say it, that they might have been more quick-witted and clever than us too…in order to be able to survive in the harsh, dog eat dog conditions of the time.
Though we have always portrayed “cavemen” as lumbering dimwitted brutes, that might just be an expression of our own species-specific xenophobia; the survivor in any situation always thinks that they are superior, and their survival is the proof. But many very smart species, not to mention large chunks of human civilization, have died out, been overrun, failed to adapt or persisted in habits that were against their own best interests. We’re not the first ones to foul our own nests — we’re just not gone…yet. Evolution is not the same as progress — we’re not “getting better” as we’d like to believe, or improving along some giant timeline. We just happen to be well adapted and lucky at this particular moment. Some of our inessential abilities will wither, and others will emerge and evolve as time goes by. But better or not better is not the right way to judge what we are.
The Neanderthals did interbreed a little with Homo sapiens, the other branch of the human tree — but for the most part, their numbers started dwindling about 30,000 years ago. Maybe the environment was changing, or maybe Homo sapiens were more social, and in unity lay strength. Maybe they became too good at hunting, and depleted their own food resources; hunters require plentiful game, and wide areas of wilderness to allow that game to flourish. Maybe some of those animals disappeared or moved to other parts of the continent. Whatever happened, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Neanderthals were stupid — or at least stupider than us, which is the point.
Other abilities and traits of these folks: they could talk. They almost certainly had a language. They had religion, and ceremonies for their dead. Paleontologists surmise that their broad, projecting noses allowed them to breathe more easily when chasing prey, and also in cold weather. Total athletes, except they had short legs.
They developed more rapidly than we do. Puberty came early, and by age 15 they were fully matured. Most scientists now think they had red hair.
[Source]
Most likely, they didn’t live as long as we do — though one might question if what some of our own elderly citizens go through is really living. They were probably lactose intolerant — except as babies — as that adaptation in humans didn’t occur until recently, and even then mostly in zones of intense dairy farming. They lived in small groups or clans, and though they weren’t as social as some other proto-humans, they weren’t complete loners either. They may have had symbiotic relations with animals prevalent at that time. And like Native Americans, the Inuit and indigenous Australians, they would get drunk easily and intensely.
So, how likely is this cloning?
According to the Archaeology article, cows and goats have been cloned successfully numerous times. Dolly, the cloned sheep, was a famous precursor. But it’s not easy. The last ibex (a kind of small goat) in the Pyrenean area was felled by a tree branch in 2000, and the genetic sequence gang and clone club all made attempts to bring it back. They used her DNA to reconstruct 439 eggs. Only 57 of those developed into embryos, and most of those didn’t develop further — the one that did died of lung failure hours after being “born.” So there are no guarantees, but scientists keep trying. Given the focus and intense interest in cloning, many assume all of this will be possible and less risky before too long. A clone of a woolly mammoth is under way.
[Source]
But should we do it?
As outlined briefly above I think it’s clear that should a successful Neanderthal be “brought back,” he or she might be smarter than us. Do we want to introduce a human that is smarter (and stronger!) than the rest of us into our world? Imagine the body of Mike Tyson mixed with the devious smarts of Kenneth Lay (Enron) with maybe some Einstein thrown in. Who’s working on this movie? Someone should be. I’m scared already. It was pointed out in the article that Neanderthals would have human rights. Here’s a great story: Stuart Newman tried in 1997 to patent a genetic sequence that mixed attributes of humans and chimpanzees — in an attempt, he said, to prevent anyone from ever creating such a creature. The US patent office denied him, claiming that it would be against the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery. Not animal rights, but slavery. (Of course, this means that the nightmare hybrid possibility is still legally possible.)
Having human rights, a cloned Neanderthal would be able to freely walk out of the lab as soon as it felt the urge. No one could legally stop it.
To make the story even more intriguing, many of the scientists, viewing the Neanderthals as social beings, claim that it would be cruel, sad and unethical to bring back just one — a single being without its family, mates and some similar beings to interact with who might also have some identical social and sexual tendencies and drives. However, creating a whole little clan of these critters, who have the right to go off and live their own lives — and presumably reproduce — and, it seems, are smarter and stronger than us…well, skip ahead a few years, and I see where this movie is going.
[Source] Didn’t this guy used to play in a Norwegian metal band in the ’80s?
I see the little clan emigrating from the lab to a part of our planet that is still suitable for their inbuilt propensities — Siberia maybe, or parts of Canada. They might request to be left alone, and to have their own “nation.” Over time they will multiply and maybe figure out how our world works — after all, they made quantum leaps in tool making, amongst other things, in their own time. Should they then realize, or come to believe, that they are indeed better than us, they might wonder why it is that we are in control. It wouldn’t seem fair to have us, the weaker dummies, running the world, would it? They might decide to assert themselves. Fred and Barney, Wilma, Betty and Bamm Bamm — no joke.
Waste Land is a documentary by Lucy Walker about artist Vik Muniz’s “Pictures of Garbage” series, a project done with the help of the pickers at Jardim Gramacho, the largest dump/landfill in Latin America, located outside Rio de Janeiro. Vik is Brazilian, and though his home and studio are now in NY (Brooklyn), he wanted to “give something back” to Brasil. He had done a series years ago called “Sugar Children” in which he made portraits of the children of sugar plantation workers on the island of St. Kitts, and he says in the film that he considers that series one of his best — I agree.
[Source] Vik’s typical process is to take photographs of something, or use a work of art, and then reproduce it using some ephemeral material — sugar, chocolate, Pantone chips, spaghetti — and in this recent series, garbage. The Gramacho pickers live by the dump, and every day they converge when the trucks arrive, attacking the mountains of refuse, from every class of Carioca. Various people specialize in certain kinds of recyclable materials — plastic bottles, PVC, and almost anything that can be recycled. These are “harvested” and then assembled in containers for another set of trucks to pay for and pick up and take to the recycling center. Here’s Vik at the dump with the pickers in the background.
[Source] To make a long story a little shorter, Vik photographed some of the pickers and then asked them to come to his studio in Rio where they help him assemble their own portraits — made from materials they’ve collected — as Vik directs from above.
[Source] These pieces are then photographed and the original assemblage is destroyed. The resulting giant photographic prints will, in this case, be auctioned, and the proceeds will go to help the community of pickers. If you look closely you can see the tires, shoes, bottle caps and plastic bottles that make up the shading and lines of the image.
[Source] All good so far — but there was an interesting moment that I can’t forget. Vik and Janaina, his soon to be ex, are discussing, in a very emotional way, a dilemma they face. After working in Vik’s studio making art for a couple of weeks, the pickers don’t want to go back to the dump. “How do you send them back to the farm after they’ve seen Paris?,” as the old song goes. It’s even more complicated than that. As we witness in the film, the pickers are more or less happy with their lives in the dump. Sure, they want better, and one of them has formed a cooperative to help organize and improve their situation — but we mostly see them laughing, sharing food, helping each other and getting along. We don’t see dead shells of humanity or zombie drones… we see lively, wonderful human beings. But now they’ve tasted the outside world — suddenly, contemplating the return to their old lives, they’re unhappy. Like the Biblical Fall, a vast sadness has been introduced into the world. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing. Previously in the doc, Vik has told his own story — how as a lower middle class Brazilian growing up in a situation where to aspire to become an artist was ridiculed, despite the ridiculous odds, he followed his inspiration. He feels that as it was with him, the seed of dissatisfaction will be a prod that will force the pickers to find a way out of their situation. Discontent breeds ambition and action, he maintains. Others in that discussion are not so sure. Some see the unhappiness of the pickers (who, inevitably, will return to their work) and feel guilty at being involved in their new despondency. After all, it’s not a given that they will be able to better their circumstances — the world is notoriously cruel and unfair. That newfound ambition could drive some to become prostitutes, criminals or drug dealers, it is argued — anything for a quick buck. This moment in the film opened up a world of questions for me. Charity: does a well meant gift sometimes sow devastation? A one time gift would often seem to have that effect. The tales of the tragedies of lottery and sweepstakes winners are legendary — fights over the money, jealousy, bad investments and conspicuously luxurious purchases. No lasting happiness. But as has tediously often been said: “Give a man a fish and you feed him once, teach him how to fish and you feed him and his family for a lifetime.” A school and its teachers, employment, and empowerment, are all more important than the immediate gratification that might be asked for, begged for, or might be tempting to give. Bags of grain to Africa might alleviate a famine — a little bit — but that generosity won’t prevent a tragedy from occurring the following year. Who could be so cold-hearted to deny the bags of grain or infant formula? — but without planning, the relief is short lived. Vik’s solution to this dilemma seemed to achieve a balance. In the same way, simply giving anyone a taste of a more luxurious (I won’t say better) life, or more material goods has the immediate result of increasing envy, jealousy, dissatisfaction and anger. In Vik’s case, though, I don’t think it was exposure to a higher class, or to stuff, but exposure to art that opened up a new world for him as a young man. It wasn’t luxury he was lusting for, but a creative outlet.
[Spoiler alert] But, at least in the film, a series of cards at the end tell us that most of the pickers we followed, and that Vik photographed, have indeed changed their lives — and we are led to believe most of those changes are for the better. The money he raised from the sale of the photos — a lot of money — went to the individuals, but also to their advocacy organization, a library and to buy them their own truck. So while they had the opportunity, if they wanted, to squander their own personal funds, a good portion of the proceeds was also designed to have a lasting effect on the whole community. The transformative power of art — in more ways than one.
[Source]
Went here after a speaking engagement on Capri.
Stromboli is an island that is also an active volcano and is fairly close to Sicily. Its population is between 450 and 700. A week ago there was what they call an “explosion”…one of the craters blew out some fiery rocks that set the grasses halfway up the mountain on fire. (None hit the town.) The explosion and fires happened in the late afternoon, and helicopters flew in from the Sicilian mainland and put them out in the morning. The volcano has been erupting more or less continuously for 20,000 years. Most of the eruptions were like the ones we saw — periodic spurts of glowing molten rock, but no lava flows…though there are those too. The most recent was in 2002, after a gap of 17 years.
In 1930 there was a fairly major eruption, and all the inhabitants of the island were evacuated. Magma hit the sea and plumes of steam arose. Flying “bombs,” as they are called, landed in the sea as well, causing a local tsunami.
In those days the two villages here were pretty isolated — no electricity, irregular fresh water, and forget about wi-fi. Stromboli conserves water as best they can via rain barrels and containers that harvest and recycle AC drips, but even so, every week a tanker arrives to bring fresh water to the island.
Southern Italy wasn’t a wealthy area anyway, so for many inhabitants that eruption was the last straw, and they left for elsewhere if they could — Australia, Argentina and the United States had waves of Italian immigrants. In the tiny town of Ginostra (current year-round population: 27 people, 7 donkeys), the church has a plaque commemorating the Strombolian Club of Brooklyn, which sent funds for its renovation in 1940. The members of the club didn’t return to Ginostra, though. In 2003 one of the larger explosions sent rocks raining down on the village, and some houses were damaged.
Ginostra got electricity of a sort a few years ago — via solar panels — so now they can watch Berlusconi’s bimbos on TV.
[Source]
In 1949 Roberto Rossellini and his then-girlfriend, Ingrid Bergman, made a film here called (in English) Stromboli, God’s Land. It’s interesting as a peek at life here some years ago, but as one local said, “It’s a terrible film! He was blinded by his love for her!”
In the movie she is a Lithuanian refugee in Italy after WWII who impulsively — or, being a refugee, pragmatically (or both) — suddenly agrees to marry an Italian serviceman. He takes her back to his town, his mother and his family, which is Stromboli — doubling for Ginostra. [Spoiler alert!] Young Ingrid freaks out and there is some overacting on her part — though the other performers, who all seem to be locals, and non-actors, seriously underact. Weird combination: calm Italians and one hysterical Hollywood actress. Her new husband in the film eventually boards her up in the house, as she’s getting seriously out of control. However, she manages to escape and heads out over the mountain (still today a more clearly marked path than the way around the outside), and we see her clawing her way over the volcano in hopes of reaching the town of Stromboli and a ship.
[Source]
The shooting was troubled — partly because RKO, the Hollywood studio backers, wanted a more narrative film than what they got, and partly because Bergman was a bankable star and her affair with Rossellini didn’t go down well with the US public.
During the shooting of this scene of her at the crater, one of the crew died as a result of inhalation of the volcanic fumes.
In the early evening, we hike 40 minutes up a switchback trail to a pizzeria in the middle of nowhere that overlooks the lava flow. From the outdoor seating area one can, as the sun sets, gaze up after a sip of white wine and a mouthful of so-so pizza and see the periodic (about every half hour) explosions of lava from the crater above.
The sound is like a sudden great gushing expulsion of liquid,which it is, I guess — liquid rock. Hiking to the crater itself is prohibited, due to last week's “explosion” in which “bombs” (red hot rocks) landed not just around the crater but also on the inhabited side of the island. These landed among the bushes and grasses about 500 meters up, catching the vegetation on fire. We can see the burnt area from our little hotel room. Had anyone been hiking up to the top they might have been either struck or burned in the subsequent fires.
This is what we saw — the red chunks don’t look as dramatic in the daylight.
Being an island in the middle of the Mediterranean, the seafood is amazing and super fresh. Every morning one can hear the pinched melodic cries of a man with a little motorized cart who wends his way around town selling “pesca fresca” — fresh squid, swordfish and dorado, and whatever else came in that morning.
This is an appetizer of raw marinated fish.
The overnight ferry back to Napoli takes about 12 hours. We sit in the tiny cabin, having some wine and cheese, and watch a Planet Earth nature doc on my laptop. (“Deep Oceans” episode — incredible!)
Midtown Market/Exchange — the former Sears headquarters in Minneapolis. A tornado warning had been lifted a couple of hours earlier. There’s great Mexican food in here, and the famous Holy Land lunch and grocery, home of the jalapeño hummus, is here as well. A few years ago it was a derelict, empty shell. The upper floors house a medical facility, not a hospital.
Minneapolis just got voted best biking city in the US by Bicycling Magazine, beating out Portland and New York City. The US Census rated the city #2.
Last Thursday they instituted a bike share program called Nice Ride — an obvious sexual innuendo that was never mentioned. I was in town for one of my bikes and cities and the future of getting around panels, so I tried the system out — twice. Here’s how it works.
There are bike stations all over a large section of town, covering downtown, and areas known as midtown and uptown (which are actually south and southwest of downtown). Each station has a map showing where the other stations are, so you know where to head for — most are within a few blocks of typical destinations.
Obviously you can also go to their website, where there’s a physical map showing the station locations as well. You slide in a credit card (debit cards are no good — pin code entry is an issue) and decide how many bikes you want. You get the first 30 minutes totally free — your card isn’t charged. After those 30 minutes are up, the fees kick in, ramping up the longer you hold onto the bike. You have unlimited 30 minute chunks available to you within a 24-hour period of your rental — all at no charge. The idea is to encourage short trips, not long, leisurely day trips. You don’t have to return the bikes to the station where you got them… you typically abandon your bike at a station near your destination. When you’ve done your business there and want to return home, or to your hotel in my case, you go back to the station, re-insert your credit card and are issued a release code number. You can repeat this process as many times as you like in the 24-hour period and not be charged. I made one trip to Dero, a company that makes bike racks, and then later to the Uptown Theater, where the event was.
You can also get a yearly unlimited pass, which comes in the form of a stick you can attach to your keychain. When inserted into a slot at the stations it releases a bike instantly.
How are the bikes? Pretty good. They’re made by Bixi in Montreal, where one of these systems is already in place. The Minneapolis bikes look nicer and are easy to spot, as they’re electric green. They’re super sturdy, of course, and have only three gears — which is plenty for a flat city like Minneapolis (or New York, or Melbourne, Australia, which is initializing their own system in a couple of weeks). There is a carrier contraption in front with non-removable bungee cords, which worked fine for me to attach my laptop bag. There are front and rear lights powered by hidden dynamos — so no batteries to replace. Mud and chain guards mean you can wear normal or office clothes and not worry about getting grease stains or puddle splatters. They’re not lightweight — this isn’t a sports bike by any means — but in a flat town like this it’s no problem.
Luckily, my destinations were located in opposite directions reachable by the midtown greenway, a beautiful bike and pedestrian avenue that goes all the way across town — from the lakes to the Mississippi. It was a former rail line and for years had been abandoned — a gully filled with abandoned shopping carts and the detritus of the homeless. A few years ago it was cleaned up, and more recently the two-way bike and ped lanes were put in. There were lots of folks using it — it was gorgeous on a sunny day like today.
It’s like an expressway — you exit via ramps. The next step is to tie in the local businesses along the way a little more.
In the early afternoon, I went to the local public radio station, where a few years ago they instituted a station with a new format called The Current, that plays more music than the usual talk and current affairs programming of most public radio. They feature local music and various kinds of alternative or indie music. Needless to say, it’s hugely popular. A guy from the station would be a moderator at the bikes and cities event later.
Then I went to visit Dero, a company that manufactures bike racks to serve various, mostly practical, specific needs: cluster racks for colleges around the country, lightweight ones that can be dropped into position for temporary events, standard U-shaped ones, and I saw a prototype for a sheltered double-decker system. The upper level rail slides down so you don’t have to hoist your bike up.
They’re busy fulfilling lots of orders. We’re in discussion about some custom-designed racks for specific cities in the near future, but have to get through some red tape first.
Outside their warehouse is a sensor powered by some solar cells.
Employees can attach a little electronic thingie to their spokes, which causes the sensor to beep when they ride by.
They are then rewarded by the company for riding to work, and receive a financial credit. New York has a similar law that employees can get tax credits or financial rewards for riding — though having an automated system makes it a no-brainer.
The panel in Minneapolis was typical of these events; the makeup was a city person, an advocate, a historian/planner and myself. On this one we were joined by Mayor R.T. Rybak, who has been instrumental in getting these programs pushed through. He’s so popular that no one wanted to run against him in the last election. This event was under the umbrella of “Policy and a Pint,” a series of gatherings organized by the same local NPR radio station, in which they encourage having a beer while discussing policy. At the Uptown the excellent local beers were dispersed in the theater lobby, which slowed down the seating considerably, but allowed everyone to loosen up a little.
I got lots of laughs during my slide talk, which was satisfying. I guess it’s turned into a PowerPoint standup routine, with a bit of advocacy in there as well. I’ve adjusted my own presentation since I started doing these about a year ago — now I end on a more optimistic note, mentioning programs that are being instigated in lots of cities. It’s not just about bikes either — they’re merely part of a larger movement to make our cities more livable. There’s a groundswell in many US cities to make them more pleasant, to improve the quality of life. Many of these changes involve giving cars less priority. Even car-centric cities like LA and Dallas are building park-like things that cover over parts of their freeways; high-speed bus lanes are being installed; and pedestrian zones are being expanded.
As usual, most of the questions during the Q&A after our talks were directed to the city person — in this case, the mayor. Big cheers… as he responded to some of the queries affirmatively, announcing plans for expansion and additions to current projects. The event was becoming less a presentation and more a rally and celebration.
We had to wrap up by nine, as the Uptown Theater was screening the Joan Rivers documentary.
On to Chicago. Nice show of H. C. Westermann’s series of prints “See America First” at the Art Institute. He became known in the late ’50s and ’60s, but was maybe a little too unclassifiable to really become super well-known. He was a big inspiration for a lot of others, though.
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The big show there was of a particular era (1913-17) when Matisse got a bit “experimental.” Needless to say it is a popular show, but for my money it’s a little bloated — there are maybe half a dozen super amazing and surprising paintings, and the rest is context and backstory.
To some these might look unfinished — but he worked long and hard on them, though they don’t betray a lot of that time and effort. One wall text mentioned that WWI was quite a disturbing and disruptive event at that time — which is sort of an understatement, but it seems it had some shakeup effect on Henri. These were quite a bit different than his earlier work.
Later in the afternoon there was a freak storm — windows blew out on the Sears (now Willis) tower, a McDonald’s drive thru sign got blown away, and the skylight of the Goose Island brewery, one of the bike event sponsors, got sucked out of their ceiling. Over 200,000 folks lost power. Earlier that day I was told that the “windy city” moniker is deceptive — that Chicago is not really all that windy…
From Chicagoist:
“Sean Maloney was on the 68th floor of the [Willis] building Friday afternoon when he said he felt the building begin to sway. Open doors started slamming shut. A colleague suddenly slid across the floor in his chair. Looking out toward the west, Maloney could see a dark wall of clouds bearing down on the city.
Blocks of concrete fell from the Aon Center.”
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I think they’d better stick with Windy City.
The bike event was at the Cultural Center, which used to be a fancy downtown public library. Here is the ceiling of a room with a Tiffany glass skylight — unaffected by the storm. There was a wedding reception about to begin there, so I was shooed out.
The bikes and cities event was not as exciting as the storm, though Chicago is expanding their network of bike lanes and is going to initiate some high-speed bus routes soon too. It’s cold here in the winter, but there are folks who bike to work all year round, so there.
My daughter goes to an art school in California called CCA, which stands for California College of the Arts. It used to be called the College of Arts and Crafts, but the crafty part got dropped some years ago. She recently asked me why. I replied that I thought it might stem from the fact that artists who work in certain materials have, for decades, usually had trouble being taken seriously as fine artists. Glassblowers, ceramicists, textile workers, furniture makers and, until a few decades ago, photographers were all not usually welcome in fine art galleries or the museums that show fine art… unless it was a show dedicated to only ceramics, for example. There were exceptions, but until quite recently those were rare. If we ignore Duchamp, whose work implied that anything could be art if he said it was, the restrictions have held firm, though photography broke the barrier first in a big way. Photography was allowed in during the late ’70s and ’80s — Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, and soon the whole Düsseldorf school of Becher students, broke the embargo by generally showing large prints that were about ideas or even performance rather than being about the craft of the print. Part of their choice to use photography as a medium was a reaction to the large, messy, “bad” painting works, mostly by men, that were prevalent at the time — Schnabel, Salle, Baselitz, etc. These new photo-based works were shown as fine art — not primarily as photography. Things were so restrictive that for decades, color photography was not even accepted as fine art photography. I think this was because color photography was traditionally associated with drugstore prints, family snapshots and with advertising. In addition, it was almost impossible for a color photographer to handcraft a print in the same way B&W photographers did — to do so meant using the very expensive dye transfer technique, and even then the available scale was limited. Bill Eggleston had his film developed at the drugstore — though he went with high-end dye transfer for his prints. This relative absence of the artist’s “hand” was troublesome for some folks. In my opinion it was an earlier generation — Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Douglas Huebler, Smithson, Oppenheim, Baldessari and others in the US; and the Bechers, Katharina Sieverding, Bas Jan Ader (below, his photo: “I’m too sad to tell you”),
[Source] Jan Dibbets and other “conceptual” artists in Europe — who in the late ’60s and early ’70s established that photos were a medium that could be used and accepted as fine art, and one did not have to be a skilled craftsperson in the art of photography or in printing to successfully communicate in that way. The photography was in service to something else — an idea, emotion or concept. Granted, almost none of these folks worked in photography exclusively, so there was no immediate danger of them being called a “mere” photographer. They were saying, in effect, that you didn’t have to be a good photographer to use photography as an art medium. You could even have someone else take the photo. You didn’t have to have skills or craft, not in the traditional sense, to make serious work. It’s similar to a punk rock DIY attitude — that anyone can make a great song, and if you can only play two chords, well, it can still be great. This news was pretty upsetting to a lot of people, and apparently still is. Get over it. A song is not better because it has more chords, and it certainly isn’t better because I labored over it longer — odds are, that extra labor might mean it’s simply overworked. Some of the aforementioned artists eventually began to command high prices for their photo-based work that were WAY above what traditionally skilled photographers were getting. There was some serious jealousy and head scratching. I heard that both Avedon and Mapplethorpe couldn’t quite figure out why their work didn’t qualify — why these “bad” photographers’ work was selling for more than their own. The attitude towards photography is slightly different than towards other crafts, but there is some definite overlap in the way photography was viewed with the way other crafty mediums are considered. My daughter was having a conversation with a well-respected fine artist not too long ago, and when my daughter said she was loving glassblowing and such, the response was a snarky remark and a sneer. Some fine artists, like Kiki Smith, can use blown glass in their work, and Sterling Ruby can show funky ceramics, but a full-on glassblower or ceramicist has a hard time being accepted in their world. Ken Price has made weird, modest-sized ceramic pieces his whole life, but it seems he is only now getting a begrudging reception from the art world.
[Source] Grayson Perry, the transvestite potter who won the Turner Prize a few years ago, was quoted as saying, “It’s about time a transvestite potter got this prize!” He also said that it was even more significant that a potter got the prize than a transvestite. He’s right. Part of this snobbish attitude goes back to the Renaissance. In order for painters to separate themselves from the various craft guilds, and establish their own worth, they had to form the idea that expression, concept and idea were worth at least (and maybe more, in their opinion) as much as skilled craftsmanship. They had to convince patrons that their work was valuable enough that they should no longer be paid by the hour. So, when crafts people sometimes make a stealth foray into the art world, they’re often rebuffed. Decorative arts have also always been considered vapid, at least by the fine arts crowd. From their point of view, that work is just about pleasing the eye — looking good as background, without meaning or consequence. It’s a valid point, but there are exceptions, and there is plenty of fine art, especially with the booming market, that is clearly made to sell, to attract buyers. The biggest exception to the “merely eye candy” view is in the traditional arts of Japan and China. A raku fired dish or tea bowl, out of the Zen Buddhist tradition, or the simple objects employed in tea ceremony, all had huge conceptual and philosophical meaning. Though they maintained their status as functional objects, they also made the statement that there is beauty in the mundane, humble and even the accidental. (Often the coloring that resulted from this raku glaze technique was partly random.) They were far from being just nice looking; if anything, they were plain, even ugly, to some eyes. So, though being, in our view, part of the craft tradition, they often aren’t about virtuoso skills and fine detail work. They embodied a way of looking at the world, as the best fine art does.
[Source] In Japan part of this aesthetic is referred to as wabi-sabi — which, loosely translated, means, “imperfect, transient, incomplete, modest and asymmetrical.” These ideas are very different from the ideals embodied in Western craft and decorative arts. In the East these craftsperson artisans are viewed in somewhat the same way the West views fine artists — as provocateur philosophers and visionaries. So the split might be largely cultural. This schism between art and craft creates problems in art schools like CCA. There are some students who are there to learn a skill, a craft, and feel that the work in their field should be judged by how well it is made. Some teachers feel the same. A sloppily executed great idea is not good enough, in their opinion. These folks would presumably prefer jazz or classical over alt rock or hip-hop. However, it’s risky for a teacher to criticize an idea — it may be killing something amazing before it has a chance to grow and mature. But most would agree that there isn’t much wrong with learning basic skills in whatever medium one chooses; one can, I hope, always abandon or pervert those skills later on, and one doesn’t need to be a virtuoso. Even punk rock songwriters hewed to a form — their playing skills may have been minimal, but their writing, and sometimes performance, can be top notch. Other students feel that the idea should be privileged — that, to them, a beautifully made piece, with no innovative idea behind it, is merely empty, vapid. I’m exaggerating — these opposing views are the extremes — but it’s not far off. How should the school compromise? I’d suggest that students be expected to show a certain level of skill — maybe in a variety of mediums — and that if they want to go further, as far as developing their skills in one medium, they continue to graduate school — or maybe, better yet, apprentice themselves to the established, successful crafts artists in their field. Very Renaissance, again.
Went to Atlanta for a bikes and cities panel that was different than the others I’ve done. This one was part of a New Urbanism conference. New Urbanism is a movement that developed at least a decade ago, and the goal is to advocate for less sprawl and a return to cities where pedestrians, drivers, cyclists and the rest all interact — where there is vibrant urban life, rather than the dead zones that many of the US downtowns have become. One branch has become associated with purpose-built towns, the most famous being Celebration, the Disney version of a small town — in all senses of the phrase.
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It’s fakey in a way that makes me squirm, but it can’t be denied that it’s a valid alternative to the sprawl that has proliferated everywhere. My parents moved to one of these places — Columbia, Maryland — when I left for college, and it smelled of a managed tastefulness that was simply lifelessness to me. The town decides what colors you can paint your door, or your house, for example. However, there were little town centers within walking distance of most residents, so that was a big change from the typical suburban developments and malls that were taking over the farmland. There was no realistic public transport in and out of Columbia, so it was an island, and without (being able to drive) a car my parents are trapped there.
Not all the New Urbanists are about Disney towns; their interests range from retrofitting dead suburban malls to bike lanes, which is sort of where I come in.
As the taxi pulled up to the Atlanta Hilton, I was surrounded by smiling, handsome black men in a variety of doorman outfits. All charming, and all welcoming me effusively to Atlanta. Southern hospitality — what a change from New York! As I passed through the double doors into the massive lobby, suddenly all the people around me were white. Or at least that was the initial impression. It was like I’d gone through some magical portal — with one group left outside, and another inside. The black people of Atlanta have all the social service jobs and are largely kept separate — outside, if possible — from the white masters. I’m exaggerating, but this is the first impression one gets.
It’s horribly insulting, but it’s as if the masters have created live lawn jockeys, welcoming visitors to their property. Now, to be fair, Atlanta had Andrew Young as a mayor and has a whole slew of black universities, as well as quite a few major music artists of note; but, well, this was my perception.
Atlanta has the worst sprawl of almost anywhere in the country — the amount of time people spend commuting and driving (stuck in traffic actually) and parking is beyond belief. So having a conference here about more sustainable towns that foster a sense of urban life is a bit of a poke in the eye to this city.
In Atlanta, as in many other US cities, in the ’60s, white flight accelerated — fear of a black planet, as the Public Enemy record is titled, had taken hold in a big way. The cities were where you lived if you couldn’t afford to get out. John Portman, the architect and developer, began building massive, futuristic hotel complexes in the center of town. They were so big that once inside, one never had to leave. A fellow conference attendee compared the Marriott Hotel, one of Portman’s projects, to the extraordinary sets for the old sci-fi movie Things To Come, a film directed by William Cameron Menzies.
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This shit is real! The future is here… and it’s white! (This is the interior of the Marriott that he built.)
The exteriors of these complexes are awe-inspiring and forbidding; they don’t relate to the street at all — no surprise there — but rather present from the outside a gleaming tower with “fortifications” at street level.
So the street life surrounding these complexes gets killed, as there are no stores, businesses or anything feeling out to the sidewalks. Everything takes place indoors, and it’s all self-sufficient, depending on what you call living. In subsequent decades what are now referred to as gerbil tubes were added to link adjacent complexes. These second floor aerial walkways connect the mega complexes, so that one doesn’t have to come in contact with the dreaded street — or the black people that might be lurking out there — even if one had to, for some strange reason, leave one mega building to enter another across the way. Stores then sprung up on the second floors to cater to these gerbils who never venture onto the streets. Obviously any folks who might have been on the streets, walking or strolling from here to there, were once excluded from those establishments. In fact, to them, those establishments were invisible.
As in LA, many of the entrances to shops and businesses are primarily through the parking lot. The entrances and facades turned away from the streets, and towards either an interior atrium or a parking structure. In Atlanta you can walk for blocks in the center of downtown and find no shops — not any visible ones anyway. There are some restaurants and bars, but no other establishments. There might be interior courts with drug stores, stationary stores, copy shops, newsstands or clothing stores, but access to these from the street isn’t possible.
Now one might say that this inward turning could be viewed in a less skeptical manner; that there might be a kind of civic life that could arise in the food courts and gerbil tubes — a kind of street equivalent — and that I am just being old school and prejudiced. However, it sure doesn’t seem like that is what has happened. People do get supplies at the drug store or gift shop, but the life has been drained out. Any risk of randomness has been eliminated. The reference to gerbils by the locals isn’t that accidental. It seems like an architecture of racism to me… everything is designed to facilitate avoidance of contact with the other.
Here is an early similar structure — the great walled city of Carcassonne in France. Within its walls only those vetted to be appropriate to that town were allowed in.
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It’s claimed that when Napoleon III widened the streets of Paris with the help of Baron Haussmann, it was to enable troop movements and to make the avenues sufficiently wide that they couldn’t be barricaded as they were during the revolution. The straightening of these boulevards, it is also claimed, was to allow the troops a straight line of fire on any insurrectionists.
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Before the renovation, various social classes lived on different floors of Parisian buildings, so there was a fair amount of mixing, though limited. Afterwards one result of the changes was that rents went up, and the poor were driven to live on the outskirts of town, where they still are today. In a sense segregation was effected that has been partially maintained ever since.
There were quite a few benefits to this urban renewal project too — benefits that significantly improved the lives of the poor — and in this respect, the project was surprisingly enlightened. Sewers were added and access to fresh drinking water (the Seine was long since too polluted to drink) was installed. The right of eminent domain was claimed as many large houses had to be eliminated in order to widen and straighten the boulevards.
There were aesthetic “improvements” as well — buildings next to one another had to have their floors the same height, and it was a rule that quarry stone had to be used on the facades, giving the center of Paris the uniform look we know it by today.
The wide sidewalks and ample air and light on these wide boulevards made sitting in the sidewalk cafes and restaurants pleasurable — and they proliferated, adding to the life of the city.
So, though there may have been some military principles behind the plan, it had its human side too.
Not so for a lot of contemporary government buildings and condos. I’d propose that almost all government buildings have a slight fuck you attitude — they’re meant to be inspiring, but that often comes off as imposing and intimidating. That attitude seems to carry over to luxury condos — maybe it’s the testosterone.
Here are some new condos in my neighborhood:
Here is what could be a dinky condo, but is actually the Chinese Embassy in NY. It used to be a Holiday Inn, with a revolving restaurant and a view of… the Circle Line.
Here is the proposal for new US embassy in London — a modern version of Carcassonne, complete with a moat! We’re back where we started. Every sort of direct approach from the street is blocked, and of course the relationship to the street, where people meet and mingle, is distant and suspicious.
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I live in New York, and Manhattan in particular over the last decade or so has sadly moved further in this direction. Though thankfully there is still plenty of life left on most streets, it’s being chipped away at. How can places like Atlanta bring some life into their urban center? I think it’s a long haul, and they should…umm…think small. When I was there, I asked if there were some neighborhoods and communities that might become less car dependent and more people friendly. A couple, maybe, was the reply. I don’t know where they are, but in the center they are not. One could imagine that if there were little town centers outside of the towering urban hospitality zone that one might bike or walk from one’s home to a transportation hub that would then get you to a place of concentrated offices. You’d leave your bike at a parking shelter, like they have at Millennium Park in Chicago. Park and ride, only without the massive car parking. One could also take public transport in, and pick up your bike at a parking/storage place in town and ride to work from there. Or maybe even walk from that drop off point.
If those options or others aren’t available soon, I would suggest that Atlanta residents move to nearby Athens or Savannah if they want a more pleasant life.
I am bringing a lawsuit against the Governor of Florida.
A while back a friend told me that the Republican Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, was using the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere” in a campaign ad. He’s running for Senate.
Well, using a recording of a song, or even just using that song and not the original recording, in an advertisement without permission is illegal, unless the composition has gone into the public domain. It’s not just illegal because one is supposed to pay for such use and not paying is, well, theft — it’s also illegal because one has to ask permission, and that permission can be turned down.
Besides being theft, use of the song and my voice in a campaign ad implies that I, as writer and singer of the song, might have granted Crist permission to use it, and that I therefore endorse him and/or the Republican Party, of which he was a member until very, very recently. The general public might also think I simply license the use of my songs to anyone who will pay the going rate, but that’s not true either, as I have never licensed a song for use in an ad. I do license songs to commercial films and TV shows (if they pay the going rate), and to dance companies and student filmmakers mostly for free. But not to ads.
I’m a bit of a throwback that way, as I still believe songs occasionally mean something to people — they obviously mean something personal to the writer, and often to the listener as well. A personal and social meaning is diluted when that same song is used to sell a product (or a politician). If Crist and his campaign folks had asked to use the song, I would have said no — even if they had offered a lot of money, such as I have been offered in the past for ad use (though I’ve always turned these offers down).
I believe my audience is aware of this no-ad use policy of mine, and part of the respect I am accorded as an artist is due to my maintaining this policy. Needless to say, if they thought I’d licensed a song to a political campaign they might not respect me as much in the morning.
It might be pointed out that Republican campaign organizations have done this kind of thing before. John McCain’s campaign used the Jackson Browne song “Running on Empty” and Reagan’s folks used Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Both were used illegally without permission, and in the case of the Jackson Browne song a lawsuit was brought. After the Republicans lost several motions attempting to dismiss Browne’s complaint, they settled with him. Part of the settlement said that the Republican National Committee promised to respect artists’ rights and to obtain licenses for the use of copyrighted works in the future. So, it’s not like they weren’t warned, or hadn’t been burned before.
Now, there is such a thing as fair use. Typically the type of free use that doesn’t require a permission might be a student quoting a passage in a book to make a point in a graduate paper, or someone using part (not all) of “Road to Nowhere” to identify, say, the marching groove in that song as a metaphor for the inexorable forward momentum of time, or some such notion. These uses are typically exempt from licensing, permission and fees. In this case, however, the use was not to comment on or explain something about “Road to Nowhere,” ’80s music in general, Talking Heads or Cajun accordion riffs — it was used solely to further Governor Crist’s advertising strategy in his Senate primary campaign… a campaign that has nothing to do with me or my music.
Another tactic the Republicans have used to justify this kind of thing is the right to political free speech. Their argument is that the song is integral to making a political point, and therefore falls under free speech. Well, that’s just crazy talk — the song has nothing to do with Crist’s political views. It simply has a title that is a handy catchphrase, as does the Jackson Browne song — but the content of the song itself doesn’t have any connection with the politician’s campaign or agenda.
So, my lawyers and I have filed a lawsuit — and we also hope the Republicans might not engage (again) in this kind of illegal behavior in the future.
The airport reopened — so we hopped in a van and a few of us foreigners headed out. On the way we stopped at two more art openings connected to the festival. The second one was in the town that abuts the airport, quite a ways out. In a sizable seaside building there were two shows, one of contemporary art involving weaving and fabric, and the other, not connected to the festival I suspect, was a massive room filled with dozens of perfect models of fishing boats! They were all made by Grímur Karlsson, a retired fisherman:
As much fun as the rest of the festival and the art and music was, this one really blew my mind — this is about half the room:
As we arrived at JFK, a woman next to us at the baggage carousel said, “Reykjavík airport just closed again. We were the last plane out.” I know Nico Muhly and some others from New York were there — they had a concert Sunday night. I wonder if they’ll make it back?
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