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I saw Errol Morris’s film Standard Operating Procedure, the “documentary” about the Abu Ghraib photos. I have the term documentary in quotes because, as the interviewees describe past events, the film re-enacts scenarios not filmed or photographed at the time. For some, these re-enactments are a problem, as documentary convention prescribes a style and logic that, in most cases, simulates truth telling and objectivity. Many assume that in documentaries, the camera is a mute witness to “facts” and “events” and any interference or fictional techniques or touches destroys this, well, myth.
The re-enactments do not adhere to the form typical of those criminal investigation TV shows, which recreate the crime scenes with actors, out of focus, slow-motion shots, and voiceover narration. Instead, Morris employs fragmentary images: a close up of snarling dog, its teeth lunging at the camera; a close up of skin covered in swarming ants; and most expensive, a helicopter exploding above our heads, the flaming parts descending on the camera.
It should be obvious that all documentary filmmakers have an agenda they hope to put forward. I’m not talking about Michael Moore and Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, The Smartest Guys in the Room) who obviously have a polemic to deliver, but about the countless docs, TV shows, news reports and educational pieces that evince a style that says, “We don’t have a point of view. We’re simply recording what’s in front of the camera and you make up your own mind.”
These ostensibly objective works invoke specific filmic devices that audiences have come to accept and recognize as indicators of truth telling and impartiality. Upon examining these “unbiased” films, we may sense their deep, inherent agendas, but for the most part, the style masks the filmmakers’ underlying prejudices, and we buy into it.
In a sense then, fiction films are also just recording what’s in front of the camera, but in their case, it happens to be costumed actors staging events. Fiction films are documentaries of the performances of actors.
Next, I watched Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA, an incredible, award-winning documentary about a violent mine strike in Kentucky. It took her four years to make the film, which she originally intended to be about something related, though different. It’s obvious that Kopple was embedded with the miners. During some particularly violent confrontations, the camera is clearly on the “side” of the striking miners, as scabs and corporate toadies take shots at them. The filmmaker hung with the mining families and otherworldly community in these hollers in order to secure some of the intimate details. Upon release, the film was an exposé, drawing attention to lives and injustices that otherwise would have been ignored.
Likewise, as Errol Morris and some of his interviewees point out, the photos taken at Abu Ghraib are responsible for drawing attention to the prison’s systemic practice of abuse. Had these photos never surfaced, the whole situation would have been swept under the rug, as was the violent, habitual torture practiced by the CIA and MI, never photographed. Since these practices can’t be proven, most media outlets pretty much ignore them. To paraphrase one of the film’s talking heads: ‘These photos made the President of the United States have to apologize to the world, so someone was going to pay.’ Unsaid, although implicit, is that those who caused the embarrassment to Bush would pay over those responsible for setting up a situation where abusive behaviors were condoned and encouraged.
Morris doesn’t broach the “Chain of Command” issues Seymour Hersh examines in his book of the same title. Hersh carefully traces the legal maneuvers of Gonzales and the policies of the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush tripartite, effectively encouraging and excusing torture and anything goes behavior.
The film details the fascinating use of forensics to establish accurate information about the photographs. Metadata embedded within the digital images is extracted and cross-referenced to handwritten logs to recreate a timeline, and uncover who took the pictures and with what camera. Morris limits the focus to the Americans, not the Iraqis. Some interviewees have the look of those whose experiences have twisted and mangled their souls deeply. They seem haunted and possessed. Especially the young women, former innocents who, like characters out of some horror movie, were fucked over by some invisible, monstrous entity.
So maybe the film is not a documentary in the accepted sense, or maybe we must realize that docs are not exactly what they appear to be. At any rate, by examining a set of infamous photos, how they came to be, who authored them, and how they survived, Morris creates a meditation on the meaning and reception of images—particularly news images—in our culture at large.
As these photos are reexamined, one can’t help but wonder whether a people often rounded up, imprisoned and tortured for no reason—many prisoners are simple cab drivers and local shopkeepers—will keep their grudges and desire for revenge close. And of course, one wonders whether a terrible price will be paid somewhere down the line. George Bush might be dead by then, Cheney will surely be gone soon—he’s running on watch batteries as it is—but some naïve and “innocent” generation will pay for our current government’s policies and actions and wonder, “What did I do to deserve this?”
I expected the mortgage credit crisis to affect the super rich here in NY and around the world, as did many of my friends. We gaze out at the skeletons of condos being erected in every neighborhood, with their toppling cranes and occasional shards of falling glass, and wonder aloud who is going to fill these expensive monstrosities? With the dollar so low, haven’t the Eurorich already bought their pieces of NY real estate? And if there is a financial crisis, doesn’t that mean that hedge fund guys and others whose wealth is based on not making anything will be less flush? Aren’t those guys the intended buyers for these apartments and bachelor pads? We wonder if these condos will end up empty if these guys fall on hard times.
A couple in a restaurant introduce themselves to me. She is a real estate broker mainly in the Upper East Side. So I ask her if there is a downturn in her market, and she says no, not in the slightest. The truly rich are barely affected, she says, and the hedge fund guys make so much money that even if they make ten million less, it’s not all that significant to them. Maybe they will forgo the Miami condo, for now, but this rarefied part of NYC will remain unaffected, so she claims.
Others make similar assertions. A few recent articles mention that the spending of the super rich continues unabated. It’s written about because, like my friends and I, many assume that everyone will be hurt by the falling house of cards. But so far, at least according to these articles, the super rich are immune, and they will go on partying, buying contemporary art and building condos as the bottom falls out for the bottom half of society.
So far, it seems there is some invisible financial dividing line below which low-income homeowners and all the companies that depend on their dollars—the Foot Lockers, Zales, and Office Depots—will go completely bankrupt. This is happening right now, and it’s happening amazingly fast. It’s not just one or two bankruptcies, and not just mom and pop stores on main streets, but huge chains that used to seem invulnerable in their ubiquity. These were the stores that put mom and pop out of business and now they’re going under?
What will happen when half the country is unemployed, with no medical insurance, stuck in a sheet rock house miles from public transportation? They’ll be ripe for religion or revolution if you ask me. Bibles and bullets.
Will they still support the billions a day spent in Iraq? I don’t think so—even now they don’t. One would expect they’ll be pretty pissed off watching the rich and famous party endlessly and continue their glamorous lifestyle—or maybe not. Surprising to me, those being duped and exploited by banks and entrepreneurs often envy their “betters”—they want to be that person in the Beemer or Lexus, and will mortgage everything they’ve got to have a symbolic piece of it. Instead of anger and action we get envy—the bane of every outside agitator, union organizer, and young revolutionary.
I remember when MLK decided to tie the Vietnam War in with domestic issues like poverty and racism, and many thought it ill advised. They assumed he would lose some support—there were still some in favor of the Vietnam War at that point—and that it might dilute the focus on jobs, racism, equality and votes.
I think he was right. This stuff is tied together. Katrina and Iraq are not separate issues. The securities and safeguards guaranteed to the super rich by the Bush administration and the credit crisis are probably linked as well. I don’t mean conspiracy linked—the connections and actions don’t have to be premeditated or thought out in advance to make a network. There are organic emergent forces at work, self-organizing systems arising that benefit some and not others. That too sounds complex and conspiratorial, but it’s not.
Torch Song
I don’t often indulge in the usual blog thing of aggregating, i.e. pointing to articles in newspapers and magazines, but there’s a lovely and surprising piece in the NY Times Arts section disguised as yet another article on the China Tibet issue and the Olympic torch relay. The piece points out that the torch relay originated with the Nazis. It was a bit of stagecraft thought up by Carl Diem and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl for her 1938 hymn to Aryan supremacy, Olympia.
The Wagnerian imagery is mythic: within a landscape of Greek ruins, a naked and pure human specimen holds a javelin as it is lit by a bowl of fire, and then transports the burning torch to the Rhineland—well, the symbolism is pretty obvious.
Clients One Through Eight
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was referred to as client number nine in the prostitution sting this week. Assignations run around $4,500 for the top gals in this house, so I ask myself: why haven’t we been provided the names of clients one through eight? It goes without saying that all are wealthy men, and there are probably a few other politicians among them. The prostitution ring — the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. — was under federal wiretap, so they MUST know the identities of the others. There are probably a lot more than nine clients too, eh, so why have their identities not been released? Though they vigorously deny it, it sure smells like a Republican setup.
Alberto Gonzales was Attorney General at the time this investigation was begun — he who fired a whole slew of high level federal prosecutors because they wouldn’t kiss Bush’s ass. It’s just the sort of thing he would do, with the quiet urging of Karl Rove or Dick Cheney. The dirty trickster Roger Stone — whose work goes back to Nixon days — has been after Spitzer for some years. He was behind a threatening phone call to Bernard Spitzer, Eliot’s father, regarding campaign contributions to his son’s election campaign for attorney general in 1994. Here is part of the voice message he left: “There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.” Stone was being paid by a group of Republicans to bring down Spitzer, and now he may have succeeded. (He was also involved in orchestrating protests against the Florida vote recount, the debacle that allowed George Bush to become president.)
Like a lot of politicians and people in power, it seems Spitzer believed he could get away with some shit. He should know that if he’s going to play moral crusader, he’s got to be a saint. People like Roger Stone are all too willing to make a quiet call and tip off whomever at the slightest slip or indiscretion of their enemies.
News
Good news, I hope: the city has given the Red Hook ball field vendors a reprieve, allowing them time to get their kiosks and trucks up to health code. The articles don’t specify exactly what that entails or whether the requirements are ridiculous or not. And it’s a little unclear whether each vendor or all of them together need to raise the 30k estimated to get up to code. 30k is a lot of money to come up with when you’re selling huaraches and pupusas as cheaply as they do at the ball fields. These vendors are one of the things that make New York a good place to live. They represent the opposite of the mallification of the planet.
Other good news: the city (specifically the Department of Transportation) is proposing to make Prince Street car-free on Sundays from 11am to 6pm. This experiment faces some opposition from car owners in the hood, but for most local residents, and for all the local businesses, it will be a big improvement.
A friend passed me a link to a survey website with a list of about thirty statements on current political issues. You mark whether you agree or disagree with each statement, and then select how strongly you feel about it. Then, when you’re done, it tells you which presidential hopeful comes closest to your beliefs, and ranks the rest in descending order.
http://www.dehp.net/candidate/index.php
Sort of sad to say, but many of my friends and I got Kucinich as our top response.
On the occasion of the opening of the new, big New York Times building on 40th St and 8th Ave, I posted a journal/blog entry recently that raised some questions about print media. The post got passed around, and after a few days I received an invitation Ariel Kaminer at the Times to visit their new home. With a little trepidation and a lot of excitement, I went yesterday afternoon and got a little tour. I wondered if embedded journalists might feel much like I did— welcomed in, but unsure how much is kosher to tell and report.
Of course they are asking themselves many of the same questions I asked in my post: for example, “how will print journalism survive financially as more and more readers migrate on line?” Part of my little tour consisted of talking to folks who are confronting that issue every day, but I also encountered journalists involved in traditional newsgathering, as well as the digerati who are pondering the online and electronic future of news media.
Needless to say, the big question remains open; we didn’t decide it yesterday, but a lot of issues and ideas were raised. The Research & Development department (!), located way up on the 28th floor with incredible views, is where possible future (and present) technologies for delivering news and other services are pondered. Or you can look out the window and see New Jersey and the rolling hills that stretch further west. On a long countertop lay a broad selection of tablets, cell phones, PDAs and other devices that might become a way that people receive their news in the future.
While reading substantial articles on a Blackberry or Palm, or even an iPhone seems unlikely on those small screens, checking stocks, sports, movie times, reviews, menus, and headlines, etc., may be a more probable scenario. The tablets and readers arrayed on the counter were more intriguing to me. One or two had color screens and were touch sensitive, allowing readers to highlight parts of articles (as I do in the print version), as well as to save and send them. These devices were about half the width of this 15” laptop I’m writing on, and some were about half as thick, approximating the size of a thin trade paperback. A few had hidden keyboards (the Fujitsu Tablet PC 1610 has a keyboard that swivels out), while others did not. These devices go online, of course, but they don’t necessarily run all the software, or perform all the functions that a laptop does, though it seems obvious to me that fairly soon they will all be able to do so.
This begs the question of whether people actually want these halfway devices, devices that do some things, some of them very well, but stop there. Will people, for example, carry a slim tablet as a way of reading the morning paper and accessing other online information and leave it at that? Will they continue to own and even carry multiple devices? A (smart) phone, a computer at the office, maybe a laptop in the briefcase and another computer at home? And a tablet reader on top of all that? (Well, in many cases the tablets will replace the laptops.)
I can see both sides. When I go out to see something or to have dinner with friends, I never take my laptop. And unless the tablets evolve to use the recently emerging folding screens (enabling a small and compact device to open up and have a larger screen), I doubt I would bother to carry one around as I would a newspaper, a magazine or a book to keep me company when I’m by myself. So, even though one can do email and documents on a smart phone now, and there are various collapsible extension keyboards for them, I don’t see people reading or writing long letters or docs on tiny devices until the advent of the foldout screens.
The R&D folks mentioned the potential advent of portable devices with tiny projectors that would effectively turn any bit of nearby white surface into a screen about the size of a laptop. Hmmm…Maybe folks would adapt to writing and interacting with little projected versions of their laptop screens? The smart phone would then serve as a link to the web, as well as a storage and processing device, its user interacting not with the apparatus itself, but with thin air, a projected virtual version of a desktop and keyboard. And then before too long, the computer interface will become a hologram or a projection that doesn’t need a wall, vanishing when you’re done work (or play) and switch it off.
There was also talk of people getting articles pushed to their phones, all of which is possible, but the question of how one reads longer pieces remains. For now, portable readers seem perfect for information updates and such. In fact a couple of these R&D guys just won first prize at a Yahoo hack contest for developing — in twenty-four hours — some hardware with corresponding software linking phones and computers easily. It is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that someone could hack a piece of software and its attendant hardware so quickly, albeit some of the stuff looked like it was held together with hot glue. Pretty impressive.
The tour continued in a dark room the size of a kid’s bedroom with a large plasma screen on one wall and various devices — game controllers, iPods, DVD players, etc. — plugged into it. I sat on the couch. A few of the guys came in and proceeded to demonstrate the interactive “game” called Rockband. (The newspaper does review games and electronics, but I suspect these guys were not the game reviewers.) They pulled out a microphone, a virtual guitar (I don’t think it had strings on it), and some virtual drums, and proceeded to jam — full on — to a Weezer tune! The “game” allows you to select avatars — in this case a weirdly muscular drummer, a singer with a kind of white mullet, and a woman on guitar with pink hair — and you sing and “play” your instruments to the prerecorded karaoke version of the song. Lyrics and tab like graphics scroll by to help you follow along. The audience in the game world cheers. Then you get rated on your performance. These guys did really well. Really well.
On another floor I had a talk with a VP of business affairs (not the business section), who of course thinks a lot about from where to derive ad income as readers migrate online. Already the present readership is far stronger online than in print, but income from online ads is not a great, not by a long shot. Ariel says that the ad income online may be much smaller than that on paper, but it’s growing much, much faster.
At present, it is mostly the ads in the Style section, and the glossy Sunday and T magazines that pay for a disproportionate amount of the newspaper’s running costs. Without the income from Gucci and Rolex, there probably wouldn’t be a Baghdad bureau. (That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the idea.) And to some extent those seductive and provocative luxury ads work best in print — they certainly don’t have the same impact when translated to a tiny online banner.
It was pointed out however, that no matter how seductive a print ad is, it still relies almost exclusively on the reader remembering it in some vague way. First it has to meet your eyes, and then it has to be remembered in some conscious or unconscious way. While small in size, online ads have the advantage of being able to take the curious reader right to the “store” — the “store” being either the vendor’s web page or some “place” where one can buy the item with a few clicks online. Any sales person can tell you that once you’ve got the customer into your establishment only a fool will let them get out empty handed.
I sense that there is an unspoken philosophy at the Times that guides and informs everything. It’s an old idea (Jefferson, DeToqueville) that a democracy — which I would suggest we barely have now — can only run with at least semi-informed citizens. Without information a citizen can’t make intelligent choices or vote in any kind of rational way. They’re easy to dupe, fool and deceive. Gut instincts will only get you so far. (One could say that faith-based politics would deny that being informed is necessary, with faith being the only requirement.) Anyway, this philosophy places the media, and in particular the news media, in a sort of integral role — not in the government of course, but in the mechanism that makes a country work.
As a serious newspaper, or news service, or whatever it will be called, the Times would then have a duty to write about situations around the world, around the US, and in NYC and Washington. And to do fairly in-depth reporting, including investigative pieces, they must maintain bureaus in a number of far-flung spots around the globe. Needless to say, this is hugely expensive and some of those articles may not be the most popular. The press is both a product to consume and an indispensable service — a tricky balancing act to pull off.
The Times folks seemed to have internalized an extension of this idea — that, for example, it’s OK if the ads for luxury goods or gadgets fund the newsgathering and reporting because it serves a greater public service. Or, to put it another way, it’s OK if the important newsgathering part doesn’t make a profit.
Many forms of media have held those same values, though a good number have been forced to drop them in recent years. In the record biz, the successive waves of corporate takeovers put increased emphasis on the bottom line and on quarterly profits (to keep the stock values up). Labels like Warner Bros used to fund recordings by Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Frank Zappa and later Talking Heads (to name but a few), with the profits made from Black Sabbath and subsequently from Madonna. The labels accepted that the less profitable, but maybe weightier and more prestigious stuff was important to keep around.
But when the suits moved in after a series of mergers, the idea that many artists’ recordings weren’t profitable in and of themselves was no longer acceptable. Like many other media forms — TV news, magazines and movies — the unprofitable stuff was inevitably axed, and the material bringing in the bucks, well, “Let’s have more of that,” the suits would say. The Ochs-Sulzberger family directs a large percentage of the board of Times, giving them effective control.
There was a similar situation at the Wall Street Journal with the Bancroft family. But, their family’s control was more fragmented and the News Corp (i.e. Rupert Murdoch) managed to take over. The Times family holds the view that “quality” journalism makes all the rest of the business worth more. It’s not uncommon that the unprofitable parts of a company lend it weight, prestige, and ultimately its worth. So, maintaining those expensive foreign bureaus is viewed as important.
It was mentioned that some folks in the building feel that the addition of glossy supplements like the T sections, is selling out. But one could also argue that as long as the serious journalism remains intact, then why not let the ads in those sections pay for it. (Well, we’ll see what happens as readers go on line.)
Lastly, I was invited to a conference room on one of the lower level news floors to sit in on the “page one” meeting. The meeting was like something out of Front Page, one of those old-fashioned newspaper movies. It’s a long-standing tradition in which representatives of each section pitch a story that might be suitable for the front page. More than twenty people sit around a giant table, each with a printed summary of his or her proposed story. A projection screen at one end of the table allows accompanying photos to be thrown up and discussed as well. The meeting was a bit frenetic, with no seeming established order of presentation. There’s no Big Board, as in Dr. Strangelove, but there is a big white wall with room enough for one.
None of the pieces even had proposed headlines at this point. Sometimes the head editor(s) would suggest that a given story be tightened up, which might involve adding a paragraph to make a point or connection, or to provide further clearer explanation.
Yesterday there was no obvious or massive breaking story, so some larger, ongoing stories (the credit debacle, for example) continued to evolve and develop in important and significant ways — although there was really nothing spectacular to hang these developments on. At one point the metro desk suggested a story about non-operating elevators at the Bronx Family court. I thought it was a good piece, as the families and children were often denied assistance or legal help because of the damn elevators — “For the want of a nail, the battle was lost” sort of thing. But OK, in the context of everything else that day, maybe it seemed that more “weight” was desired.
Haggling over the front page might seem anachronistic; soon readers might be customizing their own front pages or an algorithm might do it for them. I would argue that, as in a lot of fields (like music), a filter is more valuable than sheer information. In fact, a filter is information, in the strict sense. And a front page — whether material or virtual — is a filter that tells us what news the paper has decided we should be aware of at a glance. Granted. a nice picture (they’re getting increasingly arty these days) will draw in browsers at a newsstand as much as a headline. But for most of us, this aggregator that is that daily conference meeting is still a pretty good system.
I saw more departments after the “page one” meeting, like the guys who make interactive graphics, for example. Their online pieces are increasingly like little movies and might, I think, draw even more eyes away from the print edition. Hmmm.
On the way out I saw the nice art piece that Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen did in the 8th Ave lobby. Though it usually displays random text excerpts trolled from the online archives, at that moment it was displaying the shapes of nations and states that might be in the news. I recognized the shapes of Afghanistan and Minnesota.
Ariel adds:
“There used to be only one way to engage with the NY Times — and that was to buy the whole thing, sit down, and read it in its entirety. (If you bought it, but left parts unread you felt “guilty” — which is a big reason some people didn't buy it in the first place.)
Me, I still read it like that. Every morning, cover to cover. But now, there are many additional ways to engage the stuff we publish. You can Google a fact, land on a Times article, dip in, dip out, move on. Or you can visit the site to get movie tickets and showtimes (actually we just yesterday launched our new movie site: www.nytimes.com/movies) and click your way to the day's reviews — or the day's news about Kabul. Or you can debate with other readers about what off-Broadway plays to see during the stagehands' strike (and click thru to the reviews). Or when a rainstorm shuts down the subway system, and the MTA website crashes, you can go to the "City Room" blog, which was fielding real-time reports about what was running and what wasn't, reported via cell phone text by wet people on subway platforms. Or you can waltz through the archives, a vast and free library of history's first draft.
Or, you can log on every morning and read every story, cover to cover (or whatever the electronic equivalent of that is).
The numbers suggest people are finding lots and lots of different ways and reasons to use the Times — as a resource for news and more broadly speaking, information — and that's what I (not ordinarily a cheerleader) find cheering. Because obviously it no longer makes any sense to expect people to read the thing just out of some sense of civic obligation."
I wonder if the mortgage and credit debacle is a clue. Could it reveal one of the reasons poor or working people voted for Bush last time around? I wonder, because for working folks voting Republican is usually and traditionally a vote for Big Business, and therefore against the working man’s self interest.
In writing the following explanation of the current mortgage/credit collapse, I’m explaining it to myself as best I can. As I understand it, this is what happened. Loans, lines of credit and mortgages are all essentially lending money at interest. As long as it is guaranteed that the loans will be paid back, the loan is as good as money — better actually, as it accrues interest. I can therefore sell a loan I originally made to you to my pal Bob, a third party. And if you are good for repayment, the sale is as good as a money transfer and Bob is happy to purchase this promissory note. My pal Bob’s worth will increase in the future as you the debtor repay the loan, and my worth has gone up immediately, as Bob just paid me.
So, in various ways making mortgage/loans is like printing money — easy to do, and secure, if the payback is guaranteed. Prime Loans are so named because the risk of default is very low and repayment a pretty sure bet. The more loans one makes in this scenario the richer you can become. I can take the money Bob paid me for your promissory note and lend the money to someone else — I don’t even need more cash or capital.
One of the reasons this all worked, or seemed to work, is because of the housing and real estate boom. I know that loans — a mortgage for example — use a person’s house as a guarantee. Over the past years, the values of houses and condos were continually rising. So, if a mortgage holder defaulted on a loan, chances are the house, now the property of bank or note holder, would be worth more than the money that had been originally lent out. It paid to have suckers default on their mortgages(!), as long as the value of their assets continued to rise. And of course, no one believed that the rising cost of real estate and the boom in housing could ever end. Easy for me to say this in retrospect.
However, as one can imagine, anything akin to printing money is awfully tempting — maybe even irresistible — to avoid abusing. As assigning loans and mortgages became easier and easier, the temptation arose to give mortgages to people who in all likelihood wouldn’t be able to repay the loans. Subprime lending, which entailed a higher degree of risk, was redefined. Subprime rates are given to borrowers who do not qualify for the best interest rates because of their deficient credit history.
The recipients of such loans are often described as NINJAs — No Income, No Job, No Assets. Others were known as “liars”, because their claims of income and employment were never crosschecked. (I would think the burden for cross checking falls on the institution, no?) It seems that some banks were relaxing the standards for subprime mortgage loan approval, and assigning the loans in a way that increased the likelihood of borrower default or other loss to the bank. (See the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s testimony before the senate for further reading).
According to my business managers, this problem was compounded by the effect of the interest-only loans that everyone was signing up for: “These allowed home-buyers to pay only interest at a very low ‘teaser’ rate for two years, but after the two years, the rates can double and the payment will include principal as well. The result is that the homeowners can't afford the payments, and if they had planned to refinance after two years based on appreciation in the equity of their homes, that hope is gone because home prices have only dropped.”
In their heady euphoria, the institutions charged with monitoring the lenders and wheeler-dealers looked the other way as these iffy deals were made. It was just too tempting, I guess.
So, if one can sell a mortgage from a NINJA or a liar to Bob (without Bob knowing that’s the status of his supposed asset?), then the incentive to make more loans — to everyone — and sell them to Bob and to Bob’s friend is immense. The “value” of these companies and banks making, buying and selling these loans skyrocketed. And, why not? Very few people want to be spoilsports and actually look at whether or not these loans and mortgages have a good change of being repaid. Huge fortunes were being built on air — or on self-deception — like Enron and Tyco a few years ago.
Meanwhile the recipients — the workingmen and women who are barely eking by — suddenly have loan offers thrown at them by the truckload. They feel richer, more flush; things are going well it seems, and their situations improving. It’s not so hard to pay the bills. They worry less and sleep more. A sense of blissfully ignorant well-being pervades the land. The working class and the under- and unemployed assume that the Republicans are somewhat responsible for this new (virtual) wealth — and maybe they were. It would follow that Mr. Joe Average might vote for the administration seemingly responsible for his new sense of well-being. Now, the bills are coming due — the housing market stalled, as I understand it, triggering the collapse of the whole house of cards.
The other day I was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV with my mom and I noticed that there was a Jeff Koons bunny float/inflatable balloon in the parade! The humongous silver balloon was a blow-up replica of one of his shiny stainless steel versions of kitschy children’s toys. It was a bit of a shock: while the contemporary art world and some museums are a big deal these days, they’re still the preserve of a certain social set. And the audience for the Macy’s parade (on TV and on the streets), would seem to be contained in a separate circle in that particular Venn diagram.
C said that Tom Otterness had one last year, which makes perfect sense as his pieces are clever and funny and kids love them. The Koons balloon, not having a face and all, is kind of scary for the little tykes. We joked about what would come next year — a Richard Serra balloon? A big inflatable version of a twisty slab of rusty steel floating down Broadway?
What’s going on here? Who paid for this? These things must cost a fortune and I can’t find out who underwrote this thing. Who decided a Koons balloon should be included in a parade focused on children and children’s favorite characters? (The other balloons were Shrek, Mr. Potato Head, Kermit, Snoopy and Pokeman.)
I suspect that, as with all branding urges, once a product catches the eye of the public (or a specific subset of the public) and sells, then other consumers — in this case collectors and museums — will want the same thing, or as close to it as possible. Art dealers and collectors might then tactfully urge a successful artist to make more pieces like the one successfully branded, as the “brand”, the icon, is easy to sell and easy to identify. Within such a model, a successfully branded artist might go on to make more or less the same piece over and over again, with slight variations.
We applaud this stick-to-a-good-thing in a classic English shoe, a stapler, or a band saw, but in art it’s mystifying.
Oddly, in the fashion megaverse and some other retail areas, a brand, design or image accepted and successful amongst a tiny (usually wealthy) social demographic means that it will inevitably be desired by those lower down on the social and economic ladder, either via logo imprinted items, knockoffs, counterfeits or copies. The fact that the hoi polloi will now be interested in the item makes it naturally less interesting to the elite. It will go out of favor, and becomes last year’s model, soon to be relegated to the closet or the giveaway pile. If it’s too popular, it can’t be cool anymore. As a result, the creative folks, the designers, feel pressure to come up with a new and different line to appeal to these elites, and as quickly as possible. That’s why it’s called fashion.
Sarah R. suggests the development of fashion trends can occur in reverse as well. This happens all the time, as subculture style is appropriated and adopted by the designers or elite/wealthy, and then sold back to the masses. A classic example is of course the punk style of the mid-70s — by 1977, Cosmopolitan had a fashion spread featuring plastic and safety pins (the punks of course initially borrowed the safety pin from the working class culture where it was used to correct ill-fitting/torn clothing). The article ended with "To Shock is Chic" — so much for subversion! We see this again and again over the past 30 years: grunge fashion for instance, made it on to the runways in the nineties, and the big eighties revival started with street culture before it hit the couture houses. Today corporations have coolhunters to identify trends, and the designers look to them to tell them what will sell. She thinks the emergence of trends is less unidirectional and more of a multi-sourced dialectic these days. And the faster trends are identified, the faster new ones emerge.
Happily, this system of economic and social snobbery (along with the rapid appropriation of designs by the hoi polloi) has become a prod to innovation and invention. The designers and the creative teams have to constantly stay one step ahead of the knockoff merchants and the taste of ordinary folks. Elitism — a natural Darwinian part of sexual selection — is, in this system, a goad to creativity. Not only in the fashion world, but for anything that can be fetishized: electronic gadgets, video games, bands and singers, cars, bikes, and restaurants.
Oddly, it doesn’t seem to work that way in the realm of contemporary art. In the art world, once an artist succeeds in branding his or her name, the system seems to favor steering the artist towards the repetition of that object, with slight variations, for decades. The incentive for innovation and change isn’t there for some mysterious reason. With success, creativity often (not always) comes to a halt, and production begins. To be fair, there are plenty of exceptions, but the numbers that follow this rule are astounding — at least to me. Maybe my definitions are misaligned with those of everyone else?
Perhaps the explanation for this exception lies in the fact that art is not mass-produced, not in the same way as fashion or cars are anyway. Each object is somewhat (albeit subtly) unique, and if purchased, resides in the ownership of a collector or a museum — an individual or a single entity — and its public availability henceforth restricted. So, in order for the whole little art world to consume this brand, it can take decades of production by the artist and his or her staff. These days, Jeff Koons can have a bunny in the Macy’s parade, Richard Prince can print images on Marc Jacobs dresses, and Murakami can design the icons on Louis Vuitton handbags, which only reinforces the art brand as icon. The artist’s status is “safe”, possibly even enhanced, because the “originals” remain forever in limited supply and can only be afforded by a wealthy “discerning” few. However, it’s one thing to be enhanced by luxury goods and another to be featured on cereal boxes, and ads for hair products.
In the last few months there have been a lot of articles in newspapers and magazines about the danger that the new art bubble will burst. Recent auctions at Sotheby’s and Christies would either confirm or deny whether the ever-rising, astounding prices for contemporary art will continue to head skyward. The articles ranged in their positions, and most were simply about the bubble itself and what it means to contemporary art.
It was interesting and a little sad to me that most of the focus in these articles — and there have been lots of them — was on the sums and not the content of the art. But, as more than one writer implied, in many cases the money has become the content. In The New Yorker, Calvin Tompkins quoted a gallerist who stated that the value of artwork is now tied to its monetary worth, which means what it sells for at auction. In this system, you are a better artist because your work sells for more money. (Everyone knows this can’t possibly be true — monetary value is about desire, status and scarcity and not about quality. But according to this gallerist, this is the way it is right now.)
Souren Melikian, the auction writer for The Herald Tribune, was the only writer to offer an opinion on the quality of the some of the works on offer. He was scathing, intimating that a Van Gogh was not a very good one, and that a Picasso was “from his cartoon period”, which was not meant as a compliment. He didn’t venture into the contemporary territory too much, though he did submit that Hugh Grant’s Warhol (a portrait of Liz Taylor) was grossly overvalued in the press. The implication was clear: according to Melikian, our valuation criteria for art have become skewed, and money and the auction houses are responsible.
In particular, Melikian worried about the auction house practice of offering guarantees to favored customers selling “important” works. Assuring a customer a dollar amount for the work, whether it is sold or not, is a way for one auction house to grab a customer and a work from another house. In effect, the auction house buys the work and then becomes the seller. In Melikian’s words, “This is a flawed system. It distorts the principle of an auction that is supposed to be an open contest between sellers and buyers, with the auctioneer as a neutral arbiter.”
Of course, there are always fashions and trends in buying art, old and new. Various movements go in and out of favor — some artists become newly appreciated and others are forgotten. That’s where, on a longer time scale maybe, the art world is similar to the fashion world, although it’s dealing less with new creations and more with preexisting works.
An article by Jori Finkel in the Sunday NY Times mentions that certain powerful galleries are providing financial assistance to fund museum shows of their artists at museums (which increases the value of the work). And many of the same galleries now publicly engage in the practice of either bidding up the works of their artists at auction, or buying the works at premium prices, also a way of keeping the perceived monetary value of a work high. (If suddenly one can get the work of a premium priced artist for much less than the ascribed value, the value of ALL that artist’s work — much of it held by esteemed collectors, or the galleries themselves — will drop). This practice, not exactly Kosher, was once semi-secret though insiders knew it went on. It hardly makes for a level or objective playing field. Now, as with many things in the Bush era, formerly hidden practices are brazenly played out in open. The idea of shame has disappeared, probably because in a market driven, dog-eat-dog world, any practice that benefits you is in turn reflexively defined as legitimate.
Of course, the museums deny that their curatorial decisions are affected by the money coming in from galleries, but that’s simply too silly to believe. While the galleries may not be dictating what artists the museums show (though that does seem to happen), the internalized decision process among museum directors and curators cannot help but be affected by what is financially feasible. Some women don’t up and announce that they are attracted to a man because he has money — they just naturally find him more “attractive” and “interesting”. The knowledge of the money figures in some calculation performed by the amygdala region of the brain and voilà, one feels differently, strangely attracted.
One wonders if the quality work by emerging artists who fall outside of the circus tent will necessarily get lost. Some emerging artists are thrown into the limelight perhaps a little too quickly, with detrimental effects. Take some of the bands from the nineties: early on their work was overvalued and written about extensively, leaving them no time or room to develop as the branding process had already been set in motion.
The money amounts are truly astounding. In a speech delivered at the Burlington House in 2004, Robert Hughes, quoting Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, asserted, “[…]no painting is worth $100 million dollars” (though $100 million dollars isn’t worth $100 million dollars any more). He claims that these amounts inevitably distort the perception of any piece of art.
All that said, I find there is still a lot of interesting and inspiring work being done. In some cases the flood of money has allowed some lesser-known artists to be seen and funded, and in other cases the money carrot may unconsciously inspire some creative types to make stuff that they otherwise wouldn’t. Despite all the shouting, noise and crap, one can choose to look the other way and see something genuine and fascinating.
Halloween
Walking around town I have to constantly remind myself it’s Halloween. It might explain that woman in a white gown across the street — isn’t her makeup unusually white? And the couple in front of me as I walk to the deli — the woman sort of looks like a Raggedy Ann doll. They’re really not that far from how people normally look around here. And where’s the Birdman?
Speaking of scary…Bush’s nominee for Attorney General still refuses to call waterboarding torture, amongst many other sleazy things. He’s clearly an apologist for the policies of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush. And if the Democratic congress passes this man — who by nature of this absolution puts the US and its citizens in harms way, to say nothing of the boys in the services — they will be as guilty as he is. It goes without saying that the Bush crew does NOT support our troops, providing every justification to render our soldiers the pariahs and targets they are fast becoming.
Martin Puryear
Went to see a MoMA show surveying the sculptural works of Martin Puryear, old and new. In my opinion it’s incredible. I found his work both beautiful and moving. I got choked up.
They sculptures are all wood mixed with other materials, partly abstract but with recognizable elements and shapes too: wheels and an axle from an old fashioned cart, but giant; an old wooden wheelbarrow; baskets, upside down and out of scale; fishing nets, the kind used by native Americans; yokes, fence posts, ploughs, tools and their handles, worn into smooth biomorphic shapes with use and age. The works evoke the lyrics of gospel songs and spirituals, and the novels of William Faulkner and Flannery O‘Connor.
Ladder for Booker T. Washington
Photo by Mark Interrante
There are references to the history of Africans in the New World, to traditional African cultures, to farming, working the land and making things by hand — the way one comes to know one’s tools as if they are extensions of oneself, the way they almost come to have a life of their own.
The pieces are calm, but highly charged, both conscious and comfortable with what they are, but also aware that there are layers to get lost in.
None of this is obvious — the scale has been changed and the references are not right upfront or blatant, instead embedded in the shapes and materials, in how they must feel to the hand. (There were more “Do Not Touch” signs than I’ve seen in a long time — maybe they knew the urge to touch these would be strong).
Here is an outdoor piece that wasn’t included in the show, though there was one sculpture with one of these impossible needle like trees that seem to point to the sky just as its diameter dwindles to nothing.
The Iranian President has been banned from visiting Ground Zero. He’s a crazy man, but he had nothing to do with 9-11. So why is he banned, other than that Bush & Co. would love to provoke some incident to excuse an invasion of Iran? If one follows Bush’s logic, it is the Saudis who should be banned. But that non-democracy is a “friend” — a friend whose citizens flew the planes.
The mercenary company Blackwater — referred to as a “private security firm” in the media — continues to violate Iraqi laws and kill innocent citizens with impunity. No wonder they don’t want us there.
Went to see “Transformers” last night by Times Square (there are hardly any places to lock one’s bike on 42nd st). It was long, for a CG based action flick. 2 and 1⁄2 hours I think. I realized today, per my earlier post re video games, movies and emotional involvement that video games could achieve what this and a few other recent blockbusters do without too much further development. Add some amusing quips and asides based on “character” and behavior patterns, scattered them here and there, ditto base the actions and gestures on “character”, maybe insert a love (or a pinup, in this case) interest — and then let the fights, battles, puzzle solving and chases commence — the McGuffin, whatever it is, leads one, as it does in video games, to the conclusion of the movie, or the game. The path could vary somewhat, but by clever design one could somehow always return to the main plot thread. One leaves the cinema drained, but energized — one imagines 42nd street (in my case) rocked by alien monsters, fighter jets, tanks and girls in halter-tops. Then, 1⁄2 hour later, the adrenaline rush has worn off, and that’s it. There’s no more of a take home than there is in a video game. When movies aspire to be video games — although on larger screens — they’ve given up already.
I realized that in these movies the military and the government ministries that are involved with them are often portrayed in a flattering light — the military, despite their initial difficulties and surprise, are fairly competent in these movies — there isn’t any evidence of careerist backstabbing, politicking, ideologically based decision making and lame excuses. Granted, those are mostly the arenas of our political leaders, but lately, since the military have been slow to stand up to them, they’ve been infected as well.
These days many people know of Stasi, the East German internal security agency, from the recent movie The Lives of Others. Not too long ago I read the wonderful book Stasiland [link to journal entry] which has a lot of horrible/incredible anecdotes about domestic spying in East Germany. And then a number of years ago two artists, the Wilson sisters, did a moody surreal art film in the former Stasi headquarters that features a levitating chair. The agency was known for turning citizens against their neighbors by subtle pressure, implied threat or economic incentive. It seems it’s something that many national agencies do from time to time (“If you see something, say something”.) Turning the citizenry into rats makes the entire populace scared and docile, as no one knows who’s informing on whom. ANYONE could be an informer or an agent. The world becomes a Phillip K. Dick novel — although in his version everyone would be informing on themselves.
Sure enough, just like I read about, and as seen in the movie, there were smell samples in jars, bits of cloth holding the odor or suspected citizenry (often a stolen piece of underwear — the perverts!) These were filed away just in case that person should disappear, and then a dog could sniff the rag and discover the bad guy’s hiding place.
The Stasi Museum is inside one part of a former massive compound that enclosed many city blocks. Parking and entrances were inside the compound, so no one could see who was coming or going. And the whole complex is now for sale! For one Euro! Well, I’m sure there are conditions. I think the city is trying to sell it to the country if they will turn it into a proper museum. As is, it’s rudimentary. One floor of former offices displays clunky spy devices: cameras in logs, behind buttons and in fake rocks. Here’s one in a birdhouse — a little obvious, I think.
Maybe the intent was NOT to hide this surveillance gear too well, the idea possibly being to make people aware they were being looked at and listened to. If you’re not aware you’re being observed then you won't live in fear, so what’s the point? Sometimes buildings here in the U.S. put up fake surveillance cameras in the hopes of discouraging perps. Of course, it wasn’t all just nutty surveillance stuff — people’s lives were ruined, destroyed, their careers came to a dead end at the least suspicion, there were prison terms and torture without stated reason (where have I heard that one before?) and information and culture was heavily censored. And the food wasn’t that great, either.
On a higher floor were the offices of the head of Stasi, a Mr. Mielke. They weren’t very grand by Western standards, but he did have a little apartment attached, which was pretty cute if one can now look at this style as very peculiar design aesthetic.
Hardly luxurious — but then maybe these higher-ups saw themselves as modest functionaries just doing the noble work of the state rather than as secret oligarchs or royalty. I remember visiting Pravda HQ in Moscow in the 90s and the decorator must have been the same guy. In that room there were also no decadent touches — just one long bookshelf that held the collected works of Lenin. (When did Lenin have time to write all those volumes?)
The Stasi AV room: 
As the wall was coming down the shredding machines in this place went into overdrive. Most of them clogged and they had to call for reinforcements. Many many documents were destroyed but there were too many to shred in just a few days, so there are organizations now that will allow you to locate your file if it is readable. Here is a page from John Lennon’s FBI file, for example — not a lot of it is “uncensored” — a sort of piece of conceptual art, if you ask me.
The next day we checked out some more of the local museums. The Hamburger Banhof (a former train station and freight terminal) was massive! Bigger than DIA Beacon or the Arsenale in Venice! An endless series of identical galleries. Here is the adjoining hallway, disappearing into an art-filled infinity.
CS has some pieces in a room juxtaposed with some Paul McCarthy grotesques. She said one of hers had been hung upside down — a giant grotesque vagina.
The hotel sells pieces of the Berlin Wall in addition to overpriced Pringles above the minibar. This piece of the wall looks like a cookie. 
You can also take rides in a Trabant, the cheap plastic-bodied Eastern car that was a joke and now is nostalgia. Or Ostalgia, as it is called here.
At Arndt Gallery there was a stuffed tattooed pig — a real pig. On another floor in another room (many of the successful galleries have expanded rapidly) there was a piece by Thomas Hirshhorn that I liked of manikin hands holding aloft literary tomes and ordinary tools — a sort of hilarious intellectual “workers arise!” image.
An idealized revolution on a (large) tabletop. I can imagine this as a crude proposal for a large-scale monument that would have been made years ago in the former East. Maybe done here by a high school senior using available materials: paperbacks rather than more impressive bound volumes, and puny screwdrivers and measuring tapes rather than hammers and sickles. And of course all held together with packing tape, a Hirshhorn specialty by now.
I like this much better than his recent installations that feature scenes of horror and photos of mutilated bodies from Iraq or elsewhere mixed with slogans, art and detritus meant to amplify or heal — those pieces seem too obviously shocking or didactic. Images of mutilated bodies are indeed the part of the U.S. invasion that are carefully kept from the view of most Americans. Accounts of every car bomb, reported almost daily, are not, for example, accompanied by close-ups of the body parts that inevitably accompany those events. Usually we see a smoking car or building in the medium distance and people running away or carrying stretchers. But we don’t often see the toll on human flesh. There was a show at White Columns about a year ago in which a photographer re-photographed the images seen in a museum in Vietnam whose subject was The American War, as they call it. Mangled bodies, living and dead, Agent Orange victims, denuded countryside. Again, the human toll was brought home in ways that Life magazine and CBS never did.
In a strange way, however, the censoring of war’s toll seems reasonable. Both sides of many conflicts can, to some extent (though hardly in Iraq, it’s so one-sided) hold up gruesome images of maimed loved ones and partisans to justify their outrage and need for revenge. The images further inflame passions, anger and distrust. The images demand “justice”, not an explanation. And in order to obtain the “justice” these horrors demand, one must create equal and opposite horrors. But then we have sunk to the level of beasts, clawing at each other, an eye for an eye, until nothing is left standing. And eye for an eye may be justified in a stable society, or at least one could argue for it, under the tight control of an impartial body. But in wartime, without the controls, it spirals quickly out of control. Besides, an eye for an eye rules out forgiveness, repentance and rehabilitation. I know that our prisons are mostly about punishment and revenge — as are many wars — but those three hopeful words are the only way out of the spiral. The Israeli, Soviet and U.S. solutions — not really solutions but stopgaps — are to build massive walls and keep the parties, the entities, separate. It didn’t work in Berlin, or in South Africa, or even China, but it seems to be a recurring idea — as if no one had ever thought of it before!
At another gallery the little-known German pop artist Thomas Bayrle had some surprising pieces. He’s been making stuff since the 60s, some of which now looks like psychedelic posters. He came up with Polke and Richter, but never had the success they did. One wall was covered with wallpaper covered with a repeating graphic of women’s shoes. Possibly before Warhol’s cow wallpaper, who knows? He likes swarming patterns. In another room was an old B&W 16mm film of a rubber plant slowly turning, but on its leaves, swarming like aphids, were tiny people. They seemed be images from a busy street scene, shot from a high angle. Somehow it almost matched the angle on the plant’s leaves so the people really seemed to be crawling all over them. The explanation said it was done frame by frame.
[Link to video]
In another room he there was a wall-sized video projection of a crucified Christ (without the cross) seemingly made out of thousands of shiny angled crystal facets. There was a familiar but unidentifiable whooshing sound. As the “camera” moved in closer one could see that every facet of every “crystal” was a tiny oddly shaped high angle moving image of a highway with trucks and cars zooming by — hence the strange whooshing sound. The “camera” pushed in further, until the “Christ” was no longer discernable and all one could see was weirdly shaped films of cars and trucks on a highway.
[Link to video]
Here are some quotes from the artist:
"The entire world opinion lies in a couple billion halftone-dots."
“I never say good motorway or bad motorway.”
"I consider the relationship between individual and collective/community the same as that between dot and grid, the dot representing a component of the grid, and between cell and body, the cell being its basic element." Lastly, there was, tucked under a river embankment, a tiny museum of DDR life, complete with with a recreation of an apartment interior. Apparently nudism was a popular idea in the East, as the museum included a detailed and extensive diorama of a nude beach: 
So maybe there were some perks to living in the East after all. This museum has an odd format — much of the stuff is in drawers — so if a panel describes the clothing, for example, the drawer might be filled with actual clothes manufactured in the DDR. You can reach in and touch the stuff. Nobody steals anything. The website for the museum has an extensive photo archive of the contents of the museum, life in the DDR, and also of the details of the step-by-step construction of the space. Here’s their toilet in construction. 
There was a wonderful design book, reissued by Taschen in smaller form, called SED (Stunning Eastern Design). It emanated from an exhibition in Germany in ‘89. It celebrates a now vanished universe of “bad” design, shoddy printing and oddball aesthetics. The stuff was so “bad” it was good. 
Of course, the original version of this book became a fetish item in the 90s. Designers like Tibor Kalman, Stefan Sagmeister and Deborah Norcross all plundered its wacky pages, layouts and typefaces. This Cornershop record, for example, accurately recreated (!) a hosiery ad from this design book — funky printing and all. 
I guess at some point designers (and others) get bored with “good” design and the increasing ease of making tasteful design that looks more or less like everything else, which is exactly the point, and also not the point. At some point I guess people designing things want them to look tasteful so that they’ll appeal to a semi-sophisticated crowd. And now it’s pretty easy to do that. With computers, and under the influence of the wealth of slick packaging in the world, tasteful layouts are pretty easy to emulate. The general public is fairly sophisticated in their design sense these days — they “read” the language of design — but, it being a visual language, they are not able to articulate the “text”. But if as a designer you want to be really hip and to appeal to those who deem themselves above mere tasteful design, then you have to have to work a little harder. One way to achieve this ultra cool surprise is to look intentionally bad, but to drop little visual ironic winks into the mix so that the audience knows it’s not really buying a record by a crappy East German band.
So, over the years, every genre of crap design — East German products, tacky back of magazine ads recycled by Warhol or Lichtenstein, sleazy RnB and Rock and Roll record covers, amateur porn and scientific textbooks — gets regurgitated as “good” design. Everything gets mulched and reused. So how does anything truly new ever get created?
The U.S. Homeland Security Dept. has initiated a policy that makes it harder for folks to visit the U.S. on short notice. Mainly business travelers from Europe and China will be affected, which is odd, as this seems counter-productive for the supposedly business-friendly conservatives. Combined with the current attitude towards immigration this adds up to doors creaking closed. To his credit, Bush’s amnesty program for immigrants at least recognized that they prop up the U.S. economy and that retaliatory policies from foreign markets would be disastrous.
Other countries that closed their doors in the past were (or are) Albania, Burma, North Korea, Turkmenistan and Red China (before their conversion to glorious authoritarian capitalism). It really worked well for all those guys.
According to Einstein we’ve got a little over 4 years. Here’s a quote from him: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
And in today's NY Times it says that more than a ¼ of the honeybees in the U.S. have vanished. The article continues with a lot of head scratching as to why but sort of says “gee, we dunno.”
In Speigel, the German newsmagazine, they say, “Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.”
A month or so ago I read a similar article that said the bees were disappearing out west. Then, a few weeks later, I read a seemingly unrelated article that said that growers of GM tangerines were furious with beekeepers for allowing their bees to wander into the GM-planted fields.
The explanation for their anger is simple. GM crops have been carefully and sometimes expensively modified to have certain desirable characteristics — seedless tangerines, in this case. Bees, as an important part of the chain of life, cross-pollinate plants by “accidentally” rubbing pollen from one flower onto another further away. This is not really an accident, for, as Einstein points out, life as we know it has come to depend on it happening. If this “accident” or “byproduct” ceases we are goners.
Anyway, though it was not mentioned in the tangerine article I asked myself if the two articles could be related — if GM agribusiness could be trying to eliminate bees.
Call me a conspiracy nut, but it sure sounds likely to me. They are the ones who would principally benefit — they have a motive and incentive.
Would a civilization commit suicide? You bet they would — they’ve done it all the time. I read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse and, sure enough, according to him culture and greed trump common sense and reason every time — although in many cases it took a disaster like a drought or war to push things over the tipping point.
Links:
Are GM Crops Killing Bees? Spiegel, 3.22.07
The Vanishing, OnEarth, Summer 2006
Last night at a dinner the subject was Don Imus the radio talk show host who recently let loose some racist slurs regarding a women’s sports team. (He called the girls “nappy-headed hos”.) There has been a hubbub in the media and the station’s advertisers pulled out and now he’s been fired and his career is probably over. The story has a happy, or at least just, ending. One dinner guest suggested that all such incendiary shock jocks should be canned, as they attract listenership principally by spewing hate. Hate drives ratings up. (And therefore advertising dollars.) But initiating a reign of terror against talk show hosts and other loose canons is heading for a slippery slope, as we all agreed.
More interesting was the suggestion that the market had been the deciding factor — and that somehow the market could be a way, a device, a lever, to eject poison from the social system from time to time. That it was the advertisers pulling out, because they didn’t want to be seen as supporting a pariah, that helped to keep the social body healthy. Another guest said that it was Al Sharpton who brought this racist remark to greater attention, and that Imus has said similar things before but they’ve slipped by — that the advertisers didn’t distance themselves until Sharpton and the media made everyone aware of Imus’s remark. And isn’t it the advertisers who support and benefit from the vitriolic and incendiary attitudes fostered by these shows? Even if the hosts are sometimes careful not to cross certain lines they make it clear that they would like to.
I asked if the publishers and artists of the Danish cartoons should, in a just world, likewise be canned. Someone said, “but those were not attacks on people they were attacks on a religion.” I responded that they were in fact veiled attacks on people — on the tiny minority of Muslims in Denmark. They were a way of saying to these “foreigners” in their midst, “Your religion is stupid and you are stupid for believing in such nonsense”. Note that the cartoons did not make light of Christian imagery or mythology, nor did they accuse pious Danish churchgoers of brainless stupidity. My position is that most religions are equally based on insupportable myths and if you attack one you should attack them all. (That said, the myths and imagery are beautiful, moving and powerful.) Religions do a pretty good job of attacking one another as it is — by nature only one can be true, so all the rest must therefore be infidels. To its credit, North America is more mixed and therefore tolerant than many European and Asian countries. Those places have ingrained ideas about what is means to be German or Danish or French and the idea that Turks or Algerians might be considered German or French is slow to be accepted. The “foreigners” in those countries are usually ghettoized, so interaction with people different than oneself is rare.
There is a banner of free speech that gets waved in these discussions. The idea that anyone should be free to say anything, however hurtful, anytime, anywhere. And the question of whether the ACLU should be defending neo-Nazis who march in Skokie, Illinois is an example often quoted. I asked if one could shout fire in a crowded theater and was told that, no, there is in fact a law against that. I had hoped to make the point that we voluntarily limit our free speech in order to get along, but I picked a completely wrong example. I’ve come back to this topic more than once. I think we’re left with our social sense — a sense of getting along and living together — and not a set of absolute rules. This possibly innate social sense should govern our behavior. It’s more work than falling back on rules and it isn’t fixed like rules, either. We are social animals, and if one member of the group decides to be anti-social — which is their prerogative — they will, as in any social group, soon be ejected. (Unless they have loads of money or weapons or some other leverage that would outweigh their harmfulness.) Of course the group has to disagree with them, find their behavior disruptive and harmful to the future well-being of the group as a whole in the first place. Many times we tolerate the existence of anti-social individuals; they might be good at something else, for example, or we are not sure it is worth the necessary effort to scour out the filth. We can live with a bit of filth, but if others begin to notice it and point it out then it’s time for housecleaning.
Someone at the dinner pointed out the coincidence that as Imus was being vilified the North Carolina lacrosse players — all white — were being declared innocent of rape. They are considering suing the woman who accused them, the prosecutor and Duke university. The woman had been “hired to dance at a party”. She is poor and black, the lacrosse players are wealthy and white. There is a lot of money and popularity involved in university sports. The incentive for the “marketplace” would be to look the other way. I don’t think we can leave the oiling of the social gears to the marketplace, but economic pressure sure has an effect. Globally, though, it seems complicated. It doesn’t always work as planned. The U.S. embargo has made the lives of Cubans worse, and has possibly achieved exactly what it sought to prevent — it has provided Castro with an excuse for everything and an obvious and clear enemy. The embargo unites the Cuban people — well, sometimes — rather than spurring them to rise up against Castro. Likewise the Israeli blockage of Lebanon simply reinforces the idea of Israel as an enemy of the Arab world. It makes Hamas stronger, not weaker.
In South Africa the embargo eventually imposed against the apartheid regime seemed to have had a different effect. From over here it did seem to weaken the regime and remove their economic foundation…which eventually led to a relatively peaceful change.
Why did that one work while the others did not?
I would suggest that on a smaller scale the same thing happens. Giving people convenient scapegoats and adversaries is sometimes an unintended consequence of trying to punish or enforce “correct” behavior. The victim and the persecutor become weirdly co-dependant. We need our enemies — and they love us too, in a sick kind of way.
[A special bulletin brought to you by DB and Danielle Spencer]
[Link to savenetradio.org]
The Copyright Royalty Board is proposing a large increase in the performance royalty rates for “non-interactive streaming services”. This means web radio, cable radio and satellite radio will pay more to SoundExchange in royalties. Presumably those royalties eventually dribble down to the artists getting “played”, but it’s never that simple. It’s a little complex and difficult to understand but let me see if I can describe what is in the offing. (My own streaming web radio would be affected, and since I derive no income from it, that, among other things, makes this an issue of personal interest.)
Web radio is different than broadcast radio in that the hosting costs increase precisely as the listenership increases. With streaming web radio, information on the exact number of listeners accessing the stream at any given moment or period is available, and easy to obtain, unlike broadcast radio which is just out there and no one knows how many people are listening (so how do they determine ad rates?) The more listeners you have the more you pay in hard costs — some server’s gotta host the stream. Of course stations like mine and the network of NPR stations that have no commercial revenue eventually run into a financial wall once that audience figure reaches a certain amount.
With royalties it gets more complicated. While traditional terrestrial radio does pay songwriter/publishing royalties for the musical work itself, in the U.S. they don’t pay performance royalties for the sound recording under the rationale that airplay promotes the songs, which benefits the copyright holders. (This determination was mostly due to the radio industry lobbying congress not to collect these royalties.) Web radio, however, along with satellite and cable services, does pay performance royalties — these are the rates that are being raised now. (If this discrepancy sounds illogical, it’s because it is.) Now, broadcasters are eligible for statutory licenses for these new performance royalties. These statutory licenses set royalty rates so that each station doesn’t have to license each song individually. Until now, if a webcaster’s profit was below a certain amount, they have been eligible to pay a set yearly fee, and if they met certain criteria they have been able to pay royalties as a percentage of their profits, not as a per-song fee. Registered 501(c)(3) non-profits have been eligible for reduced rates regardless of their stream traffic.
With the proposed changes the royalties can no longer be based on a percentage of revenue, but on a fee for each listening hour — how many folks are listening and for how long — and there will be a minimum fee per radio “channel”. Also, above a certain aggregate listening hour amount, non-profits have to pay the same per-listening hour rates as commercial broadcasters. So now there will be no distinction between a large-scale non-profit station (like KCRW or WXPN) and Z100. The threshold for non-profits is proposed to be 159,140 listening hours per month. Where did this bizarre number come from?
For perspective, on my web radio I get an average of about 40,000 listener hours per month. At present I pay small mechanical royalty fees that go to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC (presumably these dribble down to the artists whose songs I stream); performance royalties that get dispersed via a company called SoundExchange, and a fee to Live 365 for hosting and doing all the paperwork. I pay about $2,000 a month, based on the above listening hours. That’s rent for an apartment for many people (at least in some cities.) I can afford it, I enjoy doing it, and people seem to like it, so it’s OK for me that I’m out of pocket. I do however realize that I am in a special position — not just anyone can afford to start a streaming web radio service if it has this many listeners. If this ruling goes through it’s likely that my costs would go up about 20%, which is not crippling, yet. But one can see where this road leads — the door will have been wedged open. It’s estimated that the per-play rates will put many webcasters out of business, all but the largest and most commercially successful.
For NPR stations it is a different story as they have wider listenership than I and would pay the same royalty rates as commercial broadcasters. KCRW estimates roughly that as this ruling is retroactive they would owe $130,000 in additional fees for 2006 and $237,000 for 2007. WXPN in Philly estimates $1,000,000. In some worlds this is not a big deal but as one can imagine many of these stations barely eek by as it is, so this could very likely shut down the webcasting side of many of them. That would be a shame, as these stations are the only source of, well, good music, alternative sounds and innovative and informative programming in the U.S. It would be a loss for, well, democracy, as democracy depends on availability of many points of view untainted by commercial concerns and pressures. A truly informed populace, in other words. It points to another victory for the oligarchs — the big 5 record companies and the media companies that own them. Count one more for the big guys. The reasoning that it’s for the benefit of the artists rings a little hollow as most artists heard this argument re: cracking down on file sharing, and most never see money from their record companies anyway — so the line about “we’re doing it for you” is pretty suspect.
Who is this agency that is proposing making this change? They are not an elected body — the Copyright Royalty Board is made up of a few people appointed by the Library of Congress Copyright Office. They used to be a group of arbitrators but since 2004 they are a group of judges. (I wonder if Gonzales, Cheney etc. have any pals in there?)
The new rates are supposed to have been based on the model of the so-called willing buyer and willing seller in the marketplace — this according to the wording of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1996. But where does this “market value” come from? Does it mean that if I play more popular music on my streaming radio I should pay more? I’m confused. (I think I’m supposed to be confused.) Who is determining this value? In this case the CRB seems to be looking towards agreements made between the major record labels and the largest commercial webcasters, but this is hardly a free market model. It also seems to ignore the fact that the “value” of a song would change depending on the context — if I’m listening to a web radio stream I can’t control what I hear, which is different from purchasing the track.
The new rates are being appealed — to join a petition (against the rate changes) or learn more about this, go to savenetradio.org.
—DB/DS
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Some further notes, for those who are really interested:
Commercial broadcast mediums in the U.S. mostly derive their income from advertisers. Nielsen systems — boxes attached to a random sampling of viewers’ TV sets — are supposed to determine what shows are being watched, and the more popular shows can therefore demand more money from the advertisers as they are “delivering” a larger audience to view their ads and presumably buy their products. I suspect it’s a more complicated algorithm than that, as some shows will have a wealthier viewership than others, and presumably one could market more expensive items to this crowd than to Super Bowl fans even though their numbers might be smaller. You might charge more to deliver potential buyers of jewelry and designer clothes than drinkers of Bud Lite. And with cable it might be possible to determine more accurately who is watching what.
From an audience perspective we are used to receiving radio and TV more or less for free. We see it as a God-given right, and our perception is that the stuff is simply “in the air” and there for the taking. Of course the fact that we “pay” by being forced to listen or watch lots of ads is somewhat ignored. Subscription services that reduce ads like Tivo, cable, and commercial-free satellite radio are increasingly popular, but I would argue that ads are not consciously viewed by the public as a cost. To some extent free programming is simply an elaborate means of getting us to sit still and tune in to the ads. With cable we pay a blanket fee, which helps fund the channels — and we still feel we can and should have complete access to the cornucopia of programs, some with ads and some without. NPR and PBS stations are funded by viewers like you, as we are often reminded, and by miniscule government grants. They don’t solicit ads. Though they pay a fee for their license and pay royalties for playing music, these amounts are not too high. And being non-profits they get a tax break. (I do not.) Broadcast radio has been traditionally viewed as a kind of free promotion of the artists and record labels’ products, and therefore the idea that the stations should be paying performance royalties was waived. The same “promotional” logic was applied to MTV in the past; the videos, for a certain period, were provided free and seen as publicity vehicles for CDs. After a while the big record companies extracted fees from MTV — which they didn’t share with the artists — and now there are hardly any videos shown at all. (Since, in the past, TV had no “product” to sell, this “promotional” reasoning was not possible in that medium. For example, Seinfeld or American Idol are not broadcast without ads under an assumption that folks will rush out an buy a video or DVD…it’s also true that, unlike music, TV shows are not quite as endlessly repeatable.) With web radio that logic seems to be partially being left behind.
—DB
The “promotional” rationale for not collecting performance royalties from terrestrial radio is more of a reflection of the radio industry’s powerful lobby in the 1940s than an ideological decision. The RIAA calls it “an historical accident”, and the U.S. copyright office has acknowledged the asymmetry of collecting publishing royalties but not mechanical royalties. We are one of the few industrialized countries that doesn’t collect these royalties. The EU nations do collect performance royalties for terrestrial radio, but because we don’t collect them here, they don’t distribute those revenues to U.S. artists.
There are of course many examples of broadcast mediums that are essentially promotional as far as the copyright holder is concerned and don’t earn direct royalty revenues. However, the songwriter/publisher royalty income from terrestrial radio is more than token. As for web radio, the “promotional” logic was never applied, dating back to the initial decision to charge performance royalties in 1995 with the DPRA (Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act). The performance royalty rates have always been significant for webcasters (12% of profit for commercial broadcasters above a modest profit threshold) even before these proposed rate increases, despite the fact that the revenues don’t amount to much for the artists.
—DS
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4.17.07
Here are some links/articles on the web radio issue that was decided yesterday:
The Death of Web Radio? [Business Week Online]
Net Radio Operators Lose Appeal Over Fees [c|net news.com]
Interesting that SoundExchange initiated the whole thing…and that they are a non-profit created by the big record labels. Hmmm. One could say conflict of interest but cleverly held at arm's length by the creation of this mouthpiece?
Did my “Record Companies — Who needs them?” slide talk as part of the music conference here. Got periodic laughs, which is a good sign…I think the pacing is improving, but I still don’t have an ending.
One of the questions from the audience afterwards made me realize that essentially it’s an optimistic presentation, despite delivering the (obvious) news that CDs will be gone in a few years and record stores will be gone well before that. The good news is that there are more and varied options for artists (and music business folks) in terms of distribution and marketing models. There is a whole spectrum of possibilities now, many more than when I was coming up. They range from the record company entity sharing in every aspect of the artist’s life — the T-shirts, the concerts and the music (this is the kind of deal Robbie Williams made) to the DIY scenario in which the artist or their manager or business rep essentially does everything (or contracts everything) themselves. Aimee Mann and Ani DiFranco are well known for succeeding in this way of doing things.
I point out other obvious factors that affect the viability of these various models — that recording costs have shrunken, and that as on-line sales rise, distribution and manufacturing costs approach zero. Both of these costs traditionally necessitated funds that record companies provided for artists, but now that dependency is going away at least.
I am slightly surprised that some of this is news, but maybe I’m able to view it from a slight distance…or a time perspective.
Mauro had asked where his group Forro In The Dark should play down here so I arranged with Liz that they play the San Jose patio for an unscheduled late-night mostly acoustic set. It goes smoothly and is loads of fun. I sing a few songs — some from their CD and some from my own CD Uh-Oh that we’d previously done Forro-style. The hotel kept a lid on the crowd so it’s relaxed — and we’re not too loud and I think everyone had a good time. I got Joe Boyd in, who was down here talking about his White Bicycles book due out soon. Some of the crowd was dancing and what was photographer Bruce Weber doing here? [His Let’s Get Lost film was screening.] Went across the street to the Continental and caught the tail end of John Doe’s set and Jerry H. and Carol were hanging out, too. The streets are filled with music — coming out of doorways, from parking lots and vacant lots. Everywhere young hopefuls are walking to and fro, networking or performing. That’s an awful lot of guitars, a lot of young men and women pouring out their souls and a lot of gimmie caps.
Bush and Co. are now telling us that Iran is funding and arming the rebels in Iraq. This is obviously an attempt to beat the drums for a new invasion, and given that their prior record of war justifications was based on lies and false connections — that Iraq was connected with Al-Qaeda, for example — it’s remarkable how the media isn’t calling them on this shit. At least put the word “alleged” in front of everything that comes out of the White House press office, for God’s sake! Their previous tack — Iran’s supposed nuclear weapon development — doesn’t hold much water, according to all reliable intelligence, so on to plan B, I guess. Funny, reliable intelligence didn’t stop them previously; they just found or made up the intelligence that fit their plan and most American news media outlets duly reported it as fact, and the majority of the American public and most politicians said OK. At least now these latter 3 might possibly not fall in line as they did before. There is hope.
New iPod ads and an image from the Men in The Cities series of drawings by Robert Longo. Coincidence or conspiracy?
Well, should we? Are individual soldiers responsible for their actions? Or are they merely machine parts? “I was only following orders” is the often heard claim when a soldier who committed a human rights abuse or worse is challenged. It is a way of absolving themselves from responsibility. “I just drove the train, pushed the button, flew the plane because my commanding officer told me to.” If we follow this argument, it would be the higher-ups who are then always responsible, yes? But the higher-ups will always absolve themselves of responsibility for My Lai, Chechnya and Abu Graib. They’ll always say that those incidents were the work of “rogue” soldiers, bad apples — or that there were higher-ups yet higher above them who made the order. Or, in the case of Rumsfeld, restructured things to make abuses easier and more likely to happen — and the attendant destruction of civilians and a country. Ultimately, following that logic that makes about 3 or 4 people ultimately responsible, if the buck continues to get passed on up the chain of command. Of course, those 3 or 4 will blame “faulty intelligence” or try to absolve themselves one way or another, and they usually succeed.
But what about the hundreds of thousands who simply do as they are ordered and whose actions in some cases destroy a nation, a population, and hundreds of thousands or millions of lives as a result? People whose actions have devastating and long-lasting repercussions? Sometimes they do these things unwittingly, but what I am dealing with here is the question of what happens when they do realize what is happening. Have participants no will of their own? Do they deny that they have free will in this case? Those who make sure the bombers are running smoothly but didn’t actually shoot anyone — are they not as guilty as those who pull the triggers? (Anyone see the footage of U.S. soldiers zapping Iraqis for a lark? It’s typical war stuff, it always happens. They act like they’re playing a video game, vaporizing civilians.) Are the guys in the green zone in their air conditioned offices and boozy evenings not as guilty as the grunts who massacre civilians? Don’t they, the officers and bureaucrats, facilitate the dehumanization of the locals, and as a result, the rapid dehumanization of their own soldiers? Those who do as they have been commanded, but abandoned all reason, free will, responsibility and common sense? Do soldiers have no apparent impulse or incentive to think about or question a policy or their own actions? Do none of these folks bear any responsibility for their actions? Will Paul Brenner eventually step forward and say, “Oh, sorry, it was my fault, hang me too — I caused as many deaths as Sadam” —? Would Rummy take the heat? Will the gang who beat the war drums armed with lies and deception — Wolfowitz, Perle, Armstrong, Rice, Powell etc. — admit they hold responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths? Would Jeff Sacks admit he helped deliver the Russian people to the gangsters, KGB and oligarchs? Not likely.
I am reminded of the employees of most businesses whose owners are so distant that the employees never think or ask why they are doing something, how the product works, or just as often doesn’t work, why a policy does or doesn’t makes sense, or if a policy might even be counter-productive. Go into almost any store or office cubicle. Alienation, I believe Marx called it, based on his experience in Manchester during the industrial revolution. Most employees as a result of this disconnect simply cover their asses and have no personal investment in making things work better, knowing about the product they sell or how to fix it. It sometimes seems as if war, specifically the soldier, is the model for the alienated worker from his job. The workplace is modeled after the military. This can be a scary efficient machine, when all goes well.
Or, a little voice asks, does each individual soldier have a moral responsibility, and as a human being should he ask of him or herself, “Is my cause just, are the means just, or was I tricked, and if so, should I refuse, or should I lay down my guns and leave?” Do any of the additional 20K troops Bush just ordered (by what right?) into the trenches have any say in the matter? “Am I fighting for what they said I was fighting for?” The reasons for the invasion of Iraq have changed so many times, surely no one believes any of them at this point. Does the foot soldier have a duty to ask, “Is this old man, mother or kid I am about to kill really a terrorist?” Does the ordinary soldier have ANY responsibility to behave morally? If the troops are tired, and if they feel the war is a quagmire in which they are among the unfairly unprotected victims, should they lay down their weapons and walk away? Do they have a moral duty as human beings to do so? Should they be held responsible if they do not act? Is it more patriotic to refuse than to obey? At this point “support our troops” for most Americans means bring them home, quickly and safely.
Cindy Sheehan: "If every peace person just stops one kid from joining the military, that’s one potential American life saved.”
The implication I infer here is that the “kids” she refers to are either being duped or are too stupid to decide or see what’s going on for themselves. Her quote implies, to me, that we have to stop them; alert them, educate them, and deprogram them, because they won’t figure it out for themselves, not until it’s too late. So much for believing in informed citizenry — and, I would argue, so much for democracy as well, because you can’t have the latter without the former.
From the BBC news website: U.S. war objector pleads not guilty
A U.S. army officer who refused orders to deploy to Iraq has pleaded not guilty to several charges at a court martial.
First Lt Ehren Watada is charged with missing movements and two charges of conduct unbecoming an officer. Lt Watada told the military court at an army base in Washington state that the order to go to Iraq was illegal because the war itself was illegal.
'Illegal and immoral'
The other two charges against Lt Watada stem from statements he has made criticising the war as illegal and immoral. He has said he wou
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