11.09.09: Estoril, Portugal — The Future, the Past, the Present and…

C & I accepted the offer to be jurors along with a couple of others at a modest film festival in an off-season, seaside town 25 minutes outside of Lisbon. For me it’s a way of taking a forced vacation, as I dove right back into various kinds of work and projects as soon as my year-long tour ended.

We had dinner with some of the other festivalgoers, along with a classical pianist who was visiting. Some wondered what was to become of music as filesharing and illegal downloading becomes more prevalent. I offered that yes, it is a huge problem for record companies and for some types of musicians — but it seems that not coincidentally, the illegal downloaders are the same people who spend the most money on music and music-related “products” (concerts, etc.). More than anyone else, these “offenders” are passionate music fans and consumers. I suggested that maybe if buying music online had been encouraged sooner, and if the process didn’t have so many catches (like DRM-hampered files), things might not have gone badly so quickly for the record companies.

I mentioned that this digital technology gives many types of artists more power over the means of production, and even distribution — which might not be such a bad thing. I then began to speculate about other media beyond music that are going digital — films, books, television — and that the “view on demand” technology that Netflix uses, or something similar to it, might allow indie filmmakers to take charge of their own distribution (not via Netflix, but through their own sites, giving them a larger income percentage). The communal theatrical film experience might be lost, but that seems to be the case for those small films anyway — so there isn’t much of a trade-off. There’s little downside in trying out a non-theatrical kind of distribution.

I could sense the eyes glazing over as I talked excitedly about various possibilities and somewhat optimistic scenarios for the near future. The conversation then turned to European cultural history, and the patronage that supported Mozart and Bach. Our fellow juror, choreographer Rui Horta, mentioned that André Malraux had been innovative and influential in this regard in the last century. Malraux was, from 1959 to 1969, the Minister of Cultural Affairs in France under De Gaulle, during which time he developed maisons de la culture in several small French towns. These were the first state-supported culture centers in France — basically performing arts centers with rehearsal rooms attached; the latter implying that new works would be created on-site. This aspect was the innovative and radical part, as it meant that creation would be decentralized — that more than a few officially sanctioned organizations and artists would be allowed, theoretically, into the fold of cultural production. Rui had been artist in residence at one of these centers in France, and had more recently initiated a similar center in the Portuguese countryside.

Malraux was also a novelist and anti-colonialist activist in Indochina and elsewhere. I’ve read his book The Voices of Silence — an amazing art history book in which he proposes that art has replaced religion in the West. Here he is editing Museum without Walls, in which he argued that art books are portable museums — again a move towards decentralization, putting creation in the hands of folks all over the country.

[Source]

Days later, during a magazine interview with Inês de Medeiros, the senator for culture in Portugal, I put my foot in it. I suggested that it was more important that children, and everyone really, be imbued with a sense that they themselves might make things — that the things they might make have value — as opposed to learning mainly to appreciate the great masters, whether they be Bach, Picasso or the literary canon. I proposed that the value of art might be of more use to society in that regard, rather than focusing on supporting, well, museums and symphony halls. Naturally, to a senator who has made it her noble mission to argue for more support for the arts, this is slightly heretical and, as she said, “very American.” America’s lack of state support for the arts and skepticism of the value of fine art is legendary.

I qualified my opinion by saying that I myself love a lot of “refined” contemporary art, and some highbrow or academic music as well — but I don’t assume that everyone should. Those who enjoy that stuff are not all wealthy, but they do constitute an elite, rarified world. By this definition, comic book fans and heavy metal fans are elite bunches as well. Every subculture is, in a way. I don’t presume that my tastes or those of my friends require lots of state support — although a little more in the US would be nice — and I would argue that supporting the arts and culture in schools at all levels is worth a lot more to our future quality of life. Encouraging students to write, to make stuff, to cook, design, to draw, play an instrument, record music, sing, edit films, etc. — all of that creates a sense of self-worth, curiosity and experimentation that has applications way beyond each of those disciplines. I would argue that this is where the greater percentage of state funding should go. Of course in the US, it’s the part that has been eliminated almost completely.

A couple of days later at the hotel breakfast table, I overheard FF Coppola at the next table espousing the merging of live performance and film as where the future of film might lie. C and I thought that he must not be aware of many of the performance groups we know who already do this — the Wooster Group has been doing it for years, and Big Dance Theater just did a short run at The Kitchen in NY that was a seamless blend of live projected video and live performance. But yes, other than in isolated scenes it hasn’t caught fire in a big commercial way just yet, although arena rock concerts do it all the time.

I noted to myself that we North Americans (and I’m not even native born) tend to get excited (with reservations) about future possibilities. We are curious about what is to come, good or bad, and how we might be part of it, and possibly find our niche or avoid the worst. Here in Europe, where admittedly things are often more “civilized,” the weight of the past consumes people’s thoughts. While a European sees oneself as part of a continuum — a long line of culture receding into the dim and distant past — North Americans can only feel in their guts that they are standing upon a thin veneer of history. They are both excited and stimulated by the idea of what can be imagined, what might come into existence that never existed previously — sometimes stimulated to the point of dangerous insanity. This is, I guess, a bit of a cliché, but here I was having examples thrown in my face. There might be a grain of truth to it at least.

In a recent New Yorker article on murder, German sociologist Norbert Elias is mentioned as promoting the concept of the idea of a “civilizing process” that encompasses many of our behaviors…a process that requires increased self-control and restraint. The growing dominance of the state, especially in Western Europe, is seen in this view as part of this process, whereby the application of justice is entrusted by the people to the state. It involves the “replacement of a culture of honor [and honor killings] with a culture of dignity… Duels replaced feuds,” resulting in fewer casualties.

In much of the US, it might be argued, this process has a ways to go, as many North Americans are loathe to give power to the state, and prefer to exact revenge and justice on their own (and to take responsibility for their own medical costs and health — or lack of it). This is one possible explanation as to why the US has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy — we are the least “civilized.” Our wildness is often a well of creativity and gumption; it’s a font of opportunity and hope, a draw and seduction for immigrants, and maybe equally an explanation for the extremes and prevalence of stupidity that exist in the US as well.

In the end, I wondered to myself, if we assume, cliché though it might be, that Europe focuses on the past, and North America on the future, then does it follow that there is another continent that is more oriented to the present? Africa? The line of reasoning is ridiculous, but I’m curious where it leads. I wonder if each continent might have a temporal focus. And if so, does this mean that there are more kinds of time than past, present and future?

09.29.09: Seattle — Angry Man Breakfast

Reading the morning paper here in Seattle, I was struck by the mood of what appeared to me to be propaganda. I didn’t begin ranting, foaming at the mouth or spraying my yogurt across the hotel dining room.

At It Again

A front-page photo/graphic in today’s NY Times shows what is rumored to be an Iranian nuclear facility of some sort. Maybe it’s just the graphic style of these things, but it looks exactly like the various photo-graphics we were inundated with before the invasion of Iraq. Pictures of buildings where WMDs were being stored, hidden or manufactured…all of which were proven to be merely rumors spread to lead and lure us into the morass we are in now. Folks fell for it then, and given everyone’s short memories they might go for it a second time.

Now I’m not saying this is definitely NOT a nuclear facility — only pointing out that the manner of presentation of alleged facts is the same.

Perspective

On the same front page we are told that socialism is collapsing in Europe because a number of countries have elected center-right politicians. I beg to differ. As the article says, the center-right accepts as a given “generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, [and] sharp restrictions on carbon emissions.” Those three ideas would place them on the left in the USA, though the writer says, maybe correctly, that in Europe the left traditionally goes further. That those givens are still not generally accepted in the US, and are currently the yelling, screaming indications that politicians are “socialist” (and therefore un-American), puts this supposed “collapse” in perspective.

Resurgence

Another front-page article brings the good news that the economy is rebounding and getting bullish again. While in some ways that might not be surprising (no serious regulation has been put into place to prevent a recurrence of the meltdown, or to restrain the hubris and greed of the bankers), it seems sort of like good news just for the sake of good news — feel-good stuff. The economy has been out of whack for so long that to cheer its “return” and resurgence to what is essentially a misguided and broken system is maybe not the best idea right now. That much of the country is living unsustainably means that while Goldman Sachs and some others might be raking it in — profiting from the downturn, some have claimed — that isn’t the real world.

08.03.09: London — Playing the Building III

The show at the Barbican was being filmed in HD, so I went in early and helped adjust lights with our LD David Ambrosio and Will from Hillman Curtis’s crew so that the stage looked to the camera more or less the way it looks to the eye… at least on the songs that hadn’t previously been shot. Before that I went up to Camden Town to the Roundhouse, where the Playing the Building installation will open on Friday, to see how it was going. The building, now cleared of circus staging and other crap, and with its skylight open for the first time, is spectacular. Mark McNamara and Justin Downs were just getting some of the motors and pipes into position, so no sounds to be heard yet… but all seems to be well. Here’s a shot of work in progress:

The crate containing the actual organ was opened in shipping — probably by Homeland Security, who carelessly repacked it, as they do — and in the process the keyboard was almost destroyed (though it’s repairable). We hope none of the other mechanical or electronic bits inside were damaged, but will know soon enough. I feel more secure, don’t you? How, I wonder, is international shipping of goods, samples, art, products, etc. supposed to happen if this kind of behavior is tacitly encouraged by the US government? The Bush legacy lingers. Is there someone we’re supposed to pay, some service we’re supposed to use to guarantee more considerate handling? The inspection would be fine if they had put the bits back with some semblance of care.

[Alice Rawsthorn adds: "Your problems with Homeland Security reminded me of László Moholy-Nagy's misadventures when taking his enormous Light Space Modulator into the various countries where he and his family lived in the 1930s. Whenever it crossed a border, customs officials pounced and refused to believe that it was a work of art, until Moholy took to describing it as "hairdressing equipment" and it sailed through unscathed."]

I walked on the net, high above the Roundhouse floor, that rings the innermost catwalk… you can see it in the photo. The ring looks like it’s floating… very exciting.

I tubed it down to the Barbican Centre, where our show will be. The walkways, as one approaches this sixties brutalist monstrosity, provide views reminiscent of the scenes in A Clockwork Orange when Alex returns to his parents’ flat after a night of the old ultra-violence (minus the blowing trash).

Anyway, at the show Leo Abrahams sat in with us for two of the songs on which he played on the recent CD collaboration with Brian. He wore the mandatory white, and plugged straight into and out of his laptop, using some software effects — and it sounded great. No amp or other bits of gear! I lent him my spare Strat, so he didn’t even need to bring a guitar.

Jenni surprised us by bringing Julian Barratt (Howard Moon) from The Mighty Boosh backstage to say hello as we gathered in our snack room. We were all stunned and flattered. He came to see us even though he really, seriously does like jazz. Julian, Thom Yorke, Brian, and some others joined us after the show. I made the rounds saying hellos, then Cindy and I went back to the hotel. Thom was very excited to meet her — I guess from his art school days, she was (is) an icon of sorts. I was wearing a not so special white shirt and Thom immediately knew the designer — a friend of his. He must have spotted some subtle detail. I never would have pegged him for someone knowledgeable about fashion.

C and I pedaled over to a show of design art furniture at the V&A. There is some truly lovely and wacky stuff, but not enough of it to be a real survey of the currently hot genre. The whole categorization is questionable for some — as it’s limited edition furniture that is super expensive, and usually not that comfortable to sit on, placed into an art context. It’s functional but not really. The not really part makes it art — if one agrees that art doesn’t serve an (obvious) practical purpose.  I’ve done a series of functional (you can sit in them) but uncomfortable chairs in a variety of materials that could be considered to fall into this genre, so I’m fascinated.

This one, by Sebastian Brajkovic, is made mostly of cast bronze — it must weigh quite a bit!

[Source]

The show is called “Telling Tales”, as if there was some Grimms’ Fairy Tale theme running through the work — death and incest and dark mothers and fathers and forests… though to me that all seems like a stretch. Pretty much all the work, except for two pieces (one British — Julian Mayor — and one by Boym, the Russian-American designer), is Dutch. Leave those out and the show could have been called a survey of recent extreme Dutch furniture design — though there is a lot more going on there design-wise as well. The Eindhoven-based Droog Design crew, which spawned Hella Jongerius and quite a few others, don’t strictly make furniture — they are also pushing design boundaries.

A road sign in Hyde Park — there’ll always be an England.

The One Year Family

The tour is winding down and we’re all feeling a little weird. I suppose my dreams are all related to the imminent end of the tour. It’s amazing we all held it together this long — there were few meltdowns and only one crew person defected, and that was months ago. The shows have been successful, and the band doesn’t have any serious substance abusers or complete lunatics — which was fairly common for a pop music tour back in the day — so maybe all those factors helped to contribute to how well we held it together for an entire year.

Extended tours like this are like movie shoots — everyone bonds, like a little family. We often do things together, and we all sleep together (well, close by) on the buses. We know our family will only last a year, though there are sometimes splinter unions that last longer. Some of the crew will go on to work on other projects and tours; some of us musicians, singers and dancers will work on stuff together in the near future; friendships and even love bonds have formed — but none of those projects or relationships will include the whole one year family. This particular unit will break apart in about a week…

We’ll all keep in touch, I hope.

There was going to be one final farewell concert in NY— a free show in Times Square to inaugurate the permanent closing of Broadway there, and celebrating the greening of the zone, on August 17 — but the production needed funding from some donors. We would play for free (or at least I would), but the cost of the stage, toilets, trailers, PA, local crew, lights, etc. was considerable. Though we came very close to finding the money (Janette from the DOT was doing this part — I don’t know donors or sponsors) and doing the show (a free show in Times Square! Santogold was going to open!), at the last minute there just wasn’t enough to cover costs, so we had to admit defeat.

South America? Didn’t get there this year (except on holiday). I’ve played many cities there many times, but this time — maybe due to the financial crisis and its ripple effect down there — the offers simply weren’t enough to pay for band, crew and shipping. So, despite asking friends and others for advice and contacts, I had to let the idea go after a while.

So that’s it. A year of touring this show (there was a break over Xmas and New Years, and during the month of May) and we’ve been almost everywhere we can reasonably go — sometimes more than once. The show has been incredibly well received, the record has sold so-so (though because it was self-distributed in a fashion, there were profits early on)  — and we all feel exhausted but very, very satisfied… like, um, after something else.

06.18.09: Houston — Land of the Free

Woke up on the bus and looked out the lounge window onto a parking lot with a few cars evenly spread out, like birds on a wire. Despite the heat I went for a bike ride later with C. There were almost no people on the streets — at a major downtown intersection I counted two. We rode past towering banks and oil company headquarters, offices and empty plazas, with no one about except for the poor and little clumps of smokers, huddled in the shadow of massive corporate towers.

This was the home of Enron, and other now-defunct entities have skyscrapers here as well. Some of the names and logos have been swapped out, but not all. We pass a residential neighborhood with lovely oak trees shading the street, and then, without any major landmark to let us know we’ve crossed a line, we’re in the ghetto, with shotgun shacks and old black men sitting on stoops in the withering heat. Boarded up houses, and vacant lots with cars on blocks.

From here one can see “downtown” a few blocks away.

“Downtown” is in quotes because Houston has hub cities further out that are almost as big.

A block or so past the run-down shacks — this is Houston where there is NO zoning — is the new Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a weird, almost surreal post-modern edifice.

The mind turns to Alan Greenspan, former head of the Fed, who helped via deregulation to get us into the mess we’re in today — the whole Goddamn world is fucked, Alan! This very out of place structure somehow lingers, like a fart left by someone no longer in an elevator. Alan was recently quoted as saying “I made a mistake.”

A few blocks further away is a bayou — a stagnant body of water in the shape of a river, with a bike/jogging path running alongside it. In this heat (100 ºF) the path is all but unusable, though we pass a few joggers who are possibly more insane than us. Looming over a grassy knoll is Houston’s AIG headquarters. If I were them I’d come up with a new name or logo ASAP.

The town is crisscrossed by massive elevated freeways, and as a result the sprawl here is immense. Though there is a center to the town, there are also myriad mini-cities — or, more properly, clusters of towers, splattered here and there, linked by the freeways. I imagine that if oil companies could control more cities they’d all look like this.

We’re playing at Jones Hall, a lovely symphony hall named after Jesse Jones, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who at one time was head of the US Department of Commerce and a large bank, owned the newspaper and was a major developer— all at the same time! You could say Jesse had this town locked up and could basically do whatever he wanted — for better and for worse.

Right after the turn of the century Jones owned almost 100 buildings in Houston, and he then

began to concentrate on real estate and banking. In 1908 he bought part of the Houston Chronicle. Between 1908 and 1918 he organized and became chairman of the Texas Trust Company and was active in most of the banking and real estate activities of the city. By 1912 he was president of the National Bank of Commerce (later Texas Commerce Bank, and by 2008, part of JPMorgan Chase & Co.). During this period he made one of his few ventures into oil as an original stockholder in Humble Oil and Refining Company (now Exxon).

President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Jones chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation — an entity created to help banks and businesses survive the Depression.  He held that position from 1933 until 1939, and as a result, became one of the most powerful men in America. He helped prevent the nationwide failure of farms, banks, railroads, and many other businesses. [Link]

[Source]

Some folks referred to Jones as "the fourth branch of government.” [Source]

As the first chairman of the Houston Harbor Board he raised money for the Houston Ship Channel’s completion. A shallow waterway was dredged, and the city became a viable port…  and he built this concert hall, as oligarchs do, to both enhance his reputation and “improve” the cultural life of Houston — and as a byproduct, provide a place where the upper crust could mingle. In a backstage hallway leading to the symphony players’ locker rooms are some 8x10 glossies of retired classical musicians. A happy bunch of misfits and one photo of a stern-looking Eastern European conductor.

The stage sound is possibly the best of any hall we’ve played in. Extremely dry (not echoey) for a symphony hall… so we can hear ourselves and each other clearly.

After the show we have drinks at the oldest bar in town, La Carafe, and a man tells Steven that there are now a series of bike lanes here that enable people living in neighborhoods within the freeway ring road zone to commute to work. Hard to believe anyone would ride regularly in the Texas summer heat… but in the mornings (around 7:30) it is actually quite cool… so I guess if one gets an early start it might be OK.

04.19.09: Senigallia — You Get What You Pay For

Some Internet providers in the US are considering a tiered pricing system — charging more to customers who use a lot of bandwidth. There has been a hue and cry from the public regarding this proposal. By now, everyone is used to paying a flat fee, and then assuming that they can use as much bandwidth as they can get away with for that fee. The providers have even abandoned the tiered proposal trials in some cities — they are that unpopular.

We’ve all become accustomed to overlooking how much bandwidth we use — without thinking about it, we go from low bandwidth usage, like emailing, browsing websites and surfing, to fairly high bandwidth usage, like video Skyping, uploading audio and photo files, or streaming a movie from Netflix or iTunes. Internet users presume that high bandwidth usage, like Skyping or video and audio streaming, is their right.

This struck home today, when someone offered our group a password to a wi-fi network he had established, but didn’t offer it to those who habitually Skype. Initially, this seemed mean, but I had noticed that as more folks hop on a network, especially Skypers, the speed of the whole network goes down — especially for the rest of us. Even simple emailing becomes sluggish or intermittent. Bandwidth hogs take 80% or more of the bandwidth, and everyone else is left with slow or sometimes non-existent connections. Here then is the hidden cost of “free” services like Skype — they’re only “free” when the resource (the information highway) is limitless and infinite — which in this case, it is not. The same thing happens in hotels — the more people log on to the hotel server, the slower the whole thing goes. Sometimes it slows to a crawl, and after you’ve paid 5 Euros for an hour’s use, that can be pretty frustrating. The information highway can have traffic jams, just like any other. We tend to think of bandwidth as a God-given right, but it’s too finite, and its limits become apparent as the highway gets more crowded.

So, should access be tiered? If the tiers are partitioned in chunks, should only those with more money have access to higher bandwidth connections? This would eventually lead to an information and Internet hierarchy — streaming movies, music and TV will only be available to those who can afford it — and the rest will have to watch in low-res or be content to miss that kind of web experience, forced to settle for basic emailing and web browsing. The whole Internet mixed media experience — Flash sites, video clips, audio clips, slideshows etc. — would become less available. As it is now, I don’t think twice about watching a video clip, or listening to some streaming audio if I’m curious — but I might hesitate if I knew that a meter was running.

I could envision the idea of a meter that monitors bandwidth usage and charges accordingly. It might be a fair system — leaving the choice up to the user in each instance, rather than segregating users into discrete tiers. The proposed tiered plans sound less flexible. They seem to want to establish completely separate pipelines — gated Internet communities, in a way.

Likewise, I just read that for centuries, fishing was relatively unregulated. There were limits on excessive catch, but the fishing grounds were more or less a free-for-all. Chesapeake Bay and other fishing grounds were public property. Anyone with a boat — a commercial fisherman, or a kid in a rowboat — was allowed to pull up oysters or crabs. It would have been all well and good when supplies seemed unlimited and plentiful, but they’re not anymore — in some places, there are no oysters or crabs left at all. Most, of course, were not taken by kids in rowboats.

One proposed solution has been to privatize the oyster beds — allotting each fishery a designated area — with the assumption being that if fishermen realize that their stock is limited, they will self-manage and regulate their own consumption and fishing. Little Johnny on his rowboat will be pretty much out of luck, as the “public” fishing zones will have been fished out, and the private areas will be off limits.

As our oceans and waterways become fished out and depleted, it’s fairly easy to justify some sort of fee, management or enforced regulation system — but shouldn’t that apply to anyone who uses limited natural resources? For years, mining companies have been digging out underground resources while paying a minimal cost for access — and they often leave environmental disasters in their wake. Weren’t those resources in some sense “public”? Ditto for oil and natural gas companies — shouldn’t they pay their host nations a hefty fee for access to finite resources that are, in a way, the patrimony of humanity?

Someone once asked me, rhetorically, if an overweight person should pay the same amount for a plane ticket as someone of “normal” weight. It’s a rude and uncomfortable question, but not totally unreasonable when you consider that someone twice my weight requires twice as much jet fuel to get them airborne. Their carbon footprint is higher as a result. In effect, I’m subsidizing their excess — at least if all seats except first class are priced equally. Similarly, should kids and babies fly for less? Should tall men and women pay more? What about those whose above-average weight isn’t a result of overeating or poor diet? That seems unfair. Who’s to say why someone is overweight? And if you’re tall, it’s not your fault — you were born that way, so why should you be penalized?

The tiered or metered way of charging for resources — how would that work? Can bandwidth even be considered a resource? Is it like the electromagnetic spectrum — a government-managed “public” resource, with various frequencies allocated to broadcast TV, mobile phones and police transmissions? We accept that not just anyone with a transmitter can usurp part of the broadcast frequency, start a radio station or blast their TV network to everyone in town — chaos would result. We accept that even though the airwaves might be “public,” they do need to be regulated. But cable and fiber optics aren’t God-given — someone paid to lay them down.

For some strange reason, we presume that our health is a crapshoot. Most public health plans don’t tax people according to a tiered plan dependent on their propensity for getting diseases — though some folks, due to lifestyle, addiction or bad parenting will require more frequent and expensive treatment than others who live healthier lives. The folks who pay higher taxes, and those who are less prone to illness, are paying for those who are reckless with their health, or (it is presumed) just plain unlucky. Every industrialized country submits to this, apart from the US, where insurance companies fulfill this function — and they aren’t quite as altruistic, though they still maintain the crapshoot model, at least in the public’s eye.

Anyway, the built-in unfairness of this system — that some per chance pay more than their share — is justified by the idea that a health disaster could randomly happen to any of us. We know this isn’t quite true — besides the lifestyle and social context factors that affect our likelihood of getting ill, there are genetic factors that are becoming easier and easier to assess. It seems inevitable that as genetic profiling becomes common, many will balk at paying for those who have a much greater propensity for getting serious diseases. Insurance companies will probably begin to adjust to that information before public health plans do — the companies themselves are taking on the risk, so if they can better their odds by charging so and so more because addiction, MS or Alzheimer’s runs in their family, they will. To many people this will seem unfair, since they might be as healthy as anyone else when the insurance company determines their rate — so, they will argue, why should they pay more? Auto insurance companies already do this with drivers — those who live in high-risk areas or have had accidents pay more. We don’t mind paying — via taxes or insurance — for the other fellow if we believe our risk is more or less the same as his, but we might be reluctant to pay medical bills for a junkie.

In the long run, and from a wider perspective, health care does more than just insure against sudden medical costs — that is, public health care, not insurance plans. Public health care ensures that everyone lives without the fear that the bottom of their world will suddenly drop out. In the US, people with medical emergencies suddenly can’t pay their mortgages, college tuition or for their kids. They often end up on skid row, or at least in bad shape, because their financial situation is precarious (since there is no safety net) and a medical emergency knocks the whole thing down. In those countries where these worries are not as pressing, the people’s lives are different — they're less desperate, less on the edge, and therefore everyone, even those who are paying more than their share, benefits. It’s hard to quantify that benefit, I would imagine — but anyone with eyes and ears can sense it.

So, back to the Internet. Is there a parallel with health care, insurance, fishing? Should I pay more, or receive less for what I pay, because my neighbor wants to stream movies, or video Skype to his or her pals night and day? Not sure. Maybe the question is how much we are willing to give up in order to share, and be equal… and what are our rights, if any, as far as resources go?

04.07.09: Belfast

I’d been to Belfast twice before. Once for an art exhibit, and once to visit my cousin Maureen, who married a sheep farmer in a little town about at hour north of here. On one of those trips I visited Shankill Road and Falls Road — the Protestant and Catholic working class neighborhoods where tensions are high and there is plenty of evidence of the ongoing “Troubles.”

On Falls Road, there are murals that align the situation of the Catholic minority with that of the Palestinians, African Americans (one mural featured a large image of Frederick Douglass!) and other oppressed groups worldwide.

Further on, there are murals that present a Dungeons & Dragons version of Celtic pride and culture.

A brief history, as I know it: the English formerly occupied all of Ireland — North and South — and made it official in 1801. The Irish island is primarily Catholic, and the English had converted to Protestantism in the 1500s. England first disowned Catholicism so that Henry VIII could get a divorce, and allow his heirs to hold on to the throne — these guys were about not much more than intermarriage and holding on to power. The convenient conversion didn’t take, though, and England retreated — but by the time Elizabeth I took over a few decades later, the reformation was nearly complete. The English didn’t love the Irish — they saw them mainly as a cheap source of labor and goods — and immigrants from the green isle were not all that welcome. It has been said that the famous potato famine was, if not engineered, then allowed to develop and flourish, thanks to the English. A little bit of Stalin in the British Isles.

In the early part of the last century, some of the Irish began fighting for their independence. The clump of northern counties known as Ulster happened to contain a fair number of English settlers, and that area wanted to remain part of England. The Ulstermen smuggled guns in from Germany in 1914, making civil war across Ireland almost certain. After a long struggle in 1921, Ireland threw off British rule and became an independent nation — except for that Northern clump, which was held on to by England. Those counties had opposed Home Rule for Ireland all along, and Ulster also contained the formerly industrial city of Belfast — proud site of the Titanic’s construction.

So, in 1921, like US Republicans drawing new zoning and voting districts in Texas to guarantee a Republican win in certain areas, the Ulstermen, with the help of the English, carved out an area of the North that was — surprise — mainly Protestant, and mainly Loyalist (loyal to the Crown). The Catholics, a majority in Ireland, were now, suddenly, a minority in that area — and therefore powerless. The writing was plainly on the wall: an unstable, untenable situation had been created, and it only took a small incident to set things off in a very bad way. The Troubles began in earnest in the 1960s with the IRA and others bombing and attacking what they perceived to be the British occupying force. Vigilante groups, aided by British military and police forces, worked violently to keep the cauldron bubbling. Since that time, there have been peace accords — though some bombs went off a few weeks ago. After decades of fear, death and destruction, neither side wants to return to those bad old days, but we’ll see — a new generation raised on hatred might not remember those days so well.

Further up Falls Road there is a memorial for the IRA and the hunger strikers — among them Bobby Sands, the young man portrayed in the amazing recent movie Hunger.

The Orangemen (the Protestants) have regularly attempted to goad and provoke the Catholics by marching in “religious processions” through contested neighborhoods at certain times of year. Like the school kids we saw hanging round these housing estates, they were all itching for a fight. The two neighborhoods are right next to one another — a stone’s throw apart — but, like Gaza and Israel, they are separated by a fence, a wall, barbed wire and a no man’s land. The last time I was here, passage between the neighborhoods was forbidden — in order to cross, you had to go back into Belfast and then out again by a different road to get from one adjacent neighborhood to another. Now there is a passage, though it is still locked up at night.

I ran into L & M, and eventually we found the passage between the warring hoods. To the right was a small pedestrian gate that led through a no man’s land to the other hood.

On the Shankill (Protestant) side, the murals have a completely different tone. Here the emphasis is on historical precedent — the English fighting the Catholic Irish for hundreds of years. One mural featured a quote by Oliver Cromwell from the 1600s, saying that there would never be peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church was crushed!:

Other murals commemorate the dead Loyalists, and portray the Catholics as a band of pesky rebels and terrorists (which they are, regardless of whether you agree with their political position or not) — a constant thorn in the side of the “legal” government. In some ways the legality of the government here is hard to dispute — but its vibe and rhetoric smacks of the use of similar convoluted logic in other places, where the powers that be — the oppressors — portray themselves as the victims. The ones with all the guns, soldiers, power, politicians and courts somehow turn things around and claim to be the victims — uh huh. Heard that one from the US Religious Right, the US Republican right and the Israelis as well.

Here is the mural that goes along with this explanation.

Update:

I stand corrected. A reader of this blog, who knows the depths of Irish (and Scots) history better than I, delves further back into the "mists of time" than I even thought possible — 1000 years! Even still, it seems as though the Elizabethan Plantations were a way for the English to use Ireland as a new territory — and to transform that territory into a more lucrative place as well, with a new, capitalist-friendly populace and religion.

It's something of a Nationalist (Republican/Catholic etc.) credo that the 'Irish Nation' was/is some kind of cohesive unitary entity which can be traced back through the mists of time, and that the irritating Northern Protestants are somehow 'English' interlopers from afar with no real place on the island of Ireland.

Historical reality isn't quite so neat, however.

The original inhabitants of Ireland came from NW Spain in approximately 8000 BC; they moved and settled freely across the landbridge between NE Ireland and W Scotland. The Scots was the name given to precisely these settlers from NE Ireland.

Further waves of invasion and settlement saw successive groups becoming dominant, then integrated with the 'Irish' Celts, Vikings, Normans, English Plantations etc.

But the key historical rupture occurred with the Elizabethan Plantations, because two factors had completely different implications for subsequent Political, Cultural, Economic and Social development and relative under-development: 1) the sheer numbers involved, and the political and economic dislocation this entailed, and 2) the fact that they now came with a new and culturally different religion, and with economic and social practices which were part of the historical dynamics of early Capitalism as it was emerging in Britain itself.

This could not fail to create a 'differentness' about NE Ulster, even without the link to Britain and the English Crown.

This is something which a nationalist analysis completely fails to come to terms with, notwithstanding the further awkward point that these 'Scots' would have been returning to precisely those ancestral lands from where the original 'scots' had first crossed to settle in Scotland — as evidenced by shared surnames and common linguistic structures which persist to the present day. Even today, the dominant blood groups and ethnic characteristics in Ireland come from the original pre-Celtic settlers from Iberia, and not from the many subsequent waves. But perhaps of even greater discomfort to the cosy nationalist notion that somehow the Protestants don't belong is the fact that these pre-Celtic characteristics are most dominant in the northern part of Ireland, amongst the Protestants and Catholics who live there.

Well, enough of potted histories — suffice it to say that all is not quite as straightforward as a simple green nationalist perspective might have you believe!

- Alan McLaughlin

03.15.09: Copenhagen — Sink or Swim? Arrogant Bastards Want Your Help

It seems the proposed bailouts of GM, AIG and a host of others are not all that popular right now; many in the US feel that the law of the jungle — of the free market — should prevail no matter how big the company. If you can’t survive, then you will justifiably become extinct — repercussions be damned. If Detroit and the surrounding cities turn into a 3 million strong refugee camp (there are camps in Fresno already), then so be it — at least that’s the current vibe. (Thing is, those refugees won’t stay put in Flint, if the Dust Bowl and Katrina were any indication.)

This sink or swim attitude was reinforced when the executives of AIG gave themselves bonuses this week — $165 million (or more) in bonuses — and GM executives flew on private jets to ask Washington for taxpayer money. These guys are all unreformed bubble heads — they claim that only they know how best to run their companies, and are therefore essential to keeping them afloat... but weren’t they the ones who drove their companies to bankruptcy? (Of course they’ll blame it on the credit crisis.) Besides, some of those who received these bonuses have already left for greener pastures — so much for the argument that the bonuses are incentives to stay.

It’s human (and often animal) nature to help those in one’s group who have fallen behind — and we instinctively look after those close to us. Occasionally we allow our friends and family to fail — maybe not too frequently, but once in a while — but more often we come to their aid, at least some of the time. But somehow this seems different.

For one thing, these guys have proven that they aren’t likely to change their behavior. They’ll drive their companies right back into the ground, because that’s their modus operandi. They’ve made no serious statements about changing their ways. None have said they’re sorry, or that they were wrong. Most of us say we should get rid of the bums and let someone else try to keep these behemoths afloat — if they deserve to be kept afloat at all.

The new head of AIG says in the NY Times: “We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.” [Link]

In other words, his type of executives will leave to work for the highest bidder — the implication being that they have no loyalty to either AIG or to the taxpayer. They don’t really love their work — they just love the money and perks. They’re not even accepting bonuses based on performance! These guys don’t believe their own “market forces” bullshit when it comes to their pay — they expect a bonus no matter how bad they are at doing their jobs! Can I get a job like that?

One of the AIG execs recently wrote a resignation letter, reprinted in the Times, claiming that his department didn’t lose money; his department didn’t engage in questionable creation of assets; and his group worked really hard for years and deserves their bonuses. He felt they were being unfairly lumped in with the bad apples across the hall. They’re all being forced to pay for the unscrupulous behavior of some rogue departments.

I’m tempted to agree, but that kind of behavior was tacitly encouraged in the banking world. There were no reins, and anything that made money was OK; just like at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, that reckless culture and behavior was part and parcel of the whole deal. If this guy knew a while back that others in the company were engaged in rash and risky behavior, why didn’t he blow the whistle or resign then?

Here in Europe, there will be a G20 conference in London in a couple of weeks. Like the AIG execs in Connecticut, London bankers have been warned that demonstrators may not take kindly to their strutting about in public. Therefore they might consider dressing down — in disguise, as it were — or not going out at all. It was suggested that AIG employees go out in pairs, and only in daylight hours. Bankers incognito — what a concept! That guy might look like a homeless person or a rent boy, but he’s a billionaire. The Masters of The Universe may think that going tie-less in khakis will do the job — but the internal memos also suggested that they think again and try harder, because people can still recognize a “dressed down” banker. Get your glam and punk gear out of the closet — now’s the time to sport it one last time.

03.07.09: Good Investments and Bad Investments

An accounting firm that’s been analyzing GM says that even with the $30 billion bailout they’ve requested, GM won’t stay afloat. Pragmatically, it would be sheer lunacy to throw $30 billion at GM executives — who still ride around in their town cars and fly on company jets — only to see them allocate it for their own golden parachutes before their company, and the cities of Detroit, Flint and a few others, become giant ghost towns. I have a feeling there will be a knock-on effect, and other ghost towns will arise in the wake of those Rust Belt towns’ demises.

GM’s management has made few comments re: altering their course; there has been little mention of producing green cars, or building public transportation systems or infrastructure. They talk mostly about closing plants, cutting divisions and firing workers — but not about rethinking what they make, or their role in the world. It seems they basically want to stay the course — but in a smaller boat. The passengers who can’t fit get thrown overboard. The boat is headed for Niagara Falls, so as far as I can see, it doesn’t really matter what size it is.

There are options. Workers could take over the factories and start producing stuff that suits the world as it really is. Or the factories could be nationalized, and the government could force the factory infrastructure and manpower to begin making stuff that benefits the population. Assembly lines would have to be altered, refitted and modified — but it’s either that, or sell the machines as scrap steel. Or the companies could make changes voluntarily — re-jigger themselves to build trolley cars, high-speed rail systems, and hybrids. Some of these, being public works, would probably receive a large amount of government financing — funding for work, NOT a bailout.

We Live in a Virtual World

French public health officials are considering laws that would ban the promotion of eating disorders — including a requirement that magazines reveal the extent to which their images have been artificially retouched. It’s viewed as a public health issue because girls and boys (and men and women) are feeling increasingly ashamed of their bodies as they compare themselves to what they see all around them — images of bodies that are not real, that have been photoshopped, digitally airbrushed and heavily modified.

[Source]

Of course, ever since the birth of the movie star early last century, their images have been cleaned up, improved and controlled. Celebrities and pin-ups have been with us for a long time, and the fairytale world of far-off Hollywood was always infinitely better than whatever small town reality you were living in. But it was just that — a fairytale kingdom that existed far away, with relatively few inhabitants.

The difference, I suppose, is that of quantity, not quality. These days, altered images are ubiquitous; the fairytale world threatens to engulf our own. The illusion is more complete, too — with digital technology it’s harder to see the smoothing. Stalin would have drooled at the possibilities. Almost nothing one sees in print or advertisements hasn’t been “improved” in some way, except maybe some journalistic news photos — and even those are suspect. There’s the visual field that consists of us and our friends, and then there’s the print world — certainly more dramatic, and often more physically perfect. We live in a parallel universe, slightly more drab and definitely more pudgy.

One can’t legislate the heavenly world out of existence — people need fairytales, after all — but maybe a more constant reminder to not believe everything we see would help us to retain some tenuous connection with our pathetic reality. The thing is, we can’t help believing what we see. When I look at an impossibly sexy woman on a billboard, I can tell myself that she’s been sculpted and smoothed to death, but I’m riveted and transfixed nonetheless. Instinct triumphs over intellect.

Pascal Dangin, a well-known retoucher who works on a lot of the images in fashion magazines (and for some fine artists as well), naturally doesn’t see it exactly that way. He makes photos that “improve on life,” in his words. But if I can paraphrase, he might say that he makes an image more like what it wants to be — and therefore it ends up being closer to what we desire to see. That doesn’t necessarily mean perfect — he is careful to avoid airbrushing the personality out of a person — but it does mean he’s certainly not against making quite a few (what he has determined are aesthetic) improvements.

The health departments are alarmed at the effect all this is having on young people. Boys hanker for steroids, and girls, a session with the knife, in order to look more like what they see in the magazines. Unfortunately, the magazines don’t just feature physically enhanced people — they’ve been heavily retouched as well. We would have to hand out some kind of high-tech, rose colored, photoshopping glasses in order to achieve a visual simulation of the media population.

01.03.09: North and South

In the late morning C and I walk around, buy CDs at a local shop, and stroll down a street selling wallpaper and fake wood floor coverings until we reach Cidade Baixa, the lower city. This area, which used to be called Commerciao, is a strange lifeless zone on a Saturday. It used to be filled with warehouses, trading companies, mercantile banks, and all the other businesses that had to do with the nearby port, but now it is mostly filled with charmless modern office buildings that house banks.

There are remnants of the old commercial spaces and buildings on some streets, scattered here and there, some in good shape but many decrepit and falling into disrepair.

At Caetano’s house C flips through a book of Pierre Verger’s photos of Bahia and Salvador from mid 20th century, and I am taken by a shot of this commercial district taken from Cidade Alta (the upper city). In this shot one can see the same grid of commercial buildings, but when the picture was taken they were all of moderate height, and all beautiful colonial edifices. “What a shame what has happened here,” I say.

Caetano agrees, and says that this legacy of incredible architecture — which existed in numerous places all over Latin America — should have been treated “like a European City.” I think he means that many European cities — London, Milano, Torino, Brussels, Lyon — also have what were once commercial centers that emerged during a historical era, but no one would have dreamt of razing those centers and replacing them with steel, glass and concrete office towers. But in the Americas, North and South, that’s what mostly happened — except in a few isolated spots.

I’ve been reading a book, “The Brazilian People,” by Darcy Ribeiro. He points out that while history may be written by the victors, and therefore what is often taught might contradict what he says, the fact is that most North American cities were slight and impermanent during the initial settlement, while Latin American colonial cities were substantial, grand, ostentatious, and built to last; for example, the churches that dot Salvador, its Pelorinho district, Old Cartajena in Columbia, the Zocalo and surroundings of Mexico City, Old San Juan, and Havana. Compare those with the clapboard houses, lean-to structures and log cabins of many of the early North American settlements. The Latins, though they may have claimed otherwise, were there to stay. They made mirrors of their European capitals in the New World while the Puritans were eking by in pathetic villages of wooden houses.

It would have appeared that the North Americans weren’t planning on putting down permanent roots. They didn’t build cities — not at first — but settlements. Except for a few exceptions — New York and Chicago come to mind — this impermanent way of building continued and continues in North America. There was apparently no need to build cities that announced “now, you are in it,” as Caetano put it. LA might be the apogee of that attitude, but all over North America you find cities and settlements so spaced out that you have little sense of being located — being in — anywhere.

Racism and Rainbows

C and I go for a ride on rented bikes heading north up the beach from the Ameralina neighborhood. There is a dedicated bike path along the beach that goes for at least 10km. We pass a zone of little cabanas in the sand with plastic chairs in front; later, a grassy area with massage tables dotted here and there; then an area where big men are flying little kites (competitively, I suspect); and, further on, larger cabanas that bordered on being actual restaurants (they take credit cards). There are kiosks with men pressing sugar cane, adolescents playing football (soccer), joggers and folks out for a Saturday early evening stroll.

C comments on the difference between the ride along this beach and the bike rides we took in Miami — one ride there took us from South Beach, with its bars, restaurants, boutique hotels and hotties, further up past the towering condos of Miami Beach proper. Mile after mile of almost identical, immense beachfront condos. There, as she said, one tended to presume that the joggers were all fairly well-to-do and probably lived in the nearby glittering edifices, whereas here the folks jogging or at the cabanas were middle class at very best, while the vast majority seemed fairly poor. They might be from the surrounding neighborhoods, but just as many may have walked or come by bus. It’s beautifully funky, relaxed and casual. People don’t consider the beach a luxury holiday spot here — it’s a place to meet friends, hang out, socialize, get a massage, eat, drink, kick a ball around, take a sunset stroll or get some exercise. In some ways it’s an outdoor living room or a communal backyard.

Most of the joggers, casual strollers and folks hanging out are black, as Afro-Brazilians make up the vast majority of this town. The rest feature a mixture of skin tones, which is typical of Brazil. Racism here is not exactly like it is up north. Everyone here is fairly comfortable with folks with lighter or darker skin tones than their own. Miscegenation has been going on so long and is so ingrained here that everyone, just about, by US standards, would be considered black. Here they might not consider Colin Powell black, for example. He’s way too light.

Here there are a myriad of words and phrases for the many gradations of skin color. Caboclo means a mix of European and Indian; Mamelucas are the 1st generation of this mixture. Mulattoes are a mixture of African and European, and pardo means brown, preto means black and branco means white. Moreno can mean simply mixed. There are pure Africans and of course remnants of the myriad Indian tribes who once covered the continent. There are pure Italians and Germans; and, in São Paulo, the largest settlement of Japanese outside of Japan. It’s definitely not just black or white. In some ways — like at the beach, on the street of the jogging path — everyone is comfortable mixing together, though it’s not exactly the post-racism utopia that some claim.

The racism is there, in other ways. In politics and on TV, for example, almost everyone is white, or very light. There is definitely a hierarchy based on color — a “light” person very often will act superior to a person with slightly darker skin. A branco might have a mulatta for a girlfriend, for example, but more than likely he wouldn’t marry her. Most “help” have darker skin tones. Nonetheless, the difference in attitude from the States is palpable. Since slavery was abolished here there was no legacy of overtly racist laws, as there continued to be in the States.

At Paulinha’s party and at Gilberto Gil's the next day the full rainbow of folks were present — dancing, drinking and chatting. C mentioned that she would make eye contact and say "hi" and "welcome" to guests of every hue and they smiled and responded in kind. Sad to say, this is not the usual situation in the States. Here everyone is just a little more relaxed around everyone else, whereas in the States when races meet there is always a slight tension, some fear, suspicion; and, from the Afro-American side, anger, envy, and resentment that colors everything. I’m generalizing, of course. We musicians don’t behave that way — at least in my dreams we don’t. The separation of worlds and the ghetto-ization of peoples — distinct music, food and culture — that exists up North and that poisons everything, is to a large extent much less prevalent here — but the racism still can’t be denied.

Here in Salvador there is also Afro-tourism. This city is so known for its strong African culture and its pride in that culture that it draws people from all over the world who savor a taste of that affirmation and positive outlook. Up North there are celebrations of sports heroes and great musicians, but here everything is celebrated, the whole culture. That acceptance and pride in Afro-Brazilian culture is evident everywhere — statues of the Orixas (Afro Atlantic deities) in the city park fountain, the Pelorinho paintings (as tacky as they are) the tourist ads that focus on Afro-Atlantic culture — the blocos, afoxes, the Baianas, and the syncretized Candomble rituals — all say that this city is more than proud of this element in its culture — this is its culture. For some Afro-Americans this might come as a bit of a shock — not being forced to the outside of society might be initially traumatic if one has, for one’s whole life, defined oneself and one’s identity as oppositional. Maybe Obama will help us Northerners edge away from that just a bit. A visit here reveals what is possible.

Why is it different? I gather it’s not exactly an accident. When the first Europeans arrived they were hell-bent on making money and getting rich quick, but they also felt that heaven had sent them to enlighten the local savages. Their interests may have been in gold and lumber, but they justified it by claiming that they were bringing the heathens to God and to Civilization (substitute “democracy and freedom” and you have the last 8 years in a nutshell).

The early European settlers found that if they married a local Amerindian they immediately had a large set of kinship relationships. They might acquire 80 relatives all of a sudden — many of which were extremely willing and able to help and assist their new relative, due to the elaborate and strong kinship rules among the tribespeople. The Europeans took full economic, practical and financial advantage of this — they could get their new relatives to help them hauling lumber and everything else. It became evident that there was a huge financial incentive to intermarry, and intermarry they did, unlike the Protestants up North.

So, within a generation or so the racial boundaries were already blurring and becoming fuzzy. It would be little harder to be racist towards one’s own children, for example. A few more generations and you have the rainbow in formation — though the Indians were fast dying off from European diseases.

Schopenhauer and the Tropics

In the evening a small group heads over to Gilberto Gil’s house where his daughter is having a birthday party. Gil and Caetano and I are talking and Caetano goes off on one of his riffs — this one about how the German philosopher Schopenhauer made some surprising statements about the tropics and race. According to Cae, the philosopher claimed that humanity was originally black — as we emerged from the tropics in Africa. This is hard to dispute. Of course we were. Schopes continued to follow this line of reasoning, saying that black is therefore our default skin color, the “true” color of humanity, and that other colors or non-colors are therefore marginal — notably, and especially, white. He claimed that from a global perspective whites, especially blonde blue-eyed ones, are a fringe group that somehow managed to survive in the chilly and forbidding Northern climate. This didn’t go down all that well at the time with his countrymen.

Not sure if it was Schopes or Cae doing the extrapolating from there — moving on, it was reasoned that such a harsh Northern clime would therefore foster an ethos that would necessarily evolve strict rules and behavior limitations. To stray from the norm — to be lax regarding time, sloppy, relaxed, indecisive or simply to be too flexible — would mean either death or turbulence in the social pond, which would be seriously frowned on. The inference is that the Northern ethos and character is what it is because it’s a survival mechanism.

This all came up because I asked Gil (and Caetano) where they wrote. (I didn’t see what one might call a music writing or project room at Caetano’s house). They both say they write anywhere — sporadically, every now and then, the place doesn’t matter. Caetano says he’s even written during a party such as the one we’re at. He’ll pick up his guitar and quietly work out some bits — with the party going on all around him — sometimes a whole song will get written, so he says.

This would maybe not be impossible but would be pretty unlikely for me. I offer that my “Protestant” character makes me more disciplined — I “go to work” in a specifically designated writing space (a room in my loft)… but of course that discipline and formality comes with drawbacks and limitations as well. I don’t write songs on the road, for example. “Pros and cons” says Gil.

However, I did write this.

12.18.08: No More News

The Tribune Company owns the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs, a bunch of TV stations and some other regional newspapers. They’re just barely holding on since being acquired in a takeover a year and a half ago by Sam Zell, a real estate billionaire. After the buyout, the Tribune’s editor left, as did a lot of its journalists and columnists. They reportedly weren’t happy with some of the changes that Zell had instituted. The paper had also acquired a relatively large debt. My guess is that after Zell bought the paper, his purchase price saddled the paper with debt; or rather, the paper’s employees — since its board members, like Zell, managed to avoid any personal debt.

I saw similar things happen in the music business in the early 80’s, as record companies merged and were taken over by other companies (Warner Bros. was absorbed by Time and then later, AOL). The result was that the companies suddenly ended up in debt, and, in order to show a profit every quarter, had to forget about their standards and musical instincts. Long-term thinking became a thing of the past. They had to cut back here and there, which often meant cutting out middle-level employees. Bosses weren’t likely to thin their own ranks, and from their perspective, losing middle-level employees who had accrued decent salaries would help shore up the bottom line — temporarily, at least. New middle-level people could be hired at lower pay, or lower-level employees could be bumped up.

The thing is, it was the middle-level people who actually knew and essentially ran the businesses.

“‘From an informed public standpoint, it’s alarming,’ said Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from the Houston area, who has seen The Houston Chronicle’s team in Washington drop to three people, from nine, in two years. ‘They’re letting go those with the most institutional knowledge, which helps reporters hold elected officials accountable.’” [Link to NY Times article]

The Houston Chronicle is not alone. Almost every newspaper in the US, except the Times and the Wall Street Journal, has drastically cut, or in many cases entirely eliminated, their Washington contingent.

“‘We used to cover the Pentagon, combing through defense contracts, and we’re covering some of that out of Dallas now, but basically we don’t do it anymore,’ said Carl Leubsdorf, chief of The Dallas Morning News bureau, which had 11 people four years ago, and now has four. ‘We had someone at the Justice Department, but no longer. We can’t free someone up for a long time to do a major project.’” [Link]

As one of the Baltimore Sun reporters, who appeared in the HBO show The Wire, mentioned, you just can’t cover with 4 people what you used to with 11 — or 30. Despite management trying to squeeze more blood out of that stone, it’s just not possible. Less gets reported.

Likewise, these newspapers have dumped most of their foreign bureaus, food critics, and film critics, and are loathe to assign reporters to stories that will take months to research and write. In doing so, they are eviscerating that which makes newspapers different from online reviews, blogs and websites. When papers end up like USA Today, there will be no reason to read them.

“The much greater loss, the journalists say, is the decline of Washington reporting on local matters — the foibles of a hometown congressman or a public works project in the paper’s backyard. One after another, they cited the example of the San Diego paper’s Washington bureau for exposing the corruption of Representative Randall Cunningham, who is known as Duke.

In accepting a Pulitzer Prize for that work in 2006, ‘we were bold enough to hope that it would be the first of many, but it turned out to be the high point,’ said George E. Condon Jr., the last bureau chief. ‘No matter how much great journalism is done by national organizations, they’re simply not geared to monitor closely a member of Congress from, say, San Diego, who’s not a national leader.’” [Link]

Second to the NY Times, the Tribune Company owns some of the country’s most widely circulated newspapers. Though I tend to think of the LA Times as more a community paper than a national one — a paper that covers mainly the intrigues and dramas of their local industry (movies, music and TV mixed in with coverage of local politics and crime) — there’s nothing wrong with in-depth reporting of one’s own city. TV sure ain’t gonna do it.

Do we really need in-depth reporting, investigative journalism and foreign news desks? Can we manage without them? I am as guilty as most in that I often (though not always) read the morning papers online, for free. I jump between different publications, as their angles, points of view and interests are varied. Yeah, sometimes it’s the wacky human-interest story that grabs my attention — the sort of thing fit for web reporting — but just as often, it’s a story that is thoroughly researched and gives background and context on the topic.

How does a democracy work without (in-depth) news? It doesn’t. While most of the population will not care about access to high-quality news, there are always some who read to find out what’s really going on, and why. Dictatorships, totalitarian regimes and underdeveloped countries don’t have the luxury of investigative journalism, and the news-as-entertainment in highly capitalist regimes isn’t really informative either — it’s bread and circuses. An informed citizenry, said Jefferson, is necessary for a democracy to function. He also said:

“Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”

and

“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” [Link]

TJ may have presumed we’d get our information from other sources, or maybe, like many politicians, he simply distrusted the press. It wouldn’t be surprising if he did — imagine if the press reported heavily on his taste for Brown Sugar. Politicians are held in check by the press, for better or worse; that too is one of the ways in which the press allows a democracy to function. Without the threat of public exposure, well… you can imagine.

Anyway, it will be strange if the USA becomes a large industrialized country with only one or two newspapers — the NY Times and The Wall Street Journal — practicing in-depth coverage; the latter, now owned by Murdoch, may find itself eviscerated, assuming its fate follows those of his other newspaper purchases around the world. There is no way the Times can afford all the foreign desks, local reporters and journalists that a country of this size requires.

What will happen when most of the country has nothing but entertainment, gossip and sports as sources of information? It’s a country ripe for takeover, if you ask me. A place where public opinion can be easily manipulated, as long as the consumers keep buying. Blogs and Internet news sites can’t fill the gap, as they don’t have the resources to sustain a team of reporters working and digging into a story — sometimes for months before anything sees the light of day. They don’t have African or Southeast Asian bureaus either. Besides, most Internet news sites like Google News are aggregates of traditional print and wire service news gatherers. Without sources they’d be pretty much nothing. Local sites like Gothamist and national ones like The Smoking Gun are cool and up-to-the-minute, but they don’t assign staff to conduct long-term investigations into the how and why of a scandal or news item. They break stuff, it’s true, but mostly they rely on others to feed them information.

I have plenty of beefs with the arts and culture coverage of many newspapers; I can easily spot the biases and lack of research. I’m of that world, so I have my own personal biases as well — which sometimes match those of the critics, and sometimes don’t. I myself have gone in and out of favor a few times, so I regard their reviews and reporting with what I feel is healthy skepticism. News, though, is another story. I imagine that cops, thugs, hedge fund dudes, politicians and bureaucrats all have their own beefs with the press, but from my point of view, I’d much prefer some seriously researched coverage in those areas — with a little bias — to nothing of any depth.

I’ve been trying to imagine what this country would be like without a serious news source. Like Cuba with only Granma, the organ of the party — that and bootleg satellite TV broadcasts of American Idol. Or Russia, pre-Gorbachev, when the choice was between Pravda and some samizdat mimeographed publications. Iran under the Ayatollah or the Shah. The Philippines under martial law — when all press critical of the Marcos regime was silenced.

We tend to get all holier-than-thou when we look at countries without free press. We think their lives must somehow be more pathetic or sad. Needless to say, this attitude makes us feel better. But people go on. They know, or at least suspect, that they are being denied something, but they maintain hope and optimism. They don’t go around moping. They get on with their lives, and sometimes, at least now and then, feel like maybe the censorship doesn’t matter all that much. There are still reasons to be cheerful. We might like to think of life in an oppressive regime as sheer misery, but from what I can tell, it’s rarely viewed that way. Life goes on and people make do with what they have, and they fall in love and get drunk and sing and dance. It takes a lot — a whole lot — to bring them to the flash point, like what just happened in Greece. Mostly, people adapt to the way things are — and to feel miserable about it is fruitless. And that’s what we will do when there are only two serious newspapers left in the USA.