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I read a review of the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human in the NYRB. As usual the article summarized much of the book’s ideas. The author, Richard Wrangham, argues that the eating of cooked food by early protohumans was, to a large and unacknowledged extent, what enabled them to walk upright, get brainier, become more social and even to verbalize. In a nutshell, he says that since cooked food allows a more efficient transfer and absorption of nutrients than raw food does, the digestive track could evolve into a smaller-sized part of the animal (raw foods require large stomachs and long digestion), which then allowed the little guys to begin to stand up more, as their bellies were smaller. It also enabled the brain to evolve into a larger organ, as large brains require a lot of nutrition only available to hominids by eating cooked food. I’m beginning to see how some of these factors converged in ways that were lucky for us. Cooking, Wrangham claims, necessitated that some part of the household guard the hearth (and children), and it also meant that groups larger than a single family were more practical. It’s been argued by others that the increased social interactions of early humans were what formed many of the brain’s pathways that determine how we behave and get along, or don’t get along. These new complex social structures also required larger brain capacities, as others have suggested… and both allowed and demanded the evolution of language to help mediate some of that social drama. Wrangham also says that once we started eating cooked food, our mouths and jaws no longer had to be equipped mainly for tearing, ripping and intense prolonged grinding… which left early mouths available for other purposes — vocalizing… and maybe singing, too? It’s an amazing argument — to tie all these crucial protohuman attributes to cooking. And equally interesting is how each attribute facilitated the others — all seemed to be interdependent. Needless to say, Wrangham doesn’t buy into the relatively recent raw food movement — which claims that we humans are more naturally engineered for eating uncooked food, which is therefore presumed by adherents of this movement to be better for us. The assumption there is that early man and woman didn’t cook. Wrangham says that if they didn’t cook they wouldn’t have survived, and could never have evolved into us, as cooked food is so much more efficient at delivering nutrients. He says that standing and talking would never have happened on a diet of raw foods.
I bike down past the avenue of banks here in Frankfurt, the banking capital of Germany, towards the center of town. One wonders how the guys I see moving in and out of these antiseptic lobbies are doing these days. I pass about a km of just banks, one after another, in almost identical buildings — many I’ve never heard of. I arrive at the old town square, which, like much of this town, was bombed out — so, though it looks to be centuries old, at least in style, it’s not — it’s a re-creation. The old square was rebuilt from scratch. Nonetheless, it has some charm and the tourists throng here, and some sit outside and drink a pilsner even though it’s still chilly. In Hannover, where we’ll be in a few days, there is a town hall building that displays a huge model of the city at the end of the war. 
It’s a beautiful and meticulous model; a lovingly made and maybe also a slightly peculiar memory aide; a meticulous miniature re-creation of destruction. There is no editorializing — no “Did we deserve this?” or “This is what we got for being so bad” — just the fact of the matter says plenty.
There wasn’t much left — that’s obvious. Almost every building — most of no military value — was at least partly destroyed. Therefore there are very few old buildings in the centers of these towns — though further out, a couple of kms from the center of Hannover, there are streets lined with frilly old mansions. I find the museum, the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, that I’ve been to on a previous visit. (At the time, it was presenting the results of a local archeological dig — displayed as if it were contemporary art.) Now it has a show about the effect of Darwin on art. It’s an incredible show that includes reactions to evolutionary theory at the time his books came out, and less directly obvious influences in the arts as his ideas filtered down over decades. It made me realize that curators can indeed pull together shows that tell a story, and are both surprising and emotionally engaging. I was becoming cynically resigned to thinking they were mere adjuncts to galleries and collectors — helpful in those folks’ marketing schemes, and many of them are just that — but this venue, if indeed the show originated here, seems to encourage loftier and more creative thinking. Naturally, many found Darwin’s suggestion — that humans were descended from apes, and that the world had not been as it is since God created it — hard to swallow. Frederic Church, a Hudson River painter of majestic landscapes, was one example. His paintings of awe-inspiring landscapes — one of his massive and detailed tropical manifestoes in visual form was exhibited here — were claimed as evidence that Edens such as these couldn’t possibly have arisen out of mere chaotic forces, as Darwin proposed. His wildly popular blockbusters were viewed as proof of creationism. Here is one (not by Church) that depicts the Divine emergence of humans from some kind of protoplasmic matter. It’s all a bit sci fi — but sci fi located in the distant past. 
Further on the exhibit presents work by artists, illustrators and biologists, all as equals. Scientific illustration and fine art were both affected by Darwin’s ideas. There are some giant, sexy and dramatic paintings of imaginary caveman life: here’s one by Léon-Maxime Faivre done in 1888 called “Two Mothers.” The intruder mother is a wild beast — a dark shape near the cave entrance — and I guess the painting shows us that as rough as our ancestors might have been, their mothering instincts and sexy bods were just like ours. 
Not quite Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC, but seems like a similar idea at work here. A man named František Kupka did this one, called “Antropoides,” in 1902. Here it seems we see the boyfriend of a proto-human fighting what appears to be a chimpanzee for the hand of his lady, who watches the fate of her possible future mate dispassionately, as ladies sometimes do. 
Why would a chimpanzee want a woman who’s not a chimpanzee? Maybe proto-human gals were irresistible to all creatures? Anyway, caveman art seems to have been an entire genre — tastefully left out of most art history books. Too bad. Another of these caveman paintings also represents a struggle — survival of the fittest being an (inaccurate) summation of Darwin’s theory. It seems the artists began to see the world as one fast field of competition. Life as struggle. Chance and accident figure in too, as genetic mutations are sometimes random — the idea that the world arrived by chance is inspiring and frightening. An artist named Martin Johnson Heade went to South America, inspired by Church’s example, and did a series of amazing paintings of Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds (ca. 1870-1883). There was a whole room of them here. To me, they are typical of a kind of alien eroticism that is still pretty damn seductive — as it must have been for him. 
Around this time (1886) Harvard was commissioning the Blaschka brothers to do their glass versions of plants and sea creatures. Ostensibly these were made for practical, not artistic reasons — so that students could study specimens that couldn’t be easily preserved. These glass pieces, like the flower/bird paintings, consistently have a strangely erotic vibe. Other biological drawings in the show were the famous microscopic sea creature drawings by Ernst Haeckel, which are maybe ever so slightly less erotic, but equally alien. It’s a little hard to pin down the effect these drawings have: maybe they show how amazing it is that all this peculiar stuff evolved, or maybe some of these artists were of a more creationist bent, and are in fact saying that only a strange and distant (and slightly pervy) God could have come up with such a menagerie. 
Haeckel, at least, believed in evolution — though he was a Lamarckian. Unlike Darwin, he believed that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” as one would have on a license plate — that organisms and their genes evolve new characteristics in their own lifetimes, and pass those traits on to their babies. From a review in the Financial Times of the show’s catalogue (Darwin, Art and the Search for Origins): “Haeckel was a promising zoologist whose life was devastated when his wife Anna Sethe died, leading him to abandon religion in favour of Darwinian theory. Trying to recover by the Mediterranean, he walked along the seashore and noticed a jellyfish in a tidal pool. Its delicate yellow tendrils reminded him of his wife’s braids; he sketched it, named it ‘annasethe’ after her, and begun the detailed drawings of marine life that were to revolutionise 19th-century understanding of the microcosmos.”
(One wonders how much his late wife’s hair resembled the tendrils of jellyfish?)
“It was such images, adapted and developed into monumental canvases that scandalised Vienna at the turn of the century. Klimt’s 1899 mural ‘Philosophy’, with its endless cycle of birth and decay, proposed humanity as a mere tool of nature for the mindless, unchanging purpose of reproduction.” [ Link]
All these ideas spread rapidly. Very potent memes, one might say. The idea of evolution may have arisen earlier; but now, this was its moment.
People with hairy faces were seen as a living link to our remote past — weird remnants of prehistoric life that had suddenly erupted into the present: 
Similarly, monkeys were now borderline human: 
There was a whole genre of monkey art — monkeys as judges, as politicians, as Darwin, you name it. This painting is called “The Studio Visit”… maybe there’s a similar one of music critics? Equally inspiring to artists was the idea that weird, fantastic creatures sprang into being to fill evolutionary niches. Work began to feature imaginary specimens, many of them mythological and surreal, and many now within the realm of possibility. Here’s a large bronze sculpture by Jean Carriès of a cross between a frog and a rabbit — why not? 
Giant salamander-like creatures loom over tiny humans in a work by Alfred Kubin. 
Monsters, formerly creatures of the unconscious or the id, were no longer just figments of the imagination. Jules Verne, Conan Doyle and HG Wells imagined whole worlds hidden in the jungle, undersea or deep in the Earth. Nature has produced creatures as strange as anything we can imagine, so why limit ourselves? The show takes us into the 20th century — surrealists and others are creating their own monsters and hybrid beasts. Max Ernst has a room of frottages (rubbings) with titles that imply imaginary plant life. Lastly, the show asks, “Where are we going?” If we evolved from tiny, strange and sexy things into what we are now, then what could the world become in the future? The curators responded with some Ernst paintings of apocalyptic landscapes. Hmmm. Some of his technique does derive from random blots, smudges and smears — so along with many others, he might be saying that like genetic selection, sometimes randomness or change might be as good a generator of material as anything — and then the artist (or the environment, in the case of evolution) decides if that image or mutation is worthy. 
Well, this line of reasoning might be a little convoluted, but who knows? It’s not a completely unreasonable leap. The show’s other conclusion was that for many 20th century artists, desolation might seem as likely a future as anything else — which I believe they linked to evolutionary theory and its randomness. In this case, though, that feeling might be more related to WWI and its devastating effect on optimism, at least temporarily.
There’s been a lot of buzz in the last week or two surrounding some scientists’ claims that, with about $10 million, they could bring a woolly mammoth back to life. DNA from the mammoth’s hair samples could be used to fertilize an elephant egg, if a modification allowed the egg to accept DNA with a few mismatched genes. Then the fertilized egg would come to term inside an elephant, and whoosh — mama would have a surprisingly hairy baby. Whether this Jurassic Park scenario is followed through now or later (when further developments might make it easier), it does seem fairly inevitable. Another article lists, somewhat facetiously, some of the other extinct critters that could be brought back — among them a 6-foot marine scorpion that lived in shallow waters. Imagine treading on one of those when you go to the beach. And, of course, people have wondered whether or not our own ancestors, like the Neanderthal man, might be resurrected from hair and other samples belonging to the proto-human. (To be accurate, some believe Neanderthals are NOT our direct ancestors, but a distinct line of proto-humans that fizzled out.) They probably could be revived, as could the “Hobbit” people who used to live on the island of Flores in the Pacific, though convincing a person, obviously a woman, to volunteer to bring a caveman to term in her belly might be a bit much to ask. But who knows? Imagine the publicity! 
This notion brings an interesting scenario to mind. I seem to remember reading some years ago that Neanderthals had larger brain capacities than we do. (This is debatable, but let’s accept it for now.) Maybe it was relative to their body mass, but at any rate, judging by brain size alone they must have been pretty smart. Most likely, they were smarter than us. Maybe not smarter in ways that we would instantly recognize — say, sitting down and taking an SAT test. But definitely intelligent in ways that would have given them the needed survival skills for life in a harsh environment, featuring encroaching ice (due to climate change), saber-toothed tigers, and our woolly friends. These guys may have been quick-on-their-feet thinkers, and WAY more street smart and cunning than we are now. Could it be that over eons, as the world warmed up and societies formed and grew, the world may have become a somewhat cushier place, in which all of the skills that Neanderthals possessed are no longer needed in such abundance? In nature as in life, why try harder? So, as I imagine it, evolution would eliminate — select against — this animal with the oversized brain, as it would any other animal with some superfluous organ or appendage. Brains require a lot of blood and care, so reducing its size to just what was needed would give a definite advantage. Most people will find this idea hard to believe — that evolution would dumb us down. But why not? We wrongly, I think, persist in believing that evolution is some kind of “progress” — a series of more or less linear improvements in each species — and that animals alive today, including us, are therefore “better” than what came before. Xenophobic thinking, seems to me. Critters that came before, and stayed around way longer than we did, were extremely evolutionarily successful in that they had adapted beautifully to the environment that existed around them. For example, if present-day animals were somehow transported back millions of years, we might find ourselves less suited for survival than our hairy pals. We’d be the ones that would go extinct. Evolution is not absolute. So then what happens if we bring Mr. Smarty Pants back to life? If he were joined by some of his mates, wouldn’t they eventually realize that they were smarter than us? Would they bide their time, hiding their agenda, and ultimately sabotage our world, taking charge of our pathetic unintelligent mobs? Cornelius may indeed have been smarter than Charlton Heston; those movies might not be as far-fetched as we thought. This does seem like an interesting basis for a film — done somewhat differently than “Planet of the Apes” or “Caveman” — in which a frozen guy is thawed out. It’s often portrayed that we’ll build machines that will become our betters, that will eventually dominate us. But wouldn’t it be a curious twist if it were our own past that came to dominate us? Consider a prequel to “Planet of The Apes”: if Neanderthal dude lived in our world, perfectly adapted for hunting and other survival skills, with heightened senses and quick reflexes, wouldn’t it make sense that he’d have no use for cushy bachelor pads, molecular gastronomy, universities, books, computers or money? No doubt he could master that stuff, but he might find it all boring and unnecessary. Our super-smart new rulers would let our infrastructure and institutions slowly crumble, having no need for them. We ignorant mobs may cling to our money, comfortable suburban houses and celebrity culture, which soon might wither from lack of support from the new hairy bosses. We'd be back to the Planet of the Apes scenario, with dust and dried leaves blowing through Redmond and Cupertino. We might fight and struggle, for a while, and strike back with our bulky, inefficient WMDs, but the infinitely wilier and cleverer proto-versions of ourselves would outsmart us every time.
A recent issue of New Scientist magazine (8 December 2007) included an article in which two scientists, Tony Martin and Vera da Silva, claim that behaviors they identified in Amazon River dolphins are clear examples of dolphins having culture. What kind of behavior is it? Square dancing? Art exhibits? Pottery?
It seems some males in a few populations of dolphins carry objects — bits of weed, a stick, a lump of clay. The carriers turn out to be among the guys most successful in mating and in prompting aggression within their group. So, the “wearing” of these cool accessories must make you somewhat sexier than the other less dressed up guys. Or they are offered as “gifts" to the gals. Females and the kids don’t carry this stuff, which they claim rules out the rationale that the carrying is simply a form of play — if that were the case everyone would join in.
Lest we think that it’s only the boys who have culture, Geoffrey Miller proposes that this kind of sexually selective behavior requires that the object of affection — the females mostly — be culturally literate in order to determine whose weeds are the coolest, most sophisticated, and the sexiest. No good getting all dressed up if no one notices. I would assume that some fine distinctions have evolved as well — that a clump of weeds say, carried a certain way identifies the dolphin as one of the cutting edge weedies as distinct from the tired stick clique.
The phenomenon has been spotted amongst geographically separate groups of dolphins. And they’re not sure if the behavior is ancestral (taught by elders or by the previous generation), or if it has evolved independently over and over in different areas, the way humans scattered across the globe sometimes develop similar buildings, rituals and behaviors. Either way, these guys claim it can be considered culture. Previously, scientists had only allowed chimps and humans into that club, but now maybe the rabble will be storming the velvet ropes.
What is culture? In the NS article it’s described as a complex skill (or behavior) that is spread and maintained by social learning rather than being a genetically fostered behavior, or one that the local environment might simply encourage. This description defines by exclusion: culture isn’t the making of things or a certain set of behaviors, but depends on how those behaviors are learned and transmitted. You could have the best table manners in the world, but if they’re merely instinctual, then you’re not cultured. Others define culture as using things or behaviors symbolically — and by that definition these dolphins seem to qualify too. When applied to people, this umbrella definition of symbolic behavior includes codes and prescribed manners of dress, language, religion, rituals, etiquette, morality, cuisine, and on and on. Inevitably, some of those products of culture in dolphins will be invisible to us; we won’t be able to know their religion, if they have one — not now anyway.
Using the definition put forth in NS — the one that excludes genetic environmentally prompted behaviors — would be, I think, to claim that to a large extent people don’t have culture either. I would say this is the case because our culture is maybe less learned than we’d like to think. I tend to agree with Miller and some others that what we call culture is essentially a very complicated and elaborate form of sexual display, some of which is learned and some of which is emergent, that is, strongly encouraged through genetic selection. This is different than a peacock’s tail display, which is sexual, but not a behavior — the peacock is born with his fancy outfit, whereas the dolphins, like people, have to do a little work to look their best.
I suspect these cultural and symbolic behaviors are mostly emergent in both people as well as dolphins and chimps. Maybe there aren’t specific genes that specify witty raconteur, financial dealmaker or rock star (though maybe there are?), but instead genes that encourage those types of display to evolve and emerge during one’s lifetime. Propensities for behavior are passed on genetically in people, just as they are in animals. These behaviors are not as clear-cut as instinctual behaviors — there’s more learning and skill mastering involved. But DNA might play a larger role than we would like to think, and our distance and segregation from our animal pals might not be as great as we presume. Moreover, our cultural manifestations might be parallel from society to society, with more similarities across geographically disparate peoples than we’d like to think too.
So, if this is true, then people don’t have nearly as much of what they define as culture as is commonly held. We have truckloads of what we call cultural behaviors, but if we only count the ones that are exclusively and entirely learned, there might not be too many left. If we subtracted all the parallel behaviors across human cultures on the basis of genetic influence then what are we left with?
In the past, another way of excluding members from the culture club was tool use — for a long time it was assumed that only humans used or fashioned tools. Then chimps were seen carefully choosing thin sticks and fashioning them into tools for extracting delicious honey ants. After that, more and more examples of animal tool use were spotted and acknowledged. Even in dolphins, it turns out. In an inlet called Useless Loop (Useless Loop!!), dolphins pluck specifically shaped sea sponges and use them as protective gear when probing the ocean floor. Some of the scientists who have spotted the sponging behaviors claim it is learned socially — the dolphins teach their kids how to sponge — which qualifies this kind of tool use as a form of culture.
PNAS/Photos by Janet Mann
Liz Hawkins, a scientist in New South Whales, Australia, also claims to have identified two hundred distinct dolphin whistles so far, all of which are contextual, qualifying them as comprising a language. The scientists don’t know what they all mean yet. “Bob’s got a nice wad of weeds there” might be one sentence.
If we broaden the definition a little bit we can still call ourselves and our societies cultured, but we might have to admit some new members.
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
Breathers (AKA — discrete breathers): A phenomenon in which energy piles up in an irregular and non-linear fashion, rather than dispersing evenly, as one might expect it to do. Some scientists are now saying that non-linearity is the norm in nature, despite most physicists’ tendency to focus on linear phenomena. To me, not only is “breather” a cool and creepy sounding word, but the implied non-linearity around us seems like a potentially useful metaphor for all sorts of non-physical things.
The Local Bubble: A region of interstellar space (through which we are traveling right now) where, as a possible aftermath of a supernova, space is emptier than the space around it. A lacuna in space.
Heliosphere: A gigantic magnetic bubble around our sun, enclosing all the planets, made by the solar wind (a “wind” of charged particles streaming from the sun). This bubble “protects” the solar system, and us, from receiving an excess of cosmic rays.
Local Fluff: A cloud of interstellar gas and dust, much of which floats around inside the local bubble. We are traveling thought the local fluff now (bring your dustbusters) — and will be for the next 10 to 20 thousand years, a blink of the eye in space-time. Mutation rates of life could have been affected by the amount of cosmic rays hitting the earth, it is thought.
The Heliopause: The boundary or outer edge of the Heliosphere. A turbulent area. We can’t accurately measure interstellar space (or the “interstellar medium”) because the Heliopause is in the way. Voyager 1 and 2 are approaching the Heliopause — right now Voyager 1 is in the “heliosheath” — the thinning part of the Heliosphere just before you reach the boundary. It will cross into interstellar space in 10 years. Then The Fluff will have a chance to listen to Chuck Berry.
Lastly: There are 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells in the human body. That means we are basically a means for bacteria to become mobile, to complete their life cycles and to procreate. We think they are living off us, but it is we who are living for them.
In an interview in Seed with E. O. Wilson:
From Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge — E. O. Wilson draws upon the early work of Mondrian: brain functioning indicates that the spacing of tree trunks and canopy lacework in Mondrian’s art are in the arrangement that is most arousing and pleasing to the brain. “It stays true to the ancient hereditary ground rules that define the human aesthetic.”
A&M researcher Robert Ulrich found that patients who could see trees from their windows healed faster and required lower doses of painkillers than those who could only see a brick wall.
Movie ads
Went to see Stranger Than Fiction, which I thought was good. I laughed, I cried. There were a series of ads shown in the theater before the movie previews.
Verizon, LG, chocolate. A phone/music player that looks stylish, like an iPod. No information provided. Does it hold much music? Does it synch to your computer? It looks nice.
An SUV. A CG landscape in bright yellows and greens. All flat layers of color swelling and looming all over the screen. Vaguely Ryan McGinness style graphic of swirls and a baroque colorform landscape. A graphic road appears, zipping into the center of the frame, and on it is a photographic image (not flat) of an SUV. The impression is given that with this car your world will be bright, cheerful and colorful. No other “information” is provided.
Zune Player. Images of hipsters grooving together to this Microsoft MP3 player. The impression is given that it is the music player that is bringing these attractive people together — people of all races, and all attractive — and therefore we too can meet these sexy women if we have this gizmo. Tag line — “welcome to the social” (sic). (Is that English? Did Borat write this ad?) No other “information” provided, though I know that the “social” and sharing part is only partly true — “shared” music “goes away” on this player relatively quickly….as will your new friends.
The National Guard. The National Guard is portrayed as an organization that mainly helps people in trouble (primarily due to natural disasters) and specializes in daring rescues. Cut to various testimonials (are these real Guardsmen or actors?) of guardsmen talking about how proud they are, how selfless and how all walks of life are represented. Uh huh. Lots of stockbrokers out there. There’s a brief mention that one might even get posted “overseas”, which I guess is a code word for Iraq. Would anyone be stupid enough to voluntarily serve over there now? The Guard uniforms look exactly like U.S. Army camos, and they say U.S. Army on them. The Army is shorthanded these days, and since there is no chance of the draft being reinstated — can you imagine how fast the Iraq occupation would be shut down if boys you actually knew were dying? — they’ve upped the ante on their ads. I seem to remember the National Guard presence in New Orleans post-Katrina. They appeared to be doing more guarding than rescuing, as I recall.
An ad for a cell phone with speakers that slide out. A crowded city street. Everyone is wearing white iPod headphones and clear fishbowls on their heads. They are all isolated in a world of their own, is the clear implication. One couple tries to smooch through their glass prisons — but everyone knows you can’t kiss with a fishbowl on your head. One guy, clearly frustrated, takes off his space helmet/fishbowl and smashes it into a million pieces on the street. He rips out his headphones and begins listening to music from a small object he proudly holds aloft. A cell phone with tiny speakers that slip out. (I can imagine the sound quality! Freedom! A 1962 transistor radio!) Immediately all the other young hipsters take off their helmets and rip off their iPod headphones and are grooving to this guy’s tunes! The world, it is implied, has been liberated by a new gizmo and an early adopter. Bring back boom boxes on the subways!
There’s a CG cartoon ad for Coke in which a polar bear family overhears a large group of penguins romping to a Beach Boys Xmas tune — the natural enemies meet and become friends over a Coke. Coke, not bombs.
The last ad that I remember: an SUV falls off a crane on a loading dock and continues falling through the Earth in CG animation until it erupts out of the center of a Chinese courtyard — and somehow manages to flip itself right side up. No information given about the car. But, if it can do this….
Do we purchase a car because the ad agency made a cute video? Is that how we make decisions? Maybe we do. Maybe the cleverness and technical virtuosity exhibited here imply to us that those same values carry over to the SUV. This would be a natural assumption to have about a person — if a person were clever, entertaining and executed something perfectly one would probably assume they had other good qualities. And the odds might be pretty high that you’d be right. In the case of ads the cleverness and the object being promoted are separate entities — rationally we should therefore love the ad agency and the director, not the car company that simply chose them to make the ad.
Went to an NYIH lunch organized by Ren Weschler. Writer Marina Warner talked about fairies.
Warner has written about mythology many times. This new book focuses on the “fairie faith” as it is called in Scotland and Ireland — the belief in tiny creatures, little people who are linked to the wild and evocative landscape. Sometimes these beings or spirits are benevolent, and at other times they cause mischief, steal souls or children.
I read a book some years ago called The Fairie Faith in Celtic Countries which was a kind of massive oral history of sightings, beliefs and suspicious goings-on. Evans-Wentz, who brought the Tibetan Book Of The Dead to a Western audience, was the author or presenter — Tibetan-Celtic — a somewhat similar enterprise of revealing a whole spiritual world.
There was a fair amount of laughter among the academics as instances of sightings and empty graves were mentioned; it all seems a bit like implying that some folk believe that the stories of childhood are real. We tend to view the Grimm’s tales and others as potent and psychologically powerful narratives passed on from generation to generation maybe because they are such good stories. But the truth is they were told because many of the events were believed to have actually occurred.
These beliefs are no stranger than that a man parted the entire Red Sea or that a man walked on water or that the creator of the entire universe wrote a book (or two).
Warner showed one of the famous 1917 Coddingley Fairie photos — a faked image of a Fairie and a Fairie cocoon taken by some young girls (who worked in a photo lab) and made by placing cut-out illustrations in a woodland landscape.
The girls, Warner said, never claimed these to be true photos of fairies — they created the images after all — but soon enough many others who saw the photos did. Grownups. Learned men and women. “Expert testimony”. Most famously, Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes — the detective who needed only his rigid foolproof rationality to solve any crime — testified that the photos were obviously NOT fakes and that here was proof that fairies were real. Other learned men and women came forward and all agreed the photos were not fakes — they were proof positive of the existence of the little creatures.
What surprises me now is how Conan Doyle and others could not see how fake the photos look — when to me and most contemporary people it is as plain as day. Anyone can see that they are cut-out illustrations, can’t they? It’s laughable, but also baffling how learned men and women could convince themselves to see things in a way that contradicts reality.
But maybe it shouldn’t be baffling. We tend to believe that it is the eye that sees, and the ear that hears. But those organs are merely the input devices — it is the brain that “sees” and “hears”. The brain can, in this case, choose to ignore obvious imperfections and evidence and see only what it wants to see. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical way — I mean it in an absolutely literal way — the brain only sees what it wants to see and disregards the rest. One can stare right at something and simply not see it. The contradictory information is simply not acknowledged. I don’t mean “seen and later denied”, but simply not seen at all. Denial is a built-in ability we have, it is essential for our survival, but sometimes, when applied to faked photos of fairies it seems pretty damn goofy. We do not all see or hear exactly the same things — key objects have been censored in the perceptions of some individuals…one wonders if objects could likewise be added to the world in other individuals. (See Happy Idiots, below.)
Anyway, Conan Doyle was maybe at the tail end of what is sometimes referred to as the Scottish enlightenment, a clumping of scientists and engineers in the mid 19th century to early 20th. This group had an extraordinary influence in the second industrial revolution. Here is Thompson’s (later known as Lord Kelvin) machine for predicting tides. He is most well knows for the Kelvin scale of temperature — absolute zero, entropy, etc. James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, was one of this crowd. Etc. etc. 
Well, Warner threw out a zinger in passing that there might be a link between the belief in the uncanny and this scientific enlightenment. A kind of secret union of opposites.
Yeats claimed that the Irish were better writers than the English because of their belief in Fairie culture — that these irrational roots left the imagination less fettered. Whether or not he’s right about the 2 nations’ respective writing abilities, he might have a point re: the imagination. I could imagine that somewhere in the unconscious of Thompson, Watt, Doyle and others lay a buried belief, or non-denial, of sprits, forces and entities lurking in the barren misty glens to the north. Could these irrational suspicions have allowed the leaps of faith that are required in a scientific and engineering revolution? To imagine a concept like entropy or absolute zero must surely have seemed just as far fetched as the existence of wee folk. (I’m not saying these guys were literally Fairie believers, but that the deep cultural marinating soaks all parts.) (See Arboretum.)
Music models — scientific and financial
Scientific quotes:
“When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”
— Lord Kelvin, 1883
“How satisfying for the human spirit to contemplate these laws, so beautiful and simple, which may be the only ones the Creator and Ordainor of things has established in matter to sustain all phenomena of this visible world.”
— Pierre de Maupertuis 1745
He goes on to identify action with evil [inertia being matter’s default state according to him] so that the principle of least action becomes the principle of maximum goodness….and says that God ordered the universe to maximize goodness. (From a NYRB article by Freeman Dyson.)
“Nature’s great book is written in mathematical symbols.”
— Galileo
Montreal
“The Royal Mountain” — the mountain that dominates the city park — was visible from the hotel window. The trees have turned yellow, orange and bright red.
I did a talk at the Future of Music Policy Summit here. My talk was called “Record Companies: Who needs Them?” My manager, David Whitehead, drove up from his home in Woodstock and joined me, helping out and answering some questions.
The answer to the question was too simple: some people do and some don’t. Not a very satisfying answer.
Most of the talk, however, was about how as record stores disappear — and CDs too, eventually — the ease with which artists can make more money by doing it themselves (or with a small office) increases rapidly.
In my talk I went over some of the various possible record distribution deals and models, some of which might have been familiar to the audience, which was largely music-oriented digerati. But some parts of it were new, and rather than focusing on one aspect I was pulling as much as I could together and examining what to me were the obvious repercussions. Maybe Whitehead and I can do it again at SXSW?
Afterwards the Arcade Fire gang showed up and I told them I had previously talked to Daniel Levitin, author of “This Is Your Brain On Music”, and a McGill professor of cognitive (music-focused) neurology, about visiting his lab. Many of the band were up for it, so we walked over and Daniel demonstrated and talked about some of what they were doing. Susan Rogers, who worked as recording engineer with Prince, and worked on one of my records and also with Geggy Tah, has been here for 3 years doing graduate studies in this lab. Tommy from Geggy Tah was there too, which was a surprise.
There were a number of what looked like small project recording studios, and we settled into one with an upright piano in it. A young woman demonstrated that the piano was actually a Disclavier, a piano that “records” the performance of anyone who played it and then plays it back with the keys moving exactly as they had been played. One of the lab’s projects aims to get a sense of where the emotion, the feeling, lies in a performance. To do this they had a classical pianist perform a piece expressively and with feeling — we heard part of it played (or performed) back. They then used a program to remove all the feeling from the performance. It sounded like an early digital sequencer; all the notes were of the same length and volume and the rhythm — the timing — had been “squared up” as well. Regine, who has some musical training, said it sounded like a 4 year old after a few piano lessons. To me this “dead” performance was also a faithful transcription of written music with no expressive markings. Much of Bach is like that, I believe, the expression left to the interpreter, but if played exactly as written it would sound like a machine. The limitations of musical notation.
Then the expressivity dial was turned to 50%. It still sounded pretty mechanical, but a little better. At 75% there was feeling there, but not played very well — “a promising student”, said Regine. But it took until 75% for the performance to begin to have what we would call feeling, expression, and humanity.
Then we heard the same performance with randomized expression — notes and time held and accented at random. We laughed, though some in the room thought it sounded eccentric, but good. Daniel said he thought only musicians would think it was interesting, because they have an acquired sense of how it’s supposed to be played, and confounding and surprising those expectations can sometimes make a piece even more interesting. I thought it sounded a little like Thelonious Monk.
One of their more involved projects involves wiring an audience while they attend a performance by the Boston Symphony. Some audience members had EEGs strapped on, others had their brainwaves monitored and others had sliders that they would use to rate the amount of emotion imparted by the performance at any given moment.
Furthermore, later these performances were played back on High Def video to other similarly wired participants (to see if they reacted at the same points and with the same intensity). Others watched the performance without sound and other groups listened without the picture. Interestingly, many of the emotional cues seemed to be visual — body language, facial expressions and eye movements would be tells about whether a performer was struggling, about to hit a high note or winding down. All of which would help explain why sometimes a live performance is often more moving — even with all its faults — than a recording.
The Arcade Fire gang and I agreed to meet later at a Ukrainian Hall where a performance that was part of the music festival Pop Montréal would be happening. Tonight was a Danish group who someone said was good and the harpist and singer Joanna Newsom.
Under Byen
….was the Danish group, and they were good, as rumored. A cellist sat in the center downstage and a blonde woman in a pink dress sang in the semi-darkness further upstage. To the left was a keyboardist — there was also a bass player, two drummers (one in a Betty Page doo) and a fiddler/saw player also stood downstage. Lights like frilly wallpaper patterns played over the whole stage. Their sound, as you might imagine from the instrumentation, verged on lush sweeping melodic lines from the singer or the strings over pulsing meticulously arranged beats from the two drummers. Unfair to say, but a bit like Sigur Ròs, but with words, songs and more aggressive and fractured rhythms…come to think of it, there might be a little Arcade Fire in there as well. The interplay, the spaces left out by one instrument, into which another player would insert a sound, seemed carefully arranged, and this sort of socket approach grabbed me instantly. The mood is one of beautiful desolation and melancholy. The words were in Danish. 
[Photo by Vincent Ferrane]
This Ukrainian Hall seems to be a new venue here, so I was told. It’s a lovely place. Holds maybe 300, with a nice proscenium stage, a balcony and beer and wine served in the side hallways. Hope they keep this venue active. As someone who gets around NYC on a bike I was happy to see about 100 bicycles locked up along the entire perimeter fence.
Joanna Newsom was the headliner. The Globe and Mail ran a large piece on her upcoming CD, describing epic-length tunes, orchestrations by Van Dyke Parks, recording by Steve Albini and mixed by O’Rourke. Who’s left? Sounds like something new.
[Photo by Amy Cobden]
The set, however, was her solo with harp…and yes, some of the songs were epics, at least 12 minutes long, not repetitive but like a series of suites — melodies and song structures strung together. The audience went pretty nuts, even with just her and harp….imagine if there had been all the other instruments the recording promises. The tunes sounded like little novels — too much to absorb on first hearing.
Saw Al Gore on a Wired Magazine-sponsored panel discussion at Town Hall last week. He was good, though not as thought-provoking as James Hansen, a scientist on the same panel. Gore timed this appearance to coincide with the film on global warming made around his slide talk called An Inconvenient Truth. I saw the film last night and it is devastating — and incontrovertible. At Town Hall Gore mainly speechified — his comments were like live excerpts from the filmed slide presentation — but although some spontaneity was lost what he has to say was real, important, and he’s justifiably passionate about it. In the movie, for some reason, there was more emotion in his voice. Maybe it was the editing and the juxtaposition of the background images. Sometimes what you see changes what your hear, and vice versa. But regardless of who was saying this, or how, it needs to be heard.
The movie theater (Sunshine) was packed, there was applause at the end of the movie and Paramount asked those leaving to fill out a card — which to me implies a possible wider release. It is something everyone in this country should see. Gore mostly avoids political harping, so even Republicans might give a listen, although I overheard the man behind me as I was exiting say to his companion “propaganda”.
Propaganda it may be, but it’s reality based propaganda at least. I think Gore presents the facts in an orderly and understandable way, interspersed with moments of pure and personal emotion — well, if you can extrapolate from scientific facts to obvious personal and social consequences then it is indeed deeply emotional. And the images — even the graphs and diagrams — tap some potent buttons, as they should.
It was not all doom and gloom — the ending presents a ray of hope, but hope only if there is the political will to implement change. (Which scientist Hansen pointed out was indeed the case with fluorocarbons — the ozone hole problem is being turned around! So it can be done) I won’t go into details on all of it, it’s all on their website — but all the usual criticisms — “green policies will wreck the economy” (gee, Bush has been doing pretty good at wrecking the economy without being green at all!) — “it’s just a “theory” — “it’s a normal cyclical event”…are all dealt with.
Props to my friends at Wired for supporting this — Chris Anderson proposed a branding — “neo-green” — which, even if the wording changes, seems viable — it leaves behind the images of spaced out hippies, kooks and freaks and replaces them with possible remedies that are economically sound and technically hip. Re-branding green makes everyone who denies that global warming is human induced and is going to be devastating seem like a bunch of losers headed for the human landfill.
Example: Here is Florida (green part) after a 6 meter rise in water level (Greenland ice sheet slips off, as it seems to be doing frighteningly quickly). Maybe that Miami real estate wasn’t such a good idea?
Of course, by the time this happens all kinds of other shit will be going down, so the refugees from South Beach will be a minor issue. This could happen within our lifetime.
I hope this movie triggers some serious thought and action on this issue, otherwise…I have just finished the Jared Diamond book, Collapse, and, yes, it could happen here.
Eve, below, might still be around after a global collapse, though her batteries would have run down. Nice eye contact, Eve.
May 15, 2006—She can hold a conversation, make eye contact [uh huh], and express joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness. These school-age tots seem to be making friends with EveR-1, a female android that made her debut this month in South Korea. The robot was built by Baeg Moon-hong, a senior researcher with the Division for Applied Robot Technology at the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH). Fifteen motors underneath her silicon skin allow her to express a limited range of emotions, and a 400-word vocabulary enables her to hold a simple conversation.
The android weighs 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and would stand 5 feet, 3 inches (160 centimeters) tall—if she could stand. EveR-1 can move her arms and hands, but her lower half is immobile.
KITECH scientists are now working on EveR-2, which they say will have improved vision, a wider range of facial expressions, and the ability to stand and move all four limbs.
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