 |
| MAIN | SEARCH / ARCHIVES / NOTES | RSS |
TED talk — Creation in Reverse
I did a TED talk in Long Beach. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design and it’s a conference that was started some decades ago by Silicon Valley types to essentially bring part of the world to their doorstep.
From the TED website:
“TED was born in 1984 out of the observation by Richard Saul Wurman of a powerful convergence between Technology, Entertainment and Design. The first TED included demos of the newly released Macintosh computer and Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind.”
(It was originally held in Monterey, a beautiful seaside escape just over the hills from Silicon Valley.) I suspect that the valley geeks and entrepreneurs didn’t usually get out much — they hardly ever even make it up to San Francisco! — so inviting innovators from around the world to come to them was a smart idea.
Here is Mandelbrot doing a return engagement this year, in reverse color.
It’s gone well beyond technology, entertainment and design by now, but still has a bit of a nerdy, techie vibe. I’d been watching their free video podcasts of various TED talks for years, and never really thought of attending until within the past year or two some other musicians who had been in the past all said, “You HAVE to go.”
Luckily, I got invited to do one of their talks this year, which saved me from worrying about the costs (this time, at least). The lineup is mind-boggling. TED talks are famously restricted to 18 minutes (or less — some folks are only given 3 minutes!... and some only got 1 minute!!) and they are very strict about it. I watched one elderly scientist almost get the hook as he exceeded his time allotment.
The time limit is a brilliant strategy — it forces us talkers to be concise, and the audience also knows that if they’re less than thrilled or stimulated, a new topic and speaker will be along in a few minutes. Being concise is one thing, but the time limit also conveniently means one has to stay “on message,” as the Cheney regime referred to it. In that time frame one can really just present one idea — and often it seems like just the inkling or introduction to a new idea was what was being presented.
Months ago I went to meet the TED folks at their New York offices after I was invited to participate. I was being vetted. I’ve done a few talks in the last few years — on bicycles and cities and Powerpoint — but they seemed to want something that pulled in my musical life. So, I mentioned to them that there was another talk, one about music in context, that I’d only done once — and I believed it could include musical examples and personal anecdotes. That seemed to satisfy them, though I said if they had doubts they could uninvite me, and that would be fine, no offense taken.
I practiced by talking on my subject over the last couple of months — at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg, Bell House in Park Slope, and at Bowery Ballroom as part of the Stories in High Fidelity series. I never got it down to the requisite 18 minutes at those venues, but I did refine and re-order the thing quite a bit. I got some feedback and some beers.
I was terrified going in front of the TED crowd — they never boo, but they’re a pretty heavy-duty lot. Walking in I glimpsed Daniel Dennett, the author whose amazing talks I’ve seen on the podcasts. Later I caught sight of über geeks like Bill Gates (who talked about a new kind of nuclear reactor), Google founder Sergey Brin (who was interviewed about the China mess) and Temple Grandin (who wore old school Western wear all the time)… and while I was talking on the phone during a break Will Smith walked by, accosted by two nerds. Some of the major science speakers sported science fashion straight out of central casting, while others were beautifully surprising in the disconnect between their appearance and their deep skill sets. The attendees were predominantly male.
The conference has evolved, as I mentioned — and with all the money that is now connected to and surrounding the tech world, many talks almost seemed like pitches for support in developing the speaker’s new medical miracle, for example. Your potential funders are probably sitting right in front of you. Thankfully, not too much overt hustling was in evidence, but there was lots of business card exchanging. Many talks seemed to be about new medical or other technologies that can be of use in the developing world. One can see that the Gates Foundation and many many others would naturally emerge from this milieu.
It’s not all science. There are musical acts as well — they play a few songs interspersed between the talks on the wisdom of whores and mathematical models of alternate universes. Thomas Dolby is the one-man house band, and this year he was joined by NY string quartet Ethel. Other guest acts were Jake Shimabukuro, ukulele virtuoso; Andrew Bird; and Natalie Merchant, who appropriately integrated a slide show into her short set. I sat in with Thomas and Ethel for an edited version of “Nothing But Flowers,” a song well suited to the venue where Gore first did his climate change talk (he was there too).
Sarah Silverman’s shock comedy routine wasn’t exactly well received by all… but overall most attendees seemed to be enthralled by the majority of talks. Naturally there were a few high points and spontaneous standing ovations (I didn’t get one), and those tend to spread around the web very quickly. The Jamie Oliver rant about American eating habits is online already. (There’s an amazing video clip included in it of West Virginia school kids who can’t identify common vegetables.)
There wasn’t much time for biking around — there wasn’t much time for anything beyond listening — but I did manage to rent one and ride down the beach bike path. Really lovely, though not a very viable means of commuting. Long Beach has oil wells in the harbor; larger offshore drilling rigs can be seen in the distance. The ones close to the beach were disguised to look like skinny condos or office buildings, as if that would somehow be less offensive than looking at an oil derrick.
Anyway, here’s a slightly expanded version of my talk, minus the musical excerpts.
Creation in Reverse
What I'm going to talk about is an insight I've had about creation. That insight is that context largely determines what kind of music is written. Maybe the analogy applies to other forms of creation as well — painting, sculpture, programming or performance — or at least the shape of them.
That doesn't sound like such a big insight, but it's actually backwards from what I perceive to be conventional wisdom — which is that creation emerges out of some interior emotion or from an upwelling of passion that inevitably and must find an outlet. This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be. Here are the lyrics to a new song by the group One Republic: “I need another story/Something to get off my chest…When a situation rises/Just write it into an album.”
It doesn’t even rhyme, but more than that I think it’s based on a mistaken assumption.
I do think that despite the fact that this old notion of how creation comes into being is mistaken, passion is inevitably present in most work. Just because the form things take is self- or (in the case of my examples here) architecturally-restricted, and just because our response to a given context can be viewed as opportunistic, it doesn’t mean that creation is therefore cold and heartless. Those dark and emotional materials usually find a way in — and the tailoring process is largely unconscious. Emotional content is formed and shaped to fit the available context and circumstance instinctively. So, the order of the process is the reverse from what is often assumed: the consideration of the vessel comes first, and that which fills it comes afterwards. Most of the time we’re not even aware of this tailoring we do. Opportunity is often the mother of invention. The emotional story — “something to get off my chest” — still gets told, but its form is guided by contextual restrictions.
Paintings are created that fit and look incredibly good on the white walls of galleries. They might not look quite as good in your living room, filled with furniture and AV gear. Music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not both). The architecture, the space, the platform, the software, in a sense “makes” the art. After art or music succeeds in a space, more similar venues are built to accommodate more production of similar sounding or looking pieces, but that happens later, after the form has been established. I sense that this mostly internalized tailoring process applies to everything, but I'll use music as my example, as people will believe I know something about that area.
Here is the room where some of the music I wrote as a young man was first heard.
[Source]
The sound in there was remarkably good — the amount of crap everywhere, the furniture, the bar, the uneven walls and ceiling made for a great sound absorption. The sound system was decent as well — better than in many other clubs, which was great, for this music anyway. Because of the lack of reverberation one could be fairly certain that details of one’s music would be heard. The lyrics would probably be understood and the rhythms and bass would be punchy and clear. Given the size of the place, intimate gestures and expression would be appreciated as well, at least from the waist up — whatever went on below the waist was generally invisible, obscured by the audience.
This club was initially meant to be a bluegrass and country venue, sort of like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville.
The audience behavior was pretty much the same too — the musical differences between the two venues are less important than one might think. Structurally, the music emanating from both places was pretty much identical.
[Photos source]
As both of these places are bars, people drink, shout and fall down, so, the music performed also has to be loud enough to be heard above that — and so it is. (The volume in Tootsie’s is MUCH louder than it was in CBGB.)
In years that followed I’ve performed in nicer halls — Disney Hall, Carnegie Hall and others — but I noticed that some of the music I’d written didn’t sound as good in those rooms. I began to ask myself if some of my music was written, maybe unconsciously, with specific kinds of rooms in mind.
There are many strains of music in the world, of course. One strain evolved in the context of being played and heard outdoors.
[Source]
In this outdoor context, percussive music typical of West Africa carries well, and the extremely intricate and layered rhythms don’t all get sonically mashed together as they would in a reverberant hall. This music tends to be steady state — dynamically it doesn’t vary much, but rather maintains a constant volume.
Alan Lomax has argued that the structure of this music — essentially leaderless — emanates and mirrors egalitarian societies, but while that’s a whole other level of context one could argue that social context counts for as much as physical space and acoustics.
Some folks might say that the instruments used here — derived from easily available local materials — determined the nature of the music, and that this was the best they could do musically given what they had available. I would argue the opposite — that the instruments were carefully fashioned, tailored and played to best suit the physical, acoustic and social situation. They work perfectly in their context, and that’s no accident. Just as non-realistic art isn’t necessarily more primitive, this music is incredibly complex on its own terms. It works brilliantly.
It would turn into auditory mush in a place like this:
[Source]
Western music in the medieval era — Gregorian chants and such — was performed in these stone-walled Gothic cathedrals, and in monasteries and cloisters, which had somewhat similar acoustics. The reverberation time in those spaces is very long — more than four seconds in most cases — so a notes hang in the air and become part of the present. Shifting keys would inevitably invite dissonances and a sonic pileup, as the previously sung or played notes would overlap with the new ones. So, what evolved is what sounds best — it is modal in structure. This music often uses very long notes and slowly evolving melodies with no key changes whatsoever. It works beautifully in these spaces — in fact, the space even improves the music… it gives it an otherworldly ambience.
It’s often assumed that this music was harmonically “simple” (having few key changes) because these composers hadn’t “progressed” to complex harmonies yet. I’d argue that in this context there would be no need or desire to include complex harmonies, as it would have sounded horrible. Creatively they did exactly the right thing.
Here’s the church where Bach did a lot of his playing and writing in the early 1700s:
[Source]
As you can imagine, there was already an organ there and the sound would be less reverberant than in the Gothic cathedrals, but still echoey. The reverb was so much less that, famously, Bach and others could introduce key changes into their music.
Later on, young Mozart wrote for rooms like this in the late 1700s:
[Source]
And sometimes for rooms like this:
[Source]
They’re slightly smaller than Bach’s church, and when filled with royalty, patrons and furniture they allowed Mozart's music to be heard in all its frilly detail. People danced to it too. Imagine people dancing to classical music today!
My guess is that in order to be heard above a dancing mob who might also be gossiping, one might have had to increase the size of the orchestra, which is in fact what happened.
Meanwhile, some folks were going to hear operas. Here’s La Scala as it is now.
[Source]
Built in 1776, the original orchestra section at that time was more a series of booths or stalls rather than the rows of seats that are typical of opera houses now. People would eat, drink, socialize and holler out to one another during the performances. They’d holler to the stage too, for encores of the popular arias. The vibe was more like CBGB than the typical opera house today.
La Scala and other opera venues of the time were fairly compact — not much deeper than a small theater or large club — so the sound turns out to be pretty tight. I’ve performed in some of these old opera venues and if you don’t crank the volume too high, pop music survives surprisingly well.
Here’s Bayreuth, the opera house Wagner built for his own music in the 1880s.
[Source]
You can see it’s also not that huge. Not nearly as big as most opera halls today. What’s different about his hall isn’t the space itself, but the bandstand. The orchestra pit is larger and more accommodating of the more extensive orchestras that he required to conjure the requisite bombast. He had new and larger brass instruments created, and he also called for a larger bass section to create his big orchestral effects.
I believe that later, as symphonic music tended to be performed in larger and larger halls — the kind built in recent centuries — the music, originally conceived for rooms, palaces and modest-sized opera houses, was now being asked to accommodate ever larger and more reverberant spaces, which tended to be less musically dead.
Quiet please
Around 1900, according to Alex Ross in a New Yorker piece (“Why So Serious?”), another development occurred which would affect the music that composers wrote. Classical audiences were no longer allowed to shout, eat and chat during the performances. One was expected to sit frozen, immobile, and listen with rapt attention. Ross hints that this was a way of keeping the hoi polloi out of the new symphony halls and opera houses. Music that sometimes used to be for all was now for an elite — something to be enjoyed without showing it or shouting about it. Audiences were intended to be “respectful,” which meant hiding their emotions until the very, very end.
This policy obviously affected composition — it meant that since no one was talking, eating or dancing anymore the music could now have extreme dynamics, and very quiet passages, as the composers knew they’d be heard, and harmonically complex passages could be appreciated. Combined with the increased reverberation of the larger symphony halls, these factors transformed music. All 20th century classical music could only work in (and was written for) these socially and acoustically restrictive spaces.
Although the quietest details and complexities could be heard, these larger halls meant that rhythmically things got less distinct and fuzzier. Late 19th and 20th century composers like Mahler therefore wrote music that took those emerging qualities into account. They emphasized texture, and sometimes audio shock and awe, as the back row was further away — and if you wanted to reach them, you needed to adapt. And adapt they did.
Here’s one of those rooms — Carnegie Hall:
[Source]
Groove music — percussive music featuring drums, for example, like what I do — has a very hard time here. I’ve played Carnegie Hall a couple of times, and it can work, but it is far from ideal. I wouldn’t play that music there again.
Even the jazz now occasionally played in these rooms becomes a kind of chamber music. No one dances or drinks — at least not in the hall. (Although I’ve gotten audiences up and dancing in many of these places.) Jazz clubs followed suit — no one dances at the Blue Note or Village Vanguard. Great music resulted, but folks often forgot that jazz was once music for dancing — that spiritual uplift and dancing were never mutually exclusive.
Popular music
Looping back to the early part of the 20th century to pick up jazz, it was originally played in bars, riverboats, funerals and joints where lots of dancing and drinking were going on. There was little reverberation in those spaces so the groove could be strong, precise and clear.
It’s been pointed out — by Scott Joplin and others — that the origin of jazz solos and improvisations was a way of stretching out whatever section of the tune the dancers were getting into. During a performance the dancers might really be getting off on one part, and if the “written” melody of that section ran out, the musicians would be required to extend it. So, in order to keep the dancers going, the players would jam on those chord changes over the groove rather than simply playing the same melody over and over again. The improvisations evolved out of necessity, and a new kind of music was born.
If anyone’s been to a juke joint or seen the Rebirth or Dirty Dozen brass bands at a place like The Glass House in New Orleans, then you’ve seen lots of dancing to jazz. Its roots are as spiritual dance music.
[Source]
Not only the form but also the instrumentation of jazz was modified so that the music could be heard over the sound of the dancers and the bar. Banjos were louder than acoustic guitars, trumpets were louder than fiddles, and this tendency repeated until amplification and microphones came in (which I’ll get to later).
Like West African music this is texturally steady state music. The volume doesn’t vary much, for to do so would risk getting lost amongst dancing and jabbering.
Likewise, country music, blues, Latin music and rock and roll were all (originally) music to dance to, and they too had to both be loud enough to be heard above the chatter and also work for the dancers. They were all performed in similarly sized rooms as well — so rhythmically they were sustainable.
Recorded music
Around the first third of the 20th century a new music venue emerged. People were now listening to music on the radio or on home stereos through one of these things.
[Source]
People probably heard more music on them than they would ever hear face to face. This technology, this appliance, became the concert hall. In some ways music was now free of any live context — or more properly, the context became the living room and the jukebox, as well as the still ongoing ballrooms and concert halls.
The microphones that brought music to radios also changed the way we sang as well as how we played instruments.
[Source]
One no longer had to have great lungs to be a singer. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby innovatively sang “to the microphone” — they adjusted their vocal dynamics in ways that would have been unheard of and unsuccessful earlier.
Others went even further. Chet Baker sang in a whisper, as did João Gilberto, and millions followed. These guys were whispering in your ear, getting right inside your head. Needless to say, without microphones, this intimacy wouldn’t have been heard at all. And mostly it wouldn’t have been heard that well either, except in the privacy of a living room.
[Source]
Recorded music emerged around this time too. Technology had turned the living room or any small bar with a jukebox into a concert hall. It seems to me that music composition and the whole situation for musicians had now come upon a forking path. The performing musician was now expected to write and create for two very different venues — for the live venue and for a recording — and the compositions were expected to be the same, as one medium was thought to promote the other.
It seems unfair. The performing skills, not to mention the writing needs, the instrumentation, and the acoustic properties for each medium, are completely different.
Recorded music allowed music venues to now come into existence that didn’t even have performers. Bars with jukeboxes became venues without any live musicians at all.
[Source]
For example, music written for contemporary discos, in my opinion, usually ONLY works in those social and physical spaces. Not only that, it works perfectly on their incredible sound systems. It feels stupid to listen to club music at its intended volume at home — though people do it. And, once again, it’s for dancing, as was early hip hop, which emerged out of dance clubs in the same way that jazz did — by extending sections of the music so the dancers could show off and improvise.
[Source]
Live performance didn’t go away — the social attraction was too important. The most successful pop music acts ended up performing in the largest man-made indoor spaces available. Basketball arenas and hockey rinks have terrible acoustics — so only a narrow range of music really works at all. The music that arena rock groups composed was, like the sounds written for Bayreuth, Wagnerian… tending to medium tempos and fairly simple harmonic structures. Otherwise, despite advances in technology, it turns to mush.
[Source]
Here the masses gather in an architectural space that demands that the music not only sonically but socially perform a different function than what it does on record or in a club. Arena rock works pretty well in arenas, but if you’ve ever heard a band who’s spent decades playing in sports arenas do an “intimate” club date, you might hear that they’ve often evolved into an animal that doesn’t fit outside their contextual element. The outsized gestures and the music itself are a fish out of water.
Contemporary music venues
What’s new? One of the newer musical venue is the car. I’d argue that contemporary hip-hop is written, musically at least, to be heard in cars with systems like this one.
[Source]
Or maybe this one?
[Source]
I’d say the audio space in a car with these speakers forces a very different kind of composition. Full spectrum. Bass heavy. The vocal is often allocated a space where not much else lives. Although this music may have emerged from dance-oriented early hip hop, it’s morphed into something else entirely — music that sounds best in cars.
One other new music venue has arrived.
[Source]
Presumably this MP3 player plays mainly Christian music.
Beginning with the Walkman portable cassette player, private listening is musically and socially partly an extension of the “sitting very still in a concert hall” experience, combined with the pristine virtual space that studio recording allows. You can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety when the earbuds are in your ears, which is similar to concerts that demand silence — but as opposed to most concert halls, the lack of reverb means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact.
That said, extreme dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. If there’s a quiet passage then we turn the thing up, only to have our ears assaulted when the loud bit comes along. I never listen to traditional classical music on one of these, for example. As with dance music 100 years ago, it’s better to write steady state music for these.
Interestingly, it seems we’ve come full circle in many ways. The musical techniques of the African Diaspora, the foundation of much of the world’s contemporary popular music, with its wealth of interlocking and layered beats, works acoustically incredibly well as both a private listening experience and as a framework for much contemporary recorded music.
[Source]
African music that might have been originally created based on being played in the open — steady state music loud enough to be heard outdoors above dancing and singing — turns out to also work well in the most intimate of spaces, our inner ears.
Yes, people do listen to Bach and Wagner on iPods, but not too many people are writing new music like that — except for film, where Wagnerian bombast works really well.
Birds do it
This adaptive tendency isn’t just limited to musicians and composers. It extends into the natural world as well. David Attenborough and others have claimed that bird calls have evolved to fit the environment. In dense jungle foliage, constant, repetitive and brief signals within a narrow frequency work best. The repetition is like an error-correcting device — if you didn’t hear the song/signal clearly the first time, here it is again.
Birds that live on the forest floor, however, have evolved lower-pitched calls — sounds that don’t bounce off or become distorted by the ground. Meanwhile, birds in the plains and grasslands have buzz-like calls that carry longer distances, like the Savannah sparrow:
[Source]
Water birds have calls that cut through the ambient sounds of water, and Eyal Shy of Wayne State University says that there are even variations within the same species. Scarlet tanagers vary the pitch of their songs in the east, where the woods are denser than in the west.
[Source]
There’s more: birds of the same species in the same place adjust their singing as their habitat changes. Birds in San Francisco were found to have raised the pitch of their songs over 40 years, in order to be better heard above the increased traffic.
So it’s not just composers who do this — who adapt to the context and to venues — it’s an interspecies phenomena.
Conclusion
Music composition being shaped by the venue in which it will be heard is an easy example for me to use. I also have a feeling that this somewhat reverse view of creation happens a lot, maybe in many very different areas of creativity.
What’s interesting to me is not that these practical adaptations happen — that seems predictable and even obvious — but what it means for our perception of the creative process.
It seems that creativity is adaptive, like anything else. When a space becomes available, work emerges to fill it. The genius, the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work, happens when the thing is perfectly suited to its context and is also surprising. And when something works, it strikes us as not just being clever — a good adaptation — but as strongly and emotionally resonant. When the right thing is in the right place we are moved.
What seems obvious by now is that emotion, passion and personal expression can be poured into whatever form or vessel becomes available. And that form and those structures are determined primarily by the available venues — be they a club or an arena in music, a blog entry, a forest, or a white gallery wall.
Sometimes if I say things like this I get accused of being cold and calculating — the implication being that by adapting, work is somehow spineless, without integrity, inauthentic. The old idea that true creativity explodes into existence out of the heart and soul, and somehow emerges and insists on the form it wants to take, still lingers.
This romantic attitude applies to politics too. Thomas Frank wrote on one possible reason why voters often vote against their own best interest:
“Authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.” [Link]
That’s where the danger lies. We need to accept that our evolutionary connection to the birds is not just physical, as a member of a similar branch of the evolutionary tree, but our expressions are like birdsong as well. Whoever writes the songs for One Republic, it’s true we do “get things off our chests,” but the way we do that, the art of it, is to put them into proscribed forms. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively — we internalize the process, like the birds do — and it continues to be a joy to sing, like the birds do.
Went to a friend’s, Ford Wheeler’s, new house in Mérida (Yucatán) on the 27th through the New Year. Mérida is now a sizable town, but a bit of a backwater, and therefore its colonial center is more or less intact and there are few tourists — they all head west towards Chichén Itzá, Tulum and Cancún instead. I’d been here a few years ago and there are two blog entries on the ruins that are all around the area, the Maya and the collapse of their civilization. Now I wondered about the collapse of the massive European-based civilization that flourished here.
Mérida used to be one of the wealthiest cities in the New World. “For a brief period, around the turn of the 20th century, Mérida was said to house more millionaires than any other city in the world” [Link]. Who’d a thunk it? The money came from henequen — an agave-type plant that, when processed, could be made into rope and other durable products. It is sometimes known as sisal, after the Caribbean port town nearby where it was shipped off in massive quantities. Green gold, it was called.
[Source]
I used to have a kind of carpet made of “sisal.” When nylon and other man-made products were created that could replace henequen, the Yucatán monopoly collapsed and the millions evaporated. This was the second collapse of a civilization in that peninsula, the first being the collapse of the Maya civilization, which had already begun, but proceeded more rapidly after the arrival of the Spanish, who claimed the city from the Maya in 1542. Because it was a pre-existing city, it is considered the oldest continually occupied city in the New World. That doesn’t mean there is an abundance of buildings that are 500 years old — but there are a few. Though the great Maya temples are now ruins, and their peninsula-spanning network of roads and cities has all but vanished, the people are still present, and much of their culture survives. The Spanish, like the English in North America, instigated a feudal system when they arrived that was based on race — with the Spanish at the top, people of Spanish descent (Creoles) next, mestizos (mixed race people) in the middle and the Maya as slaves at the bottom. The Spanish built massive haciendas — huge plantations that were like self-supporting towns unto themselves.
Mexican insurgents fought for independence from Spain — a movement that started around 1800, ending with independence in 1821 — though it was hardly democracy. Agustín de Iturbide declared himself Emperor after victory. But Mexico was not the Yucatán. With independence from Spain, some here hoped that the brutal caste system would come to an end — but what happened was the Creoles simply took over from the Spanish as rulers and nothing much changed. Besides, the Yucatán wasn’t considered a part of Mexico proper — it was a separate country. Eventually, and not surprisingly, a war erupted — the Caste War.
The Caste War was long coming — private interests had been usurping Maya lands for some time — and it was the execution of three Maya that triggered the uprising. It continued for decades and by 1848 the Europeans had been driven from the entire peninsula, except for the cities of Mérida and Campeche… and the port of Sisal. The Maya had almost won, but then something strange happened.
Swarms of flying ants appeared, which we might interpret as some Biblical omen, but the Maya realized this meant it was the perfect time to begin planting their crops — so they abandoned the battlefield and walked away, not realizing that victory was close at hand.
The Creole Yucatáns, still a separate nation, offered sovereignty — their country! — to anyone who would help them defeat the Maya. Mexico answered the call and the Maya were pushed back — well, halfway. The “European” Mexicans controlled the northwest (Mérida, etc.), while the Maya controlled the jungle and the southeastern portion of the peninsula.
The Talking Cross
In 1850, an apparition appeared to the Maya — a Talking Cross — that urged them to continue their struggle. This was in the area called Chan Santa Cruz, which Britain recognized at this time as an independent nation (it was close to British Honduras — present-day Belize — which was British-controlled, and they traded with one another). But as years went by the British began trading more with Mexico, and the balance of power eventually shifted; by 1893 they signed a treaty recognizing Mexican sovereignty over the Maya-controlled region — and stopped all trade between Honduras (still their colony) and Chan Santa Cruz. The “rebels” had been isolated.
[Source]
Logan Hawkes attempted to find the Talking Cross. Here is an excerpt from his account:
Deep in the jungle…at the tiny straw-hut Maya community of Tixcacal Guardia, village elders fiercely guard what they swear is the authentic cross and will let no outsider near it. Kept within a 'city within the city', much like the Vatican, the talking, or speaking cross, is safely hidden away from all eyes except the Cruzob spiritual leaders - the head Shaman and a circle of Elders. Down Highway 295 is the turnoff for Tixcacal Guardia, or Xcacal, religious and spiritual heart of the lower Maya world. It is home to the Maya who most fiercely defend their autonomy as keepers of the Cruz Parlante, or ‘talking cross’. The church in which the cross now rests is actually open to the public, but only on feast days, and even then the artifact is not on display – not even to the Maya themselves. It stands on an altar covered with veils in a blocked-off section of the church called La Gloria, and no one enters this inner sanctum. The cross is guarded day and night by armed Maya who hail from all across the region. [Source]
During the time when Chan Santa Cruz was an independent nation, non-Maya were forbidden to enter the region — they would be instantly killed — but after so many years of conflict, financial isolation, and the arrival of the Wrigley’s company looking for chicle (the sap that forms the basis of chewing gum!), the war was declared over in 1915. By then the world of the henequen barons was already collapsing.
So, that’s the story of what was once one of the wealthiest parts of the New World — and not so long ago either! Kind of puts things in perspective. There are decaying haciendas all over the peninsula, like this one with a chimney built to vent off the processing of the henequen, and many of them have been renovated as luxury resorts with swimming pools added. 
I was invited to be on the jury of the Estoril Film Festival, which, like many others, has a number of sections — tributes to directors (David Cronenberg, Victor Erice — Spirit of the Beehive) and actors (Juliette Binoche), a smattering of crowd pleasers (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Antichrist) and an actual film competition. The force behind the festival, Paulo Branco, a Portugal-based art film producer, had his folks select competition films from the pile that often gets overlooked at the other big name festivals, where films by big name directors are often in competition. So, we got some small to medium (Moon) films that often deserved another look or more attention than they’d gotten, though a few had indeed won prizes previously. Unlike Cannes this festival is not a marketplace, but an award or series of awards might help a small film find distribution. As it gets slightly easier to make a film — with digital projection and computer editing — marketing and distribution are no easier or cheaper than before, though innovative strategies appear, as with the super cheap to make Paranormal Activity in the US, which Paramount released city by city before it blew up. We’d usually see 2 movies a day, and after viewing the dozen selections, we 4 members of the jury haggled over a nice lunch.
Here are the winners and some others we all liked a lot. Best Film: Dogtooth, a Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos. Wow — I loved this film, even if the video projected version wasn’t so great looking. It’s very formal and stylized, and it begins in a way that appears to be completely hilarious and absurdist (one juror said it just seemed random at that point) — but soon it turned dark and became very disturbing. I noticed online that some people absolutely hate it. There was one scene where I turned away. 
[Source]
Here’s a trailer. (Spoiler alert: some images in the trailer give away too much, in my opinion.) This from Variety: “Three indefinitely grounded siblings are stuck in an alternative universe dictated by their parents' cruel whimsies -- think an eternal ‘Big Brother’ house as designed by Lars von Trier.” We split the second prize, as we loved both films. The Girl, a Swedish film by Fredrik Edfeldt. This is a beautifully made and shot film about a young girl in a rural house who is left in the care of a young aunt while her parents go on a good works trip to Africa. Soon enough, the young aunt abandons the girl as well — and she has to fend for herself, which isn’t completely bad, as most of the adults seem like jerks. 
[Source]
And:
Eastern Plays, a Bulgarian film by Kamen Kalev about a young, artistic though aimless man who drinks a bit too much beer (the actor was also a junkie in real life). He rescues a Turkish family (and their beautiful daughter) after they are attacked on the night streets of Sofia by some fascist skinheads — one of whom is our hero’s brother. Slow moving, but wonderful. Sadly the lead actor passed away before the last few scenes in Istanbul were to be shot. The film integrates news footage of soccer hooliganism, racist attacks and Eastern European street fighting with the characters and the story in a way that feels natural. 
[Source / source]
Other films we all liked were: Le Roi de l'Evasion This hilarious French film by Alain Guiraudie is about love among French farmers and tractor salesmen. These middle aged and older guys all appear to be normal hicks, but they love to frolic together in the woods and elsewhere. It’s a farce, I guess — I laughed a lot. The lead is an overweight tractor salesman named Armand who rescues a young girl from a group of teen bullies — she, though only 16, then falls obsessively for him, and he decides to try going straight, and the two end up on the lam, with the young girl chasing big Armand in his skimpy briefs though field and forest. I could just imagine the director pitching this concept in Hollywood! 
[Source]
Les Beaux Gosses is a French film by Riad Sattouf about pimply teens and their attempts at scoring girls. Sounds like a typical American Pie scenario, but these kids are (to me) funnier and more realistic in their awkwardness and geeky looks. Much, much better and funnier than any recent Hollywood teen movie. I think this one could be the most popular of the films we saw — the audience, like me, was laughing a lot. If close-ups of awkward tongue kissing and pimples turn you off then avoid this one. 
[Source]
Lastly:
Le Famille Wolberg, a Belgian film by Axelle Ropert about a Jewish family — the husband is a mayor, the wife had an affair, and we watch the model family fall to pieces in a very subtle way. The film touches on a lot of hot topics in Belgium, so it’s not just about one family’s problems.
Slightly inland from the seaside town of Cascais, nestled on a low mountain that seems to generate its own cloud cover, is the retreat of former royals and wealthy citizens called Sintra. The mountain and its cloud cover must have made for a pleasant coolness in the hot Portuguese summers. C and I made a couple of day trips up there to visit some former palaces, residences and monasteries.
One of these is called Quinta de Regaleira, the former home of a baroness that was later bought by Carvalho Monteiro, a super wealthy Brazilian, at the turn of the century. After buying the house he then bought up the rest of the hill where the baroness’ home was situated. After a false start at commissioning a design for a place for himself, he decided to hire an opera set decorator to design both the house and its chapel, but also to effectively turn the whole mountaintop into a colossal set, with fake ponds, underwater labyrinths and a series of underground tunnels that functioned as a metaphorical voyage of initiation and self-discovery — a voyage inspired by the Knights Templar, the Freemasons and alchemists as well. Disney take note — this guy was doing freaky cosmic theme parks before anyone else.
So I asked myself, as readers of Dan Brown’s books no doubt have, who were these Knights of Templar?
They came into existence after the crusades had gained a foothold in Jerusalem. The first crusade, or shall we call it invasion of the Middle East by western Europeans, was in 1099. Jerusalem was captured from the Arabs, and Europeans began to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land in significant numbers to see and feel the aura of the place where their faith originated. While Jerusalem was, for these pilgrims, a kind of protected Green Zone, the approach to it was not. The route from the port of Jaffa (alongside present-day Tel Aviv) inland to Jerusalem was dangerous, and scores of pilgrims were slaughtered by what we might now call insurgents, or freedom fighters…or defenders of their homeland? The hapless pilgrims needed to call Blackwater or some other ruthless mercenaries for hire to protect them. So, one hundred years later a French knight proposed the creation of an order that would attempt to protect these pilgrims — the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, so called because they were given a headquarters by King Baldwin II: the Al Aqsa Mosque, which, significantly, had been built over the former Temple.
What was this Temple of Solomon, I ignorantly asked myself? According to Wikipedia it was, in its first incarnation, “the first temple of the ancient religion of the biblical Israelites, originally constructed by King Solomon… It was designed to house the Ark of the Covenant” — so we’re in Raiders of the Lost Ark territory now. Other powerful relics were rumored to be buried at this site, but all we know is that the Templars got hold of bits of what were referred to as pieces of the “True Cross.”
The Temple of Solomon was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times…marking important events in Jewish history. Here is a (somewhat exaggerated?) visual depiction from a Freemasonry website — it brings to mind the Merchandise Mart building in Chicago. Freemasons sometimes claim that the architects and masons who built this massive thing were the original Freemasons — hence the association with the Knights.
Eventually the Romans took it over, and built their own temple there — and at present there is once again a mosque on the site, which includes the oft-disputed Dome of the Rock.
[Source]
Beneath a section of the Dome of the Rock there is a cave known as the Well of Souls. All sorts of wild myths abound:
“Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad ascended heavenwards from the stone above the cave, a related tradition has grown up that states that the Last Judgment will happen at the Sakhrah, and that the souls of the dead gather in the well of souls to wait for that event, and to pray… [and lastly,] according to pre-Islamic folklore, the well of souls was a place where the voices of the dead could be heard along with the sounds of the Rivers of Paradise.” [Source]
That’s a lot of mythical weight to bear!
The Knights were quickly endorsed by the Catholic Church, and wore recognizable white mantles featuring a symmetrical red cross (this cross appears regularly at Monteiro’s theme park). They became an expert fighting unit — proto-Jedi Knights, spiritual warriors and protectors. About 100 years after their founding the Pope not only recognized them but gave them special privileges — one can imagine how noble their cause would have seemed to the European imagination. They were granted tax-free status, and were allowed passage anywhere they wanted to go — borders were no longer of any import to the Knights. Being a kind of military and financial institution (see below), this papal bull was immensely helpful.
[Source]
Though as individuals they were legendarily poor and relied on donations to continue their work, their order quickly amassed massive assets and devised innovative financial techniques. For instance: a pilgrim or entourage might want to visit the Holy Land but not leave their valuables unattended back home. So, they would place them in the hands of the regional Templars in their hometown, and in turn they were issued a paper certificate, which they could redeem for money in Jerusalem. The first form of checking, and banking of a sort, was born. Already the plot thickens — you can imagine the kinds of assets the organization accumulated. The whole island of Cyprus belonged to the Templars at one point!
Their power increased and they became an established institution (partly financial) in Europe and elsewhere in the following centuries. But not everyone was happy about this. King Philip of France ended up owing them a lot of money and he wondered how he could get out of his debts. He pressured Pope Clement V to go after the Templars. At first the Pope was timid in his attack on the Jedi — but King Philip must have had some leverage, because after a bit the Pope summoned the Templars to him and arrested and tortured them all, accusing them of heresy, homosexuality and weird initiations. Some signed confessions under torture (which they later recanted) and most of the powerful Templars were burned at the stake.
[Source]
One cried out to the King and Pope as the flames consumed him that he would see them later; both of them died within the year…but not before the church and king had usurped the accumulated lands and property of the order.
By around 1300 the Templar Order was effectively gone, but as an inspiration they lived on. Reader Luís Bonifácio adds: "The Order was disbanded in all countries of Europe with the exception of Portugal, where King Deniz, when notified by the Pope to disband the Templars, proposed to confiscate all their belongings, and to form a new Knight Order called the 'Order of Christ.' The Pope accepted, and all the knights, churches, monasteries and territories of the Knights Templar were transformed into the 'Order of Christ,' which was simply the Knights Templar by another name, commanded by a member of the Royal Family. Their symbol continued to be the red cross, with a different design, which you can still see in the sails of the NRP Sagres (sister ship of the USS Eagle). A century later, the Knights of this Order, led by the Grand-Master Prince Henry the Navigator, started the Portuguese Discoveries, an expansion towards Africa, America, India, China and Japan. The Order remained in the lead of the Expansion until Portugal's annexation by Spain in 1580. After 1580, the Order was disbanded, and today remains one of the most important honorific orders of medals in Portugal. In the XVI century, the role of the Order of Christ in Portuguese history was taken by the 'Company of Jesus' (the Jesuits), until the early XX century."
Both Knights Templar and Freemasonry were essentially secret societies — though very different from one another — which led to lots of speculation and rumor. They both also had a vaguely spiritual bent — an idea that initiates might be given special knowledge that was passed down, and strange rituals that both bound the members together and were metaphors for personal discovery. [Source]
Various spinoffs of the Masons in the US in the earlier part of the last century made the initiation and other ceremonies into lovely little quasi-theatrical events. Here is a “set” and backdrop from one such ritual that was for sale via the Webb Gallery in Texas:
One could argue that here was a whole genre of theater that existed out of public view.
So, back to Monteiro’s theme park mountain. The house is pretty great — with Arabic-themed rooms, and a hunting-themed room with mosaics of beasts to be killed and a huge tusked boar bust in marble looming out from the wall — but it is the gardens that folks come to see. Visitors head up the hill, along winding paths, past follies and fountains, through a forest of exotic plants imported from Brazil until one reaches a pile of moss covered stones.
We were told that in the past a hidden staircase led to the top of the pile, but as that route led nowhere, one was sometimes led through a crevasse to a hidden stone door with no handle. And the door was way too heavy to move by hand. How to get inside? Our guide showed us a hole in a crack near the rock door, in which was concealed a lever that released a counterweight, allowing the door to swing open — like a fairytale or an episode out of Arabian Nights come to life! Through the door was what is referred to as the initiates’ well…though it was never used as a well.
In Monteiro’s conception this allowed one to metaphorically descend into the underworld — a realm of self-testing, self-discovery and rebirth. At the bottom of the stairs was the entrance to a couple of tunnels. Our guide escorted us into one of them, saying the other led to a dead end. We pulled out our little flashlights.
Monteiro had a whole maze of tunnels constructed under his mountain — some led to grottoes, with no way out, and one led to another well that had no winding staircase to bring one up and out. To really leave the tunnel complex, and symbolically escape from the underworld (the subconscious?), one had to take a tunnel with no light at the end — to head into darkness. Eventually one emerged in the back of a little (man-made) grotto, and had to exit using stepping stones — stepping in a proscribed manner, right foot first.
Fun, eh! None of it is natural, but with the algae and mossy growth it all seems quite believable.
There is a chapel with a Knights Templar cross on the floor and a Masonic eye in a triangle on the ceiling. A mosaic shows a saint on a seashore preaching to fishes — the fish are leaping out of the water with their mouths open in rapt attention. Inside the main house there is a library that must have been constructed as a kind of contemporary art installation. The walls were filled with books on all sides, and around the perimeter of the floor was a mirror that appeared to extend the bookshelves down below the floor we were standing on. The carpeted ground in the center of the room seemed to therefore “float” — it was a creepy, unnerving sensation. I believe the lowest shelf you can see is actually a reflection:
Nearby Quinta Regaleiro is the remains of a small monastery formerly belonging to the convent of the Capuchos order. Like the magic mountain, it too was somewhat peculiar. There was no sign of a large building that might harbor loads of monks — just a small, rough cobblestoned area with two crosses on top of vaguely triangular stones. C looked behind one of the crosses, and sure enough there were steps that led to a crevasse between two huge boulders. In the crevasse was a door.
The monastery itself was not huge, and was tucked into the natural boulders and vegetation — we were told that these monks sought a kind of enlightenment in harmonizing with nature. Inside, the rooms were often lined with cork bark, as those trees were growing everywhere around. The bark walls, and bark covered doors and window blinds, made the tiny rooms appear even more primitive — as if some other kind of civilization lived here. The rooms for the individual monks, their cells, were so tiny and the doors leading to them so low and small, it seemed the monks were a species of Hobbit.
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?
I did a week of events (NY, Austin, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and LA) around the theme of Cities and Bikes and how we get around. I began each one with a broad introduction that I hoped would set the scene — a background on how our cities became so car-centric, and some alternatives in various places around the world. There were some funny slides too. As I mentioned earlier, at these events I was followed by a city representative, a representative of a local advocacy group, and an urban theorist. Different folks in each town. Q&A at the end. The turnout was great — the theaters for the most part were lovely and averaged around 700 seats. It really does seem like this was a little catalyst for an issue that has reached a point of acceptance. The “theorist” in San Francisco, Michael Teitz from UC Berkeley, proposed a lovely and surreal thought experiment in which the car had never been invented. An alternate present, with, for example, tunnels being a priority in many cities, as they make it easier for cyclists to avoid hills. In Los Angeles the man in this theorist role, Don Shoup, is a sort of famous specialist in parking. Such a thing may be laughable to some like me who don’t own a car, but in LA and elsewhere it is a serious issue with many ramifications. He pointed some out — if the price of a street meter (or a free spot) is lower than the nearby lot, then folks tend to circle the block in search of these bargains, to the point where the streets become clogged with naïve and hopeful drivers who spend a crazy amount of time looking for a spot. We’ve all done it, I know I have. I have also done concerts in “new” areas of LA (like downtown) and gotten complaints from folks who didn’t know if or where they could find parking close by. I think attendance suffered at those gigs because folks were worried about it. The events in some towns, like Portland, well known for being bicycle- and public transportation-friendly cities (despite the frequent rain), were almost like little rallies; whereas LA, like Austin in a way, is so spread out that it has more obstacles to overcome. I spent the morning walking around LA’s lively downtown district. One whole store sold nothing but glass pipes (for smoking) and another sold nothing but super realistic BB guns, and accurate reproductions of Glocks and Uzis. 
An old cafeteria has a waterfall inside with a mechanical bear that emerged from a hole! 
I suggested to the city rep that one might try adding bike lanes, etc. in specific neighborhoods, little by little, and not try to instigate a whole citywide program. Downtown, Santa Monica and Venice would be obvious candidates. Her response seemed to imply that the state of LA politics and bureaucracy makes that impossible — if one hood gets something, they all want it. Of course, if the mayor or other higher-ups were more sympathetic, as they are in Portland (or even Mikey B in NY), that entrenched bureaucracy might open up here and there. A poke from the top can indeed unclog a logjam. Naturally there were some questions from the audiences about the messenger who nearly ran me over and, from the other side, why can’t I have a bike lane on my street? The question raised by the first issue is: can our behavior change? One is always skeptical if that can ever happen; one doesn’t naturally think that North Americans can be like the Dutch or the Danes. I think it was at the NY event where I came up with what I thought was a pretty good analogy in response to this question: who would have believed that those independent-minded New Yorkers, with all their attitude, would stoop to picking up doggie shit in little baggies and carrying it steaming in their hands to the nearest trash can? No one. But they do. Pretty much all of them. So, people can change some old habits — it happens.
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.
Bikes, Cities and the Future of Getting Around I’m on a one week tour — a series of events focusing on bikes and cities timed to coincide with the release of my Bicycle Diaries book. I told the publisher I didn’t think I’d be very good as a reader — which is the usual way authors are trotted out to promote their books — so I suggested instead we do a series of forums focusing on our cities and how bikes have become a symptom of a new interest in urban living in North America. (This has a little bit of the added effect of hinting that the book is not just about riding a bike.) The publicity department of Viking, the publisher, generously helped put these events together. Sometimes they are held in bookstores, as those are the venues the publisher knows; and sometimes, like last night in Austin, in small theaters. At each event there will be a representative of the local city government; an advocate; a theorist/designer/planner or historian; …and me. We each do short (10-15 min.) presentations about our area of expertise and then there is some Q&A and then we’re done. So far, I’ve been to NYC and Austin and Seattle and it’s working pretty well. By bringing these elements and people together the events serve as a catalyst, a reminder and a symbol that perception and policies are changing — about bikes as a way of getting around and about how our lives in cities can be. The interest and turnout might be as much for the content as what’s on stage. The morning after I arrived here I rode around Austin and discovered that a surprising amount of the downtown area has been given over to parking. 
There are parking lots everywhere and, maybe because of the oppressive heat in the Texas summers, lots of indoor parking structures as well. Some of these take up a whole block and some only take up the ground floor of a downtown building. Either way, they kill any potential for life, business, interchange and encounters on those blocks. It seems that not only did the city accommodate cars with some massive freeways that are often jammed up, but they have given some of their best downtown real estate simply to house automobiles. I was reminded that the vibrant “people” streets (South Congress and 6th St.), no matter if you love or hate those scenes, would never exist if there were massive parking structures on every block there. The vacant lots on S. Congress are now filled with tent kiosks and tiny Airstreams and other trailers that serve as specialized food carts (like the ones in Portland). I got a mushroom tamale and berry smoothie at one, and they were great. Austinites were surprised when their city bike lane and trail rep Annick Beaudet revealed how many of the city’s residents commute by bike already, and how much new infrastructure is going to be added in the coming years. If they can conceive of replacing some of those parking lots and structures with mixtures of cool housing, office and retail they would inevitably lure more folks into the central district, where cars are not absolutely essential for every activity. Where will all those new workers, consumers and residents park then? — well, some will find it more practical to use public transportation and some will…ummm…ride bikes. The policy of infinite accommodation to the car needs to stop and be reversed if our cities are to survive as more than clumps of offices and parking garages. After the Austin event I rode to the Continental Club (the hotel has loaner bikes) to see the guys in Heybale do their usual Sunday evening set. The band, partly made up of veterans from the bands of artists like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, play their repertoire of mostly classic country songs (Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, George Jones, Webb Pierce) and a few originals with consummate skill. The guitar player Redd Volkaert and the pedal steel player in particular are amazing musicians — their frequent and concise solos are both surprising and inventive, and technically mind-boggling. More than once I’ve seen young musicians standing close to the stage with their jaws hanging open as these guys whip off another effortless solo. I was reminded of the days when Clapton was heralded as a guitar godhead — well, these guys are in that class, though the tunes are a little different. At least three of the band members sing, and pretty well, too. I happen to love those songs, though I realize they’re not to everyone’s taste. What’s just as wonderful as the band is the audience they’ve amassed over years playing this Sunday night residency — all ages: 20-somethings and folks my age and older, many of whom have come to dance the two-step or the waltz, depending on the song — and they fill the floor as soon as the band starts. I’ve seen 20-year-old girls in dancing dresses and grandmas in the same outfits. Last night one of the very best dancers in the joint was a young man who didn’t look like your typical country music fan — he could have been Mexican, Indonesian or Syrian. All the girls were happy to dance with him.
Living the Dream
The next morning, as I changed planes at Dallas Ft. Worth, I saw a guy talking on a cell phone outside a fast food place on one of the endless concourses. He was in full cowboy costume and it was, to me, so extreme and clichéd that he could have been a member of the Village People. I don’t think he would have appreciated hearing that. He had the full gear — a checkered Western shirt, old Tom Mix-style hat, jeans, boots, a belt with a giant buckle, and a handlebar moustache. Halloween ain’t for a few more weeks! I guess you can get away with that here in Texas, though this guy was pretty out there. There isn’t much call for ropin’ and herdin’ around DFW, unless it’s rodeo season, but even then the rodeo guys I’ve met don’t dress like this. This guy, it seems to me, is role playing. If he’s not that guy he’s going to at least look like that guy. If he were to walk into a NY office in that getup, folks would point him to the casting call across the way. But Texas is, sometimes, big and crazy enough that one can take the risk and reinvent oneself and folks go along with it. Flying out of DFW I marveled at the sprawl. 
I went to a show-and-tell demonstration of the BIXI bike share system that will be coming to NYC in the not too distant future. It will be a pilot program, subject to tweaks and adjustments, and will begin in a few logical neighborhoods — the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, the Village etc. It is a system that has already been installed in Montreal, so it’s been road tested. I used it to bike around there the day before Halloween [link to Journal]. As long as one avoids the Royal Mountain it’s a perfectly acceptable city to bike in, though in the middle of winter I think it might be inhumanly freezing. In summer the city is funky and beautiful. Here’s what the BIXI system looks like and how it works. As in Paris, Barcelona, Lyon and of course Montreal, there are racks of these special bikes (made specifically to fit the racks, with a limited but adequate number of gears and a holder for bags and groceries) spaced around the neighborhoods. 
The idea is that you use the bikes for grocery shopping, going out at night, running errands and going to meetings — trips that are usually under a ½ hour. They’re not for day trips to Nyack. You swipe your credit card and you are charged $5 for 24 hours of use. (Or you can subscribe to a monthly or yearly plan, which includes a BIXI key.) After swiping, the machine spits out a ticket with your code to release a bike. You punch in that number at any dock with an available bike, and it releases. I presume that if you don’t return your bike within a 24-hour period the system will assume that you’ve stolen it — and you will be charged accordingly. If you take a long ride there’s an additional fee, but you can take as many short trips in the 24-hour period as you want with no surcharge. One trip and you’ve saved a cab fare; a few trips and you’ve saved the equivalent MetroCard fares. Yesterday, for example, I biked from my home in midtown to my office in Soho; then, after some meetings there, I picked up some groceries and took them home. Later I went to Joe’s Pub to see Emanuel and the Fear and then up to Terminal 5 to catch Battles. Then home. All of these trips were, I’m pretty sure, under a ½ hour. I have room in my loft for my bike(s) so I normally use my own — but many New Yorkers, and certainly visitors, either don’t have bikes or don’t have room for them in their NY-size apartments. (There is a movement to outfit all new apartments and offices with built-in bike storage space, but that hasn’t happened yet.) If the stations are as tightly interspersed throughout the city as they are in Paris, one is never more than a couple of blocks from a place to pick up or deposit the bike, so you’d never have to lock it to a No Parking sign or to one of my bike racks. These share bikes do not come with locks — they’re meant to go from station to station, so theoretically there should be no reason to carry your own lock. How is the bike itself? 
They’re fine for what they are. There are chain guards so you don’t get grease all over your nice white pants or dress, and the gear switching mechanism is inside the axle, so no grease there either. In other words, you can wear normal working clothes to ride these, as you would wear the rest of your day. You don’t HAVE to dress like a messenger unless you want to. There are fenders as well, so if there is some wet area or a puddle you won’t get a gray/brown streak of NY street water up your back. The bike I tried seemed sturdy, which made for something a bit heavier than what I would personally choose. The front wheel has a limited turning ability, so no tricks or super sharp turns are possible. In Montreal and other cities the adoption of these kinds of systems has been rapid — even Parisians take to them. It has relieved a lot of congestion and has probably lowered the carbon footprint of those places as well. I have heard that people have begun to change their habits based on the convenience and availability of these and similar bike systems. Folks don’t have to plan their evenings, for example, based on where or how they can get a taxi or last train home. They also have begun to re-form their mental maps — now free from concerns about heavily trafficked routes, congestion or nearness of subway lines. They have begun to experience their cities in different ways — ways that are more self-organized, improvised and accommodating to change.
I stayed an extra day to record another singer on the Here Lies Love project. It’s almost done — the double CD, that is.
The hotel I’m staying in gives out two newspapers in the mornings for free — The Daily Telegraph and The Irish Independent. I am reminded just how many newspapers there are in this relatively small country. It’s staggering how the population here can support so many papers, tabloids and broadsheets. Newsagents must lose their minds occasionally.
The Daily Telegraph
London Evening Standard
Yorkshire Evening Post
The Birmingham Post
Bristol Evening Post
Hull Daily Mail
Liverpool Daily Post
Shropshire Star
Stoke Sentinel
The Times
The Guardian
News of the World
Belfast Telegraph
News Wales
Daily Express
Daily Mail
Daily Mirror
Daily Star
The Sun
The Independent
The Irish Independent
The Scotsman
The Dundee Courier
The Glasgow Herald
Scotland Today And more… !!!! Unbelievable! How is this range possible in an age when most newspapers are watching their sales dwindle daily, and are desperate for some survival strategy? My guess is that two factors allow this plurality to exist in the UK, at least for now. The country is proudly regional — the Welsh, the Scots and the Londoners all see themselves as very different, and not just in class (though that factors in too), but also in their specific local interests and sensibilities. Then there is class. It’s never gone away here — don’t believe what they tell you — and the paper you read obviously says a lot about your class, personal interests, politics and aspirations. That’s true everywhere, but what’s different here is that there are more distinct class subdivisions — you can be identified by your job, accent, dress, football team and what paper you read. The subtle distinctions escape me — though the tacky scandals and topless girls of the Murdoch-owned Sun scream lower class, and the redesigned Guardian shouts middle class smartie. Given the number of papers, you can imagine the competition is fierce for stories that will attract readers — so it comes as no surprise that News of the World reporters (another Murdoch paper) have tapped into the cell phone lines of celebrities and royals. They will indeed stop at nothing. In my opinion they’re also skilled at turning on the charm when they meet you, then making outrageous comments about your appearance and personal life when they turn in their copy. Everything needs to be embellished just a little more than what the competition might write. There are also plenty of headlines about fat celebrities, cheating footballers, drug addled singers and poor sods who beat their kids to death (this week). A cat stuck in a tree would make headlines if it could be spun in some sexy way. Any story makes the rounds like a house on fire — which is why bands shoot to popularity so fast here and similarly disappear almost as fast. Oddly, there is no daily or even weekly paper for the left wing bohemian class, like Libération in Paris, The Village Voice in NY, or other alternative weeklies elsewhere. Members of that demographic, who fancy themselves as being beyond class, have been suspiciously left out. Time Out, which originated in London, doesn’t really count, as it and others are more listings mags than news and reviews. Private Eye is unique here… a newsprint political humor weekly that requires a lot of knowledge of the players in order to get the jokes. Don’t know if anything like that could survive elsewhere.
|
