Cars, Nationalism, and Economic Decline
Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Book:
“This was the day General Motors came to the end of the road. I once asked a Sudanese politician to name the thing that in his eyes proved a nation was a nation. He didn’t hesitate: ‘The ability to make cars.’ Britain was a nation because it made Jaguars. Germany was a nation because of Volkswagen. America ran the world because of General Motors. Italy made Fiats and France made Peugeots, Japan made Toyotas, and even the Russians, struggling along the highway towards modernity, had the easily underestimated Lada. Was making cars once an indicator of national self-sufficiency? Is it still?”
Despite the internationalization of automobile manufacturing, O’Hagan points out that the public, as citizens and drivers, connect the welfare of their nation with the welfare of thier nation’s cars. There is even a personal emotion of nationalism we feel when driving:
Behind all this stands the culture of driving and the fact of traffic. We love driving and we hate it, we praise it and we slate it, but our relationship with cars is a lively element in our relationship with ourselves and other people. The downturn in the industry chills us, but mainly because – and we don’t feel this way about pharmaceuticals or petrochemicals – it makes us imagine we might have to stop being who we are. I speak as a fairly late convert to the life-enlarging potential of cars: for 36 years I was happy to go around the country on buses and trains, taking the Tube to any destination I ever wanted or needed to visit, to work and to cinemas, on dates and on expeditions, without ever feeling at a loss. When I took taxis it was just another form of being in the hands of others. It meant listening to speeches I found actively aggressive and paying over the odds for the privilege. Then I began taking driving lessons and the world suddenly opened up to me in a way I now depend on. The first long drive I took after I passed my test was a kind of baptism: I put down the windows and let all life’s unreasonable demarcations fly behind the car, enjoying the illusion that I now had a friend who cared for my freedom.
David Byrne on the Pedaling Revolution
David Byrne in the Times Book review:
“I’ve ridden a bike around New York as my principal means of transport for 30 years, so I’m inclined to sympathize with the idea that a cycling revolution is upon us, and that it’s a good thing. Like Jeff Mapes, the author of “Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities,” I’ve watched the streets fill over the years with more and varied bike riders. It’s no longer just me, some food delivery guys and a posse of reckless messengers. Far from it.”
The review mostly surveys the topics in Mape’s book, but Byrne’s words are interesting:
For decades, Americans have too often seen cycling as a kind of macho extreme sport, which has actually done a lot to damage the cause of winning acceptance for biking as a legitimate form of transportation. If your association with bikes is guys in spandex narrowly missing you on the weekends or YouTube videos of kids flying over ramps on their clown-size bikes, you’re likely to think that bikes are for only the athletic and the risk-prone. Manufacturers in the United States have tended to make bikes that look like the two-wheeled equivalent of Hummers, with fat tires and stocky frames necessitating a hunched-over riding position that is downright unsafe for urban biking and commuting. But that’s been changing for at least a few years now. Whew.
In addition to designing bike racks, Byrne is completing a collection of writing and photographs about his 30 years as a biking enthusiast, Bicycle Diaries.
Remember Everything with SuperMemo!
I recently discovered a profile of Piotr Wozniak and his creation, SuperMemo, written by Gary Wolf last year in Wired. SuperMemo is a database and program that, using an algorithm, provides a person with repetitive, timed review of facts and other memorized items— its computational flash cards, not unlike what we all used in grade school, and biology students continued to use in college.
“SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?”
“Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.”
Photo: Patrick Voigt
The eccentricities of Wozniak seem easy to point out. For instance, “One of his most heartfelt wishes is that the world have one language and one currency so this could all be handled more efficiently. He’s appalled that Poland is still not in the Eurozone. He’s baffled that Americans do not use the metric system. For two years he kept a diary in Esperanto.” But Wolf takes care in the article to consider how the idiosyncrasies of Wozniak the person are revealed in his program. Despite some early and sustained commercial success, SuperMemo has never changed how computer users remember things. (Indead, the current trend (e.g. Remember the Milk and other ‘Getting Things Done’ applications, too numerous to list as examples) is toward rapid capturing information and systematically storing it.) Yet, as Wolf observes, this is probably not why SuperMemo faulterd as a product:
“… Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he’s working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there’s a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning.”
More over,
“… one of Wozniak’s friends who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak’s focus on his own learning has tunted the development of his invention. “Piotr writes this software for himself,” says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineeringat the University of Delaware. “The interface is just impossible.”
There are several ancestors to SuperMemo, I’ll list the applications that are maintained and free.:
- The Mnemonsyne Project, a cross-platform research and study application.
- Genius, a memorization program for OSX
- Anki, which is an application I’ll be trying out to refresh my Spanish vocabulary and commit some math principles to memory
- spicyelephant.com/, is a web-based implementation of the concept
Argento and Sterling on the Future
Writers and thinker Bruce Sterling, and his alias Argento Bruno* have hypothesized about our current century.
- The True 21st Century Begins, Argento Bruno
- 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic, Bruce Sterling
In Argento’s reading of history, there was a gap between the last century and the current one:
Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.
The “true” 20th century — the Communist century — began in 1914 and ended in 1989. We are now in the true 21st century.
After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where “history ended.” Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.
Argento considers differences in American and European sentiment: How a shared political and economic history, foremost the wars of the 20th century, give members of the two continents very different answers to political and cultural challenges of the future and the economic turmoil that will surely overshadow the next decade. He is, nonetheless, optimistic:
The year to come is best approached as a learning opportunity. It offers a golden chance to bury our dead prejudices and learn how to properly feed the living. Once we stop shaking all over and scolding Americans, we will recognize the tremendous potential this new century offers the people of the world. The sun still shines, the grass still grows, we are still human. If we stopped pretending to be puppets of an invisible hand, we would not fret over the loss of the 20th century’s strings. We might see that life is sweet
* It’s classic, but 21st century use of a pseudonym— Bruce Sterling is Bruno Argento.
Daniel Tammet in Scientific American
There’s a fascinating interview with Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant best known for reciting 22,514 consecutive digits of Pi. Tammet, though, seems to spurn his categorization as savant, and finds other classifications of intellegient as a poor indications of how people really think:
When I was a child, my behavior was far from being what most people would label “intelligent.” It was often limited, repetitive and antisocial. I could not do many of the things that most people take for granted, such as looking someone in the eye or deciphering a person’s body language, and only acquired these skills with much effort over time. I also struggled to learn many of the techniques for spelling or doing sums taught in class because they did not match my own style of thinking.
I know from my own experience that there is much more to intelligence than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person’s mind or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.
The bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two thirds of the world’s population has an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some four and a half billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values (“he’s a 94,” “you’re a 110,” “I’m a 103”), equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This sounds a lot to me like astrology, which lumps everyone into one of 12 signs of the zodiac.
Tammet also refers to an interesting ligustic bit, on the gendering of language:
Another finding, by cognitive psychologists Lera Boroditsky, Lauren A. Schmidt and Webb Phillips, might also offer a useful insight into an important part of learning a second language. The researchers asked German and Spanish native speakers to think of adjectives to describe a range of objects, such as a key. The German speakers, for whom the word “key” is masculine, gave adjectives such as “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged” and “metal,” whereas the Spanish speakers, for whom “key” is feminine, gave responses such as “golden,” “little,” “lovely” and “shiny.” This result suggests that native speakers of languages that have gendered nouns remember the different categorization for each by attending to differing characteristics, depending on whether the noun is “male” or “female.” It is plausible that second-language learners could learn to perceive various nouns in a similar way to help them remember the correct gender.
Morrissey
What is it about this man’s voice that breaks my heart? Asks Stephen Metcalf in Slate.
Metcalf explains who Stephen Morrissey is:
Had Johnny Marr never knocked on Steven Morrissey’s door, Steven Morrissey would have made something of himself—a DIY brochurist for the local avant-garde?—but he probably would not have been a singer and definitely not a rock star. Marr was four years Morrissey’s junior and everything Morrissey wasn’t: musical, industrious, perseverant, shrewd. Above all, not being an egomaniac, he knew what a band needed other than himself. “I always had a comprehensive understanding of what it takes emotionally to be a really great singer,” he has said. “I always felt it was more than intellect, gimmicks, and stage presence.” Marr saw something in Morrissey that no one else had—a peculiar charisma that might yet transfer to the stage. So he visited Morrissey in his bedroom.
[...]
The word recurs frequently in his biography. Marr rescued Morrissey from his “lonely bedroom existence,” writes Paula Woods in an introduction to a collection of interviews. On the very entertaining Morrissey: From Where He Came to Where He Went, a pop journalist says, “The recyclings of his early infatuations and obsessions is the extension of the lonely kid in the bedroom. It gave him a kind of comfort as he went out into the world—somehow his bedroom was still with him.” Of his legendary debut on Top of the Pops, another journalist adds, “It’s almost as if you’re watching someone through a keyhole, doing this in front of their bedroom mirror.”
He was, as a musician, not important to the band, but this was not his role:
Predictably, Morrissey adopted the habits of the rock ‘n’ roll celebrity. He was tardy, capricious, and hostile to the press. The backlash against him, however, as a diva-vampire who fed on Marr’s superior talents, confuses two issues. In musical jargon, it’s true, Morrissey never woodshedded—he never submitted his talents to a term of excruciating refinement, as Dylan did on returning from Greenwich Village to Hibbing, as the Beatles famously did in Hamburg. But this does nothing to minimize Morrissey’s musical contribution to the Smiths, not only as a lyricist but as a singer. His technical prowess may have been minimal at first—limited to about “six notes” in the middle range, as one producer put it—but his powers of emotional insinuation were vast. These came not out of the closet, not out of the woodshed, but out of the bedroom.
Rapture Raptor
My friend Rachel sent me this vivid image from Rapture Ponies:
Jesus Riding a Dinosaur
motherfuckers
“Is some variant of motherfucker used all over the world?,” Nina Shen Rastogi in Slate asks:
Pretty much. While it’s not quite a universal insult, variations on the command to commit incest with one’s mother appear in every region of the globe. Anthropologists note that, across cultures, the most severe insults tend to involve a few basic themes: your opponent’s family, your opponent’s religion, sex, and scatology. Because motherfucker covers two of these topics—plus incest, a nearly global taboo—it’s a popular choice just about everywhere. In Mandarin Chinese alone, riffs on the basic phrase include Cao ni ma ge bi, meaning “fuck your mother’s cunt,” and Cao ni da ye, “fuck your elder uncle.” Given the Chinese culture of ancestor worship, Cao ni zu shong shi ba dai, or “fuck your ancestors of 18 generations,” may be the worst incest instruction of all.
Tilted Perspective of Mardi Gras
Over 300,000 people lined the route of this years Mardi Gras parade, which marched up Oxford and Flinders streets in Sydney’s inner-city Darlinghurst this Saturday.
If you were there on the night: I tried to capture as much as the event as possible. High quality digital still images are available from every frame of every movie – Please contact me via this form keithloutit.com/contact-keith/ if this is of interest, or if you have any questions about the film. Happy Mardi Gras!
Linux Porn: body paint edition
"Opps...I think you might have missed a spot on the chameleon"
MindFuck Movies
There’s a certain brand of movie that I most enjoy. Some people call them “Puzzle Movies.” Others call them “Brain Burners.” Each has, at some point or another, been referred to as “that flick I watched while I was baked out of my mind.”
The Morning News survey’s films that puzzle us:
I’m keen on watching The Dark City and finish David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which I’m currently watching.
Flannery O’Connor: a collection of facts
The Times Book Review has a wonderfully written piece on Flannery Connor:
Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After Kennedy’s assassination she said: “I am sad about the president. But I like the new one.” As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a cartoonist.
This line is great:
She read a lot of theology because she believed it made her writing bolder. When she went to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, she said, she “didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper.” Yet she quickly became a star there and “scared the boys to death with her irony,” as a teacher put it.
Hornby’s ‘Good’ Books
It can happen anywhere: a dinner table, a pub, a bus queue, a classroom, a bookshop. You strike up a conversation with someone you don’t know, and you’re getting on OK, and then suddenly, without warning, you hear the five words that mean the relationship has no future beyond the time it takes to say them: “I think you’ll like it.”
[...]
We are asked to believe, usually by critics, that the most important factor in our response to a book should be its objective quality – a good book is a good book – but we know that’s not true. Mood and taste are important, self-evidently, but mood and taste are formed by educational background, profession, health, amount of leisure time, marital status, state of marriage, gender (men don’t read much fiction, depressingly), age, age of children, relationships with children, and parents, and siblings, and, possibly, an unfortunate experience with Thomas Pynchon’s V as an overambitious and pretentious teenager. All these and thousands of others are governing factors, and many of them are wildly inconstant.
In addition to this thoughtfully equivocal definition of a good book, I’m looking forward to reading some of Hornby’s book suggestions.
I’ve also always have enjoyed his column in The Believer, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading”. Really, the way I blog (or the way I would like to blog) owes much to the rational and purpose of this column– reading a bunch of stuff and putting it together for other, anonymous people to read.
Watchmen: a preemptive review
I don’t read comics, but I try not to discount the form. I read Watchmen around 5 years ago at the behest of a friend, an avid comic book and graphic novel reader. I’ve not decided if I’ll see Watchmen, the movie: When I first saw a teaser for it, I felt disinterest, with a touch of disgust. But in thinking more about the film the other night, I remember reading the novel-bound edition of the comic over an evening with no breaks. It was the first time I truly appreciated the graphic novel form. I was also just emotionally involved in the story.
The series creator, Alan Moore , it is argued– and I just accept this valuation– its a master of the comic form. A craft that often remains just this, but with a touch like Moore’s becomes art. Of course, much can be said about the denigration of comics as an art form, just an one can point to the many great science fiction, mystery, and espionage writers that have been pigeonholed as genre fiction writers. Denigration of this other beast, the adaptation of comics to blockbuster films, however, may be too little.
I recently read a exposition on the act of adaptation by Salmun Rushdie, which lead me to think about Watchmen and comic-to-film adaptations in the first place. Of course, comic books are often adaptations of adaptations. This is sometimes the commercial reuse of intellectual property in the form of characters and stories; but there is also an mythological element in the reworking of superheroes and villains to square with contemporary issues. In the case of Moore’s watchmen, DC Comics made an acquisition from Charlatan Comics, a cast of characters. Moore was then hired to adapt these character’s for a DC series. He choose to take a group of status-quo super heroes and make them dysfunctional anti-heroes. As Grady Hendrix writes of the comic:
Watchmen made the point that superheroes, realistic or otherwise, were beside the point. Its costumed do-gooders are retired, impotent, or insane, and they generally do more harm than good [...] This [is a] surprising development, the comic reframed itself: Watchmen isn’t about crimefighters coming out of retirement and taking up their rightful mantles, but about how they never should have existed in the first place. The nuclear war they’re trying to prevent is almost entirely their fault in the first place, and the arms race that preceded it was accelerated by their mere existence.
Last summer’s comic blockbuster, The Dark Knight, also considered whether a non-super hero should retire. The comic book release of The Dark Knight was released at the same time as Watchmen, and the two works are interesting companions. They shared critical acclaim in the mid-Eighties– both perceived as revolutionary in artistic process and narrative. Also, they both take place– one figuratively– in New York city. The Gotham milieu says many more things about our current condition, about American fear and politics in an age of terrorism. And whereas the effete watchmen either become the literal tools of Richard Nixon or hang up their capes, its natural to feel, as many critics have argued, that Batman’s heroism against terrorism is apologetic for the policy’s of Dick Cheney and the Bush Department of Justice.*
The Dark Knight is an exception to movies derived from comics though– they generally stink. They stink for many reasons, but in part they stink because the format doesn’t allow for hero’s to be deconstructed, as is done in The Watchmen series and, too a smaller extent, in The Dark Knight. I expect the movie retelling of the story will try to, despite its grit and frame-by-frame loyalty to the original, recast the Watchmen as heroes (not that their story ends heroically). In the case of Watchmen, its doesn’t really seem to matter that the original work is masterpiece. As Dana Steven’s sumarizes, “the book’s spirit—its paranoia, its dark humor, and above all its bleak anti-triumphalism—has been squelched in the transition to a big-budget action epic.”
* I felt that this question in Christopher Nolan’s Batman was more provocative than allegorical. Thinking of its portrayal of torture and also a scene where the police, to their demise, neglect a suffering man because of his association with the Joker. (The Joker has given the man an implant of explosives.)
Some related readings:
