Our grandchildren aren’t stupid. Their mental equipment isn’t inferior to ours. They just live in a different world, one which no longer belongs to us even though we helped create it. It’s theirs now, and whatever we imagine, we’re no longer in any position to judge them. Likely they’ll be fine, but if they turn out not to be fine, it’s going to be very hard to show how listening to us would have made the slightest bit of difference.
Homages
If This Be Treason….
A meditation on Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia
Is the logic of capitalism the logic of the germ cell or the cancer cell? If it actually turns out to be both, what does that augur for our future?
Social democracy demands consensus. Fascism demands obedience. Neither has much respect for the richness of human intention.
We are a mercurial species. Cats are actually easier to herd than we are. Sooner or later, this drives the zealots, ideologues, and bureaucrats of every religion and ism around the bend. If they weren’t so vicious in their disappointments, they’d deserve our sympathy.
There are echoes of an eloquent despair in DeLong’s perceptions, something prophetic, something like an eternally acerbic Brechtian irony:
Wäre es da
—Bertolt Brecht, die Lösung
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?
Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
If in the end democracy isn’t robust enough to save us from the metastatic influence of 21st century technologies on our nastier impulses, what then? Even if human evolution were proceeding according to our fondest hopes, could it ever be quick enough to make Brecht’s tongue-in-cheek option a viable one? Clearly not.
I don’t care. I’ve just finished reading Slouching Towards Utopia, and I’m putting away my lantern. I’ve found an honest man. To return to Brecht again:
In den finsteren Zeiten
Wird da auch gesungen werden?
Da wird auch gesungen werden.
Von den finsteren Zeiten.In the dark times
—Bertolt Brecht, Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik
Will there also be singing?
There will also be singing.
About the dark times.
I’m Not As Smart As I Thought I Was Either
I feel about Elon Musk pretty much the same way the Salieri character felt about the Mozart character in Amadeus. Is this buffoon on Twitter really the guy who beat NASA at its own game, and on a shoestring, too, and almost single-handedly made electric vehicle propulsion for the 21st century a commonplace? Really? This is the guy?
Yeah, this is the guy. The Universe may not care very much about us, even less about our categories, but it does have a sense of humor, and it does deserve respect, even when—especially when—it appears to mock our most cherished pretensions….
Il Miglior Fabbro
Today in the Guardian, a number of Bob Dylan’s fellow musicians contributed to a celebration of his 80th birthday by naming their favorite Dylan songs, and commenting on their choices.
In her comments, Gillian Welch said this:
I bought my first Dylan record – The Times They Are a-Changing [1964] – when I was 17, but to experience those early records in real time as he was releasing them must have been like being around when Shakespeare was creating new plays.
Yes. It was like that. Exactly like that. Unexpected. Miraculous.
Brecht in the 21st Century*
Nur wer im Wolfstand lebt, lebt angenehm.
Years ago, when I first fell in love with a scratchy early recording of die Dreigroschenoper, I misheard the famous punchline from die Ballade vom angenehmen Leben (The Ballad of the Comfortable Life), which actually goes Nur wer im Wohlstand lebt, lebt angenehm.
The original line, which, translated into English means something like “Only he who is well-off can live a comfortable life,” came, in my misheard version, to mean something like “Only he who adopts the habits of a predator can live a comfortable life.”
When I discovered my mistake, my first take was, “God, how embarrassing,” and my second, which cheered me up a little, was “Hey, I just made my first pun in German.” (A friend of mine, who’d been partially deaf from birth, once confessed to me that he’d learned early on that when he misheard something in a social situation, being credited with a clever pun was much more to his advantage than being considered slow-witted. I now knew exactly what he’d meant.)
Brecht’s original line represented a very understandable attitude for anyone, let alone a Marxist, witnessing the horrors of the German 1920’s, but I have to wonder if he might not also have approved of my corrupted version had he been confronted with the viciousness of 21st century neoliberalism in the United States, or the schwarze Null fetishism of Wolfgang Schäuble and the CDU in the reunified Germany of today. With all due respect to the genius of the original, I’d like to think so….
*Apologies to any native German speakers who might be reading this, der Wolfstand not being a genuine German word, as far as I know, I have no idea what anyone born into the language would make of my accidental corruption of Brecht’s famous line. All I know is that it’s stuck with me all these years as somehow being even more Brechtian than the original. This is blasphemy, or at least lèse majesté, I admit, but I mean well….
Cantabile
Since I first heard them almost sixty years ago, J.S. Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello have never left me. Over the intervening decades, I’ve listened to I don’t know how many recordings of them — by Casals, Fournier, du Pré, Rostropovich, Ma — and now that the Internet has finally delivered us up to the celestial jukebox as promised, hardly a year goes by without some new rendition to attend to.
This is a profound thing, an almost too good to be true thing. Play these at Rush Limbaugh’s funeral, I find myself thinking, and the world, for a moment at least, would be a better place.
Such things don’t happen, not in the public space we’re compelled to share with the vengeful, but in private we can reflect on what it is that makes us compassionate even when we know the worst about ourselves. For those private moments, I can think of no better soundtrack than these genuinely sublime compositions of Bach’s, and no better argument for their right to be called that than Yo-Yo Ma’s latest recording of them.
His phrasing here is revelatory, the dynamic range astonishing, the pacing as intense and as variable as one imagines Bach must have heard it in his own inner ear. There are bones and sinews in these performances, and no apologies. As the Italians say, they sing — so much so that I find myself wondering if I’ve ever before heard these pieces played this well, this architecturally. Even Ma’s own earlier recordings of them seem somehow less forceful, less transparent. This is very high art indeed, and I for one am grateful for it.
The People, Yes….
Given a lemon, the real American makes lemonade
21st Century Human Interface Design
Modularity, not convergence, is the future. There’s not going to be any other foreseeable way, short of magic, to approach the ideal state of computing hardware design, in which the use case alone determines the form factor. If you have the money to acquire its full arsenal of devices, Apple currently comes closer to this ideal than anyone else, Microsoft included.
In this future, it’s not going to matter where data is stored. So long as every device granted access to a unit of data is seeing the same instance of it, with both security and synchronization routinely embedded in every transaction, and therefore rendered trivial to the user, it won’t matter at any given moment where it is stored. Again, Apple gets this better than anyone else, even when its execution has been less than ideal. That’s why its somewhat premature effort to do away with files and file systems on the iPad will ultimately prove to be the right way to go. Files as a concept are obsolete. Computing devices understand this. Human beings do not. Handicapped by our reliance on the conceptual commonplaces of the past, we haven’t yet figured out what the ideal relationship should be between the tangible and the virtual, but we will. We’ll have to.
Ambidexterity is the new black. Trackpad, touchscreen, or mouse? Keyboard, stylus, or voice? Why not all at once? An embarrassment of riches ought to be the goal here. On our most treasured devices, there’ll always be at least three or four ways of doing anything, no matter where our hands are, or our eyes. We should be thinking musical instruments, not typewriters; collages, not spreadsheets, and we should try to keep in mind that whatever advances are made in the underlying technologies, imagination is still the most formidable aspect of the human side of the human/computer interface. Steve Jobs understood this, which is undoubtedly why Apple still understands it today, and why I think they’re very likely to remain the most reliable overall steward of human interface design and development as the 21st Century progresses.
Interstate 40
For Charles Bukowski
You already have your plans
your image of the women coming to you
blond
and used to the water
you smell salt in the air
and money
when you close your eyes
and you decide to come
You pack your toothbrush
you try it on your friends
you stop for cigarettes in a gas station
And it takes you coming out again
the wind
the way the trucks pass
I think how you stand there
feeling for your wallet or your breathing
striking a light then
inhaling
as you step down off the curb
They do it the same way in the movies
first with the wind
and then
a Greyhound sign
a kid with a botched haircut
and a dufflebag maybe
two girls seen only once
laughing and turning away
outside the terminal
Inside
a drunk and his paper suitcase
get tagged and separated
one ticket apiece
someone puts his last nickel
in the pinball machine
They get it right
the producer
the director
thin as it is and sad as it is
they get it right
And we sit there
watching the places we start from
the places we wind up in
sooner or later
pass over us
and no one blinks
no one wakes up afterwards
Everyone but everyone
a moviegoer
Even the drunk great once
at following the hero and the waving grass
at stepping over the derelict
lightly
with the rest of us
Before the bottle took him
and the fog inside him rose
and left him a six-part
ticket to the coast
and forty maybe fifty cents
The westbound express
is now boarding passengers
at gate five
Places everyone
It was
just like in the movies
the way I remember it
There was hardly anything
left of him then
except for the eyes
except for the way he sat there
with the light on him
looking out
and me across the aisle the whole time
thinking
“It all comes easy to him
the storefronts and railroad crossings here
the lumber yards
car bodies
bars
it all comes easy”
But for me
this is how it is in the towns
The children run
and you pass them
At the crossroads
faces
women’s faces most of them
turning away from you
inside the glass
outside the glass
the same
I have never found it easy
I find it the way it is
the land like a flatiron there to here
the towns small
and broken at the hinges
and wind
and too much light
all of it out of our reach now anyway
no matter what my friends tell me
who rub their hands together
and the dust escapes them
who walk through looking at scenery
No
I have no respect for the land I think
I think of you
shielding your eyes when you travel
the sun at noon
standing on the broken ridgelines
“Half chalk” you think
“half fire
standing like that…”
But you go on following electric wires
letting your eyes glaze
your weight
shift a little
and when the weather changes
you watch the Indian beside you
the one with the crewcut and bow tie
fold his hands
He’s made the trip before
this Indian
or his uncle has
or his sister
Forgetting the hawk
the shadow where their horses go to water
forgetting the slap of the wind
and the broken rock standing like that
they pack overnight
and make their way here with you
Here
they all come here to California
where everything
stays close to the heart
everything works
so they think
and they come
I know the way they come to it finally
leaving the smell of sweat and alcohol behind
the uneasy breathing
They roll their magazines
and step down blinking
in their new sunglasses
they get picked up
or walk toward town against the wind
in pairs
alone
And when I look again
cypresses and redwoods cover them
girls with copper earrings
lemon groves
earthquakes
fire in the hills
money
(if they’re lucky)
money
I know
I have been here ten years now
doing what they all do when they need to eat
or stop for a smoke
or be remembered
I check the mail
put the water on for coffee
find my way downtown
I come home at night
and open up my curtains over
California palm trees
California-loving-the-water
“And when it’s like this”
I think
“I could come to it still
the way they do
the way you do
all heart and teeth”
But after ten years
the suntan oil and chlorine and success
run in me like a river
cheap thrills cheap thrills on signs
burning under the offramps
acres of carpeted hallways
doors with numbers on them
and regret
something like regret always part of it
come morning
It weighs too much with me
the traffic and the leaden air
love
the way my neighbors work at it upstairs
with the lights on and the TV going
all this time
and it never changes
There’s a swimming pool in Burbank
like they say
a yacht
a white sand beach in Venice
lettuce in the desert
And in Hollywood a man I admire
stumbles in his bedroom
Drunk
undoubtedly drunk again
and I think
“Night
and his arms around it
night
and the wind in it
making something for his middle age and mine”
while people pull up in their cars outside
and park
and walk away
while I sit up half the night
with a light on still
and curtains blowing
listening to the palms outside my window
bend and rattle
and it weighs with me
It weighs with me
exactly
the way you’d imagine
In Memoriam 李文亮 (Lǐ Wénliàng)
He who holds the firewood for the masses is the one who freezes to death in wind and snow.
慕容 雪村 (Mùróng Xuěcūn)