I love the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles but, generally speaking, I think it’s pretty underappreciated. Sure, people know it. They recognize it, it’s generated it’s share  of buzz (let’s be honest, mostly not very positive). It has won the hearts of post-modernists and ironic architecture-appreciating hipsters during its various oscillations on the so-wacky-it’s-cool spectrum. But I think where it really earns the most points is in its sheer lack of apology or regret.

In April of 2006, initial renderings were released of Cesar Pelli’s third installment of the Pacific Design Center. The bright red building, which resembles a Star Wars ship going into hyperspace in freeze frame (or a 21st century Titanic ready to fight the icebergs back), will complete construction in 2009 and follows its equally brilliant predecessors with as much eyebrow-raising and eye-catching gusto, which is no small feat.

The first iteration of the Pacific Design Center was completed in 1975. It was, and remains, enormous at 245 feet wide by 530 feet long with over 750,000 square feet over seven stories. There are bigger buildings out there, certainly, but few in Los Angeles and certainly fewer in West Hollywood. The building wears a skin of ultra-reflective royal blue glass—most of which lets little light into the interior—and its shape has been described as a blow-up of an architectural molding. Given its scale, shape, color, and context, the building elicited its share of derision from local citizens, critics, and vocal enthusiasts alike. Los Angeles Times critic John Pastier—a figure most notable for getting fired after a series of columns criticized development in which the paper had political and financial interest—equated the building with a whale, a nickname which it has since held.

While perhaps not the most graceful or popular building on the block, the design center held its ground and stayed with little apology. So little, in fact, that in 1988 a second building called “Center Green” opened. Though smaller, at 450,000 square feet, the new building was equally noteworthy for its bold and colorful design—this time a deep forest green and dotted with pixel-like square windows of transparent glass. Its general aesthetic was in keeping with the original but its form and structure indicated a significant evolution of Pelli’s own work and reflecting his departure from Gruen Associates, where he left in 1976 to form his eponymous firm. Center Green blends the corporate orthogonality and rigid geometries of his world financial center (completed 1988) with the vocabulary of the earlier building.

Twenty-one years after the second the third should be completed. Given its site in L.A., one would imagine that this is the final leg of the trilogy. And like genre films, the Pacific Design Center has provided a fantastic allegory of architecture’s own development over the past three decades. By working in the same “style” of bright colors and loud geometric expressions (all three buildings don’t stray far from the exclamation point as their preferred punctuation) but with significant variation in design, Pelli has, with tremendous success, given us a history to experience physically and a narrative to hold on to.

And that’s no small feat in architecture, a profession plagued by apologies and regret. Rather than celebrating the brutalism of the 1960s or the corporatism of the 1970s and 80s, we are apologizing and trying to erase them. Boston’s City Hall, finished in 1968 by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles and one of my favorite buildings, is under threat because it doesn’t project the right image of what we want city hall to look like. We shouldn’t be allowed to revise history and ignore that there was a moment during which this is what our perception of city hall was.

The Pacific Design Center stayed against many odds, however. It was never hidden and never apologized for. It was instead expanded. Twice. It not only represents a moment in history—and its place in L.A.’s urban design history is important as it represented, against the wishes of Tom Bradley’s coalition for Downtown development, the continued economic success of the West side business district—but three distinct moments interwoven in a story that centers on one architect, and one vision spread over both his and his profession’s shifting ideologies.

Over the last few years, there has been a tremendous increase in global interest in biofuels, a term that refers, broadly, to transportation fuels derived from biomass.  Bill Gates, Richard Branson, British Petroleum, General Motors, most giant food companies, and countless other people and institutions haves dabbled in these fuels lately.

There is an enormous amount of news reports, analysis, discussion and media attention given to biofuels.  One is first struck by the incredible variety of opinions expressed on the matter; from over the top excitement hailing biofuels as the answer to all of the world’s environmental, economic, social and political problems, to severe criticism that views biofuels as an ultimate evil that will have a profoundly negative impact on forestation, food supply, poor-country economics and just about everything else.

I have been researching this topic for a while, and will attempt to use this column to lay out the (very rough) outlines of the current state of thinking on biofuels—this is, more or less, the local-bar-discussion version of my knowledge of biofuels.  I will attempt to provide a short (vastly over-generalized) assessment of the scientific literature on the issue, highlight future possibilities, and discuss how government policy is probably playing a negative role in this process—at least in two specific cases.

The biggest question in biofuels circles for the last few years has been concerning whether they are efficient or not (meaning: do they reduce our use of fossil fuels or use up more energy in their production than they give out when they are burned) and about what their environmental impacts might be.  Dozens—if not hundreds—of studies have been done to assess these two questions and have arrived at conclusions so contradictory they may as well have been totally random guesses by children.  I will not list those studies and attempt to critique them all, but will outline what I view as the conclusions drawn from assessing the most widely accepted and scrutinized results, dividing them by the type of biofuel assessed:

Corn ethanol seems to be a bad unsustainable idea which is only alive thanks to very generous government subsidies in America, which are estimated to be around a mind-boggling $1/gallon, as well as import tariffs that prevent ethanol from other countries from competing with American ethanol.  Environmentally, corn ethanol doesn’t seem to offer many benefits, but producing, manufacturing and distributing it may be more harmful to the environment than just using regular oil. Note that these results will probably not change if the price of oil goes up: oil itself, and many other fossil fuels, are used extensively to produce corn ethanol and a rise in their price will also increase the cost of producing corn ethanol, raising its price as well.  The survival of this brand of ethanol is almost exclusively due to the power of the farming lobby, and other special interest groups in America who ensure all the generous subsidies, as well as the fact that Iowa, the country’s main producer of corn is the first US state to hold Presidential primaries, making politicians eager to please its corn farmers for votes.

Sugarcane ethanol, which is mainly produced in Brazil, does seem to be a good idea that everyone is happy to endorse: it is efficient and it reduces CO₂ emissions.  However, most of the studies done on sugarcane are based on Brazilian production, and it is unlikely that conditions would be as favorable in other countries.  Secondly, most of the analysis of Brazilian sugarcane ignores fundamentally important issues: whether sugar cane replaces forests, indirectly replaces forests by displacing other crops which then displace forests, and whether its impact through land use change poses significant environmental damage. This will become a more important question with time as sugarcane production increases and encroaches on more and more land.

Cellulosic ethanol is to biofuels what Barack Obama is often portrayed as being to Democrats: the new shining hope that will fix everything and solve everyone’s problems.  Needless to say, there is cause for caution in both cases.  Cellulosic (often referred to as Second Generation) biofuels will mark a revolutionary way in producing biofuels, with whose technical details I will not bother for this piece. Everyone seems to agree it will be more efficient, cleaner, and able to produce much larger quantities of fuel; yet no one has perfected the industrial process that will be able to produce it en masse, and therefore, any estimates on its efficiency and environmental impact remain, until now, tenuous.  With enormous difficulties in measuring the environmental impacts of biofuels that have been produced for decades, it might be a tad over-optimistic to take at face value any estimates of the efficiency and impact of something that hasn’t been produced yet; similar, perhaps, to measuring the fuel-efficiency of the Flying Ferrari from your childhood dreams. I remain pretty skeptical about it until I see some more concrete evidence.

Biodiesel (usually produced from palm oil, soybean, jatropha or rapeseed) seems like a good idea initially, if one were to look at reduction in Carbon emissions and a basic energy balance. However, on closer inspection, one finds that it is usually a terrible environmental disaster in the making.  Nitrogen-based emissions, which also have a large impact on global warming, are produced at very high rates in biodiesel production. Further, in many locations where biodiesel is produced, it has caused massive deforestation, soil damage, environmental degradation, and species extinction. This remains the least researched of the biofuels, and new techniques and plant feedstocks are proposed every day, meaning that there might be possibilities for better applications of it.

It is important to note that these studies are inherently marred with enormous problems that might turn a skeptic away from even bothering with their results at all. Many of these studies have a bad methodology and employ some really egregious assumptions about certain parameters.  There is a long debate about what parameters are to be included, and how they are measured. Yet, even if one were to somehow overcome these methodological problems and find the “best” papers employing the most impeccable methodology, problems persist.  Even the “best” of these studies still employ a large number of assumptions and predictions of factors which are almost impossible to predict.  Everything from the future prices of oil, to the price of cattle feed to demand for oil and price of land is factored into these models, and extrapolated into the future with the swaggering certainty of the captain of the Titanic on the eve of its maiden voyage from Southampton.

Here, one could ask a very pertinent question: Why bother attempting to answer such difficult and laborious questions in universities and think-tanks and research centers?  The market system on its own can make decisions for us without someone anointing themselves as an all-knowing prescient central planner ready to predict for us everything from the price of oil to demand for cattle feed in 2030, a quest in which they will invariably fail.

Without subsidies, farmers will only produce what is economically efficient, and everyone will be better off, right? Not exactly.  The reason this wouldn’t really work in the case of biofuels (and in many cases related to environmental issues) is that the market can not (at least in its current state) factor in the all-important issues of environmental costs and benefits.  Biofuels would compete with oil purely on technical and economic grounds, and the issue of the environment will not factor in the market-decisions of rational actors in any way. This will ignore the environmental damage and produce an incentive to over-exploit fuels that would be harmful to the environment.

Here one would hope for public policy to attempt to make things better, or at least not make things worse.  A reasonable course of action would consider funding research into biofuels, since if some of their benefits do materialize, a good argument could be made that these benefits are public goods for which subsidy might be appropriate.  Another avenue would be to set the regulatory and economic framework for the fuel market to take into account the environmental benefits and damages accruing from biofuels to assure an incentive for producing the cleanest and most economic forms of fuel.

Unfortunately, public policy seems to be doing the exact opposite: aggravating all the bad aspects of biofuels production and providing incentives for everything but good energy and environmental policy.  There are two main policies that I refer to here, and they are common in America and Europe: the subsidizing of biofuel production and the issuing of mandates for a certain percentage of biofuels to be used in transportation fuels.

When production of biofuels is subsidized, governments are practically taking a product which the markets says is inefficient and forcing its production, without much knowledge of whether this increase does indeed have any benefits worth subsidizing, and without even a clear knowledge of whether this subsidy will lead to an incentive to innovate better biofuels, or to promote lethargy among producers whose incentive shifts to lobbying for more subsidies rather than innovation.

But perhaps what is more egregious than subsidies are the mandates forcing a certain level of biofuels to be blended in with regular fuel.  The most important of these regulations is the EU directive stipulating a 5.75% share of biofuels in transport fuels by 2010. What this effectively does is encourage the production of any type of biodiesel worldwide to meet the needs of the EU market, with total disregard to their environmental impact.  As European demand for biodiesel sky-rockets, the production of the dirtiest and most polluting biodiesel in the world is encouraged, along with all that that entails in deforestation, emissions, and environmental destruction.  This is most pronounced in Indonesia and Malaysia, where Orangutans are facing a real threat of extinction from encroaching palm oil farming for biodiesel.  The EU will be reducing CO2 emissions coming out of its own cars, but in exchange, probably increasing emissions in other places that supply the biofuels as well increasing deforestation and harming ecosystems.

The incentives from such policies are a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences, and of how government can so often make things worse when attempting to make them better.  The original goal of these policies, addressing global warming and environmental damage, has been replaced with the tool that was supposed to address them: biofuels.  These laws have converted the means into the ends, and while concentrating on producing legislation that convinces voters that the government is “doing something” about global warming, are instead possibly producing more global and far-reaching damage to the environment.

Far better for all involved (except the producers benefiting from subsidies) would be for governments to get out of subsidizing production and placing mandates, but instead make sure that the market for all fuels internalizes the costs of the environmental damage that they produce.  This would provide actors in the global fuel marketplace with the incentive to look for the fuels most efficient economically and environmentally, and allow the market and the collective wisdom of millions of decision makers to arrive at the best outcome.  The most obvious way of doing this would be to press ahead with plans for a global market for carbon emissions.

When that happens, maybe biofuels will really turn out to be the panacea that will save humanity, or maybe we will find out that they are a completely pointless, expensive and counter-productive invention and that we would all be better off utilizing other forms of energy.  It is impossible to be able to answer this question now, no matter how good the data and the methodology employed.  We are much better off remaining agnostic and skeptical; and working to ensure that a system exists that allows the market itself to answer this question clearly.

It is important to note, however, that a lot of the environmental damage that comes from biofuels’ (and all other fuels’) production is not restricted to carbon emissions, but also extends to issues of biodiversity, water pollution, habitat destruction, air pollution, and countless other issues, all of which would not be captured in a market for Carbon.  Addressing these issues is no mean feat, but would probably be best achieved through mechanisms that internalize the price of positive and negative externalities into production, allowing the market to decide on what is economically, socially and environmentally optimal.

Two stupid wars and no new racial slurs; no caricature of our enemies to destroy reluctantly, decisively, with a passing smile of satisfaction; no black toothed turban wearing Shiite-Sunni-Kurdish amalgam, a bomb belt so naturally on his waist it looks fashionable, to scare our children with; no super bad leader for only the most perverted boy to play during backyard battle reenactments; no one for the cab driver of yore to curse. Another George Bush failure? Of course my imperialist Yankee satanist reader. By taking on terror! instead of a peoples, our strain of retarded president has robbed the English language of the easily siphoned and spread froth at the top of war time rhetoric that makes killing other humans easy to accept.

I have heard, never convincingly, “towel head”, “a-rab”, the significantly more insulting to our own intelligence “sand coon”. None fits as snuggly, gives that reassuring condom-just-on snap of our earlier enemies: the japs and krauts, charlie and the evil empire, the almost fifty years of reds, commies and the effeminate pinkos. In 2002, left uncomfortable by the wet kiss on the cheek of a plea to humanism we took on France, the easiest target of all. In New York, normally a tan-o-rama of liberal rays, I witnessed adults pouring French wine into a sewer grate across the street from the Guggenheim (fine looking stuff too, and my baster at my mother’s). Back then my job took me to the courts downtown and few clerks’ yellow walls did not have the New York Post cover with Osama bin Laden’s picture bracketed in old Western style font by “wanted dead or alive” the “alive” forever sharpied out.

Osama bin Laden, bearded, making pronouncements and mixtapes from caves, himself the entire cassette tape market, shuffled out of a comic book, the best bad guy since Hitler and, of course, we did not catch him and probably never will and he might be dead and lives on anyway like the lifelong scar from a drunken fight we should have won and do not want to talk about. Moktada al-Sadr is even more painless to make a caricature of. His teeth are very nasty. He is turbaned and has his own evil private army. Where bin Laden is musing and sedated, al-Sadr is angry and brutish. But, al-Sadr is a weight watchers slice in the shit pie eating contest for one we were dared into. We cannot point to him anymore than we can the ambulance chasers and salesmen types of the Iraqi government or the faceless heads of terrorist splinter groups.

Six years of fighting abstraction has also robbed us of the geography lesson war previously afforded, the latitudinal lines and cities with strange names that become part of our language. We have no new glorious history lesson in the making pulling at the rope through our national identity, coated in victories, taught with measured rightness.

We ignore the din increasing in size and volume: Muslims pointing to baroque Zionist conspiracies, Israelis certain of genetic Arab flaws, Russians kicking Uzbek produce vendors out of Moscow, the 700,000 Mugabe displaced out of Zimbabwe’s capitol to “drive out trash”, every new academic who really believes that the holocaust did not happen, the thousand other caricatures that make what almost all deplore bearable to societies, all united by one image of Americans as belligerent fools, destructively and begrudgingly on their way out.

Talking to people of different opinions is nice, but equally essential to a democracy is the right to stand across from people you disagree with and scream at them and call them names with few repercussions beyond a bruise to the ego from a well placed quip, and with the expectation that one’s earnest screaming, if loud and persuasive enough, can have an impact. Most Americans are privileged enough that the majority of their opinions are formed from hypothetical scenarios. (My opposition to the death penalty does not answer the question supporters of it often ask, “if someone killed your family, wouldn’t you want that person to be killed too?” because no one in my family, or most Americans families, has been murdered.) With all the post 9/11 flags and pro-USA graffiti on overpasses, I figured a couple of years of self-assured slurring was inevitable. Few protests have stopped the start of a war, but at least I could assume my place across from the kind of aggression I believe foolish to passionately bleed my heart out, to yell and try to swing the rightness in question of the war in my direction.

Warmongering months passed. I had less and less to say. The flag waving reached a stasis. A war that cannot be won or stopped, that is not engaging or inspiring, hatched, fledged and flown by crazy men, has robbed all sides of meaningful convictions (this essay too has a place in the heap of irrelevance). Walmart sized generalizations about Muslims only muddle and distract. Soldiers and soldiers’ families suffer. We stare at inkblots of our own silhouettes, saying, “I don’t know. A dinghy? You tell me.”

A side point, connected. Please watch the following trailer for the upcoming fourth installment of Rambo. A quick synopsis for those who cannot watch the clip follows.

John Rambo is living on his own in Bangkok (good place to typecast a 16-year-old boy, girl or ladyboy into the imagination), monk-like, salvaging PT boats and tanks to turn to scrap metal. A missionary group he escorts up river, which includes a hot blond, is heading into Burma to save the Karen people from genocide. The missionary group is captured by Burmese soldiers. Rambo goes in to save them and kills a whole lot, I mean seriously a whole lot, of Burmese because, as he puts it, “when your pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing.” For those who are unsure from the clip he does not punch that guy’s head off, he has a knife, but it looks like he punches the head off. Rambo and the blond are the only ones to make it out, end of story.

The movie, despite youtube member skinheadben’s assertion that, “this is what America needs . . . knife decapitating action [to] put a little steal in hippies spine,” begs the question valtheon asks, “what’s Rambo doing all the way over there? He should be in Iraq”. He adds, I am not sure what he means, “lol”. Aoenflux67, a prolific Amazon reviewer of ancient historical fantasy books, answers, “too politically incorrect for Hollywood wussies to consider Iraq now. Burma only scrapes in because no one cares about it.” Too true, Mr. or Ms. Flux67. Even Rambo, long disturbing PSA for war time PTSD, who went into Vietnam to save POWs and to Afghanistan to help the same men who became the Taliban, would not know who to fight, whose throat to rip with his hands, which men to turn to sauce from the close range of a 50-something caliber machine gun. Too bad, some could have used him.

(The movie, in a nod to the times we live in, does feature a mercenary who was a marine that completed three tours of Iraq. He is black and dies swiftly.)

Farrokh Bulsara was born in 1946 in the British colony of Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). His parents were Zoroastrians (Parsis) from India. As a boy he was sent back to India to attend boarding school in Bombay. He did very well in studies, was a competitive boxer, and also learned to play the piano–even participating in a 5-person band called The Hectics. He graduated from St. Mary’s High School, and then moved to England where he obtained a degree in Art and Graphic Design from Ealing Art College. In 1970 he joined a failing rock band in London named Smile when their lead singer quit, renaming the band in the process.

I first encountered his music when I happened to move from Pakistan to the United States in September of 1975 at age 11 for almost two years, and immediately upon my arrival was completely taken, as was all of America and much of the rest of the world at the time, by a song that Bulsara wrote and sang with his rock group. Interestingly, and though I did not know this until recently, among his important musical influences, Bulsara has cited the legendary Bollywood playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. My own infatuation with Bulsara and his music has well-outlasted his tragic death of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 45, and I remain, like many others, including, of course, Wayne and Garth, a lifelong devotee. You probably know Bulsara better as Freddie Mercury (recently voted, once again, the best rock singer of all time). The name he gave his band was Queen. And the 1975 song I mention above is, of course, “Bohemian Rhapsody” (recently voted again: best rock song of all time).

Okay, before anything else, just watch and listen to this:

While writing this short tribute I listened to many Queen songs turned up very loud on my quite powerful sound system (to the chagrin of my thin-walled upper-west-side-of-Manhattan neighbors), and as I was listening to this live version of “Under Pressure,” I found myself suddenly and shockingly but not completely unpleasantly reconnected with the remaining hormone-drenched vestiges of my teenage self, standing up (ridiculously alone!) in my living room to accompany Brian May with a spastic air guitar, then getting more and more emotional at the mostly-inscrutable-yet-movingly-poetic lyrics, until the unbearable and insane buildup when Freddie is singing “Insanity laughs, under pressure we’re breakin’…” and then by the time, a second later, when he sings “Can’t we give ourselves one more chance… Why can’t we give love that one more chance… Why can’t we give love… give love… give love… give love… give love… give love… give love… give love… give love,” I felt like I was in a trance. If you don’t believe me, try hooking up your computer to a decent sound system, and then just sit there and play the song!

By the way, during an early Queen concert Freddie’s mic stand broke in half and he continued carrying the broken half around. Later, this became a trademark style of his.

Among other things, Queen were a particularly well-educated rock band: all four members held college degrees, and as we reported here, Brian May recently turned in a Ph.D. dissertation at Imperial College in astrophysics. He defends it on August 23rd.

Freddie Mercury displayed an energy and dynamism and theatricality and showmanship in live performances which is truly awesome. Queen were the most important forerunner (and later practioners) of stadium rock, and Freddie Mercury actively engaged even large audiences and often made them participants in the music. The a capella playful vocal beginning of the video above reminds me of the immensely talented Pakistani vocalist and qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who like our friend Freddie had immense vocal range and liked just playing around with his amazing voice–just because he could. Queen taylored some of their music for large stadiums, hence it is not surprising that some of their songs (“We Will Rock You,” “We Are the Champions”) have turned into worldwide sports anthems. This is from the Live Aid concert in 1985:

Freddie mercury and Montserrat Caballé live:

And, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody:

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!