Julia is a bright-eyed girl of 14, with shoulder-length chestnut-brown hair and a winsome smile. One recent July morning, she, along with her 16 year-old sister Jane, drive into downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, in their father’s battered F-150 pick-up truck, on their way to fulfilling a dream. She pulls a damp wad of ten- and twenty-dollar bills from the pocket of her jeans, carefully saved from a weekly allowance and regular babysitting jobs. “I’ve been working for this almost a whole year,” she says excitedly, as Jane rolls her eyes in the driver’s seat. “But I’ve wanted it a lot longer–like, since two years ago, when Jane got hers done.” When they reach the corner of Benmont Avenue and Fifth, they pull into a metered parking space and walk the remaining two blocks to Rickys Tattoos, a grimy storefront parlor on the main drag of this sleepy town. Julia is so thrilled she can barely keep herself to a measured pace, which she must do if she doesn’t want to leave her sister struggling alone on the sidewalk. Jane walks with a pronounced limp. “Come on, Jane,” she cries, bouncing on the pavement, half a block ahead. “We’re almost there.” Jane rolls her eyes again, then turns to me and confides, with charming sympathy she conceals from her younger sister, “I was totally just as excited as she is. It’s, like, a really big day for her.”

Jane and Julia are but two of the many thousands caught up in what is fast becoming a fashion craze among American teen-age girls. It’s called “crippin,” and among the few sociologists and psychologists fully versed in the practice, it is one of the more worrisome new developments in a culture of low self-esteem, best characterized by drug and alcohol abuse and rampant sexual promiscuity. Liz Harmon, a developmental psychologist at the University of Rhode Island, who is among the foremost authorities on crippin, is unsurprised at the speed with which American girls are submitting themselves to the quasi-medical procedure. “It’s really the next logical step, isn’t it?” she says. “With the ubiquity of tattoos, and after piercings have become practically de rigueur, why not crippin too? It was right around the corner, but still nobody saw it coming.” She sighs with a depth of fatigue one might expect from someone who makes her living studying the ways of American teendom. “I think nobody really wanted to see it coming: That’s how disturbing it is.” But opinion is not monolithic on the subject. Jack Stiles, a sociologist at UCLA, says the widespread concern is overblown. “Look, it’s difficult to understand, without a doubt, but is there anything about growing up in America that isn’t? These girls aren’t doing long-term harm to their bodies, at least nothing that isn’t superficial. The fact is, much like tattooing, it’s a reversible procedure. Expensive? Sure. Painful? Absolutely. But it’s a correctable thing, and if it answers a psychological need, then maybe we should be focusing on that. Maybe we shouldn’t be marginalizing these gals for just trying to fit in.”

Ronnie Jendick’s left arm is covered with tattoos: a naked woman, Chinese characters, complex circular designs of what looks like barbed wire. He lifts his shirt and points proudly to his ample belly, to a fierce-looking eagle whose wings span a rippling American flag. “Took two weeks for this one,” he says enthusiastically, “and painful as hell. Belly flesh? That’s tender shit, got to be honest. But it was worth it.” Ronnie is the proprietor of Rickys Tattoos. “I bought it a few years ago. Dirt cheap, too.” When asked about the name on the hand-painted sign out front, he says, “Ricky? Croaked on his bike.” He makes a dispiriting sound through the baffle of his thick lips. “Totaled, man. It was ugly. Semi behind him sort of finished him off for good. But it was quick, though. Definitely not the worst way to go out, you know?” He crosses himself in the Catholic style. Ronnie leads me to a back room, the “fracking room,” as he calls it, behind the main floor of his establishment, where body art is commissioned and performed. “This is it, man. I got the chair from some dentist across the street a couple years ago. He was retiring, wanted five hundred for it, but I talked him down. It was pretty easy to modify. I got the leg irons off this freaky sadist dude I know–traded for some body work.” The chair is of the normal variety–red pleather cushioning, a head rest, a welter of hinged metal limbs coming out from both sides, most of them unused in its new function. What distinguishes this chair from one you might find in any dentist’s office are the leg clamps, two on each side, rust eating away at their metal bindings.

The procedure is a simple one, but that simplicity hasn’t stopped sixteen states from outlawing it. Commonly called “fracking,” which is short for fracturing, Ronnie is willing to describe it only because Vermont’s legislature is famously reluctant to curtail the freedoms of its citizenry. “Those laws are about the anesthetic, not the procedure, ’cause they couldn’t even outlaw the procedure, you know. But I bet they tried.” The anesthetic is local, but nonetheless potentially dangerous, and its administration is usually subject to state licensing. Ronnie himself is not licensed, as is the case with most frackers, and so fracking is often performed at night, after normal business hours, in back rooms similar to the one at Rickys Tattoos. He brandishes a large hammer, larger than one you’re likely to find in the local hardware store, and equipped with a narrow, clawless head. “Ready?” He swings it with startling force. “See, you got to come down real hard to get it done right. That little head? It concentrates the force. You better know what you’re doing though, or there’s some serious damage. Shut your ass down quick if you’re not careful.” He mimes the striking procedure again. “I make a little target with a laundry pen, a little x, right there on the leg. It’s the fibula you want, but it’s easy to miss. You crack the tibia instead, you’re screwed.” At the sound of this reporter’s uneasy laugh, Ronnie asks, “You want to hop in, have a try? Give you a special discount.”

There is a distinct look of anxiety on Julia’s face as Ronnie calls her into the back of the store. Jane, who is examining tattoo samples, encourages her. “Let’s go, Jules. We gotta get back by four, and you’re gonna have to sit around for an hour afterwards. Let’s go.” Julia has consented to the presence of an observer, and we walk back to the fracking room together. Trembling, she gets into the chair, and Ronnie locks the clamps around the ankle and knee of both her legs, even though only the right will be fracked today. “Keeps ’em still,” he says by way of explanation. He pulls out a large hypodermic needle, the sight of which elicits a cry of fear from the 14 year-old girl. “Don’t you worry, little honey,” says Ronnie. “I know just what I’m doing.” After injecting the anesthetic and giving it some time to take effect, Ronnie tests Julia’s responsiveness with a few mild taps of the hammer. “You feeling that?” Julia grins up at him from the chair and says, “I’m ready.” With a single fearsome blow, Ronnie fracks Julia’s right leg. The resultant cracking noise is surprisingly sharp and clean, not at all what one expects from such a violent act. Apparently, Julia hasn’t felt a thing. Ronnie sniffs with satisfaction. “Good frack, I can hear it, and I’ve done enough to know when it’s wrong. There’s sort of this chunky sound when you miss. Kinda hard to describe.”

Ronnie insists that all his clients remain in the chair for an hour, to allow the anesthetic to wear off. “There’s no law or anything, but it seems like a safety thing to me. Plus it gives me a chance to put the brace on, teach ’em how to do it, ’cause you don’t want ’em coming back again, you know, demanding another frack. Big waste of time if the bone goes and heals right.” He wraps the effected portion of Julia’s leg in a small plastic brace designed to prevent its setting properly. “You got to keep this on for two weeks, understand? Go ahead and walk around without it, the normal stuff. The more you move the better. But when you sleep you put the brace on. Same in school and everything, when you’re just sitting around. Not my responsibility if it sets right, got it?”

Back on Benmont Avenue, Julia and Jane move at a halting pace, side by side. It’s almost 3 o’clock, and Jane is annoyed. “We’re gonna be late and Dad’s gonna be pissed,” she says, but Julia is unconcerned. She’s crippin now, and happy. “My boyfriend Nick? He’s totally excited. I’m calling him up right when we get home.” Jane rolls her eyes at me. As I watch the girls make their way back to the pick-up truck, I’m struck by the controlled violence of the procedure, the primitive equipment, and I’m reminded of Liz Harmon’s weary words. “These girls,” she said to me, “they’re damaging themselves for the rest of their lives, and it’s a sad commentary. It shouldn’t even be allowed. You have to ask yourself: What does it mean for us, as a society?” Having witnessed the procedure, having seen the result, I’m not sure I have an answer to her troubling question. And yet I confess I can’t help but appreciate the girls’ simple beauty as they struggle down the street. The gentle scrape of their shoes on the pavement, the slight bobbing of their heads as they limp away–there is an appealing vulnerability there, and I am not unmoved. It’s easy to condemn crippin out of hand, without taking time to understand the process and appreciate its aesthetically pleasing outcome. Perhaps we need to look a little deeper before we judge so harshly. As we part, Julia turns to me and says, “Crippin? It’s not about being rebellious, all pointless and everything, you know? I mean, that’s what everyone says, but it’s totally not like that at all. It’s my choice, and it’s got nothing to do with anyone else, right? Crippin–it’s just a way to express myself. It’s a way for me to be me.”

Why do I love Crosby Street?  It inspires in me the kind of preference I remember having as a kid for lucky talismans, strange everyday objects I became attached to and took with me: I have a sentimental feeling of loyalty when contemplating it.  Streets go to work with their parallel neighbors and perpendicular interceptors, sharing affinities and sometimes friendships.  Crosby is friends, in my mind, with Howard Street, and Grand.  It’s cordial with the slightly tony Prince, affable with Mott.  With Houston, it forms a strangely superfluous intersection.  To its grander parallel neighbors, Broadway and Lafayette, it functions as the humble employee, the service road, or the mews, maintaining their emporia’s delivery entrances and fire escapes. 

Those fire escapes: Crosby retains, more than any other street besides perhaps Greene, the trademark look of Soho, all cobbles and rickety rusty iron-rung ladders.  Because so much of it is back entrances, there’s very little flash, and the traffic is mostly of the type given to handcarts and freight elevators.  Its sidewalks meld quickly into metal plates and loading docks.  Food is delivered to Dean and Deluca, which leaves its refuse on Crosby so as not to put off the paying customers with the smell – even when Broadway is at its most oppressively populated, on summer Saturdays, Crosby’s quiet.  Crosby’s an honest street like that. 

Yet there is grandeur, too.  At the very top of the street, at Bleeker, lies the Bayard-Conduit building, New York City’s only work by Louis “Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor” Sullivan, complete with gorgeously ornate plaster facade.  Growing up in Buffalo my favorite building was always Sullivan’s red Guaranty, and I always like glancing up Crosby at its fairer sibling.  To be a little mythopoetic about it, it makes my life trajectory seem more continuous.  But that’s not the main reason for my liking Crosby; if anything, it’s the exception that proves the rule.

No, Crosby’s appeal lies in its steadfast resistance to being pedestrianized, mallified, the way every other street in Soho has – except maybe Wooster below Grand, where street art sanctifies wrecked facades.  Crosby is a living, working street.  The Housing Works used bookstore is nice, but next door the Housing Works itself conserves some of New York’s social diversity.  Where once Houston Street was peppered with gas stations, the only one left is at Crosby.  Accordingly, the Lahore Deli across from it is a permanent cabbie break, and one with excellent samosas, chicken patties and tea with cardamom (which I guess some might redundantly call “chai” tea). 

An alley-ish street, Crosby also crosses one of the most beautiful New York alleys north of Canal: Jersey Street, connecting to Mulberry.  Balancing my chicken patty on my teacup lid, I often look through to the back of the Puck Building, with its beautiful pink iron window shutters.  Back when Keith Haring’s Pop Shop felt like an arty outpost in the dystopia below Houston, the alley had more life: people practically squatted there.  Now it’s free of the homeless and the Pop Shop was too lowbrow to survive next to Triple Five Soul’s seventy-dollar hoodies.  But Crosby has not gone that way completely, yet.  Either that or it has, in a more complicated way.

Crosby Street is both what it is and a stage set at once.  It is a working street of deliveries and tea breaks, recalling an earlier downtown, but that very appearance makes it more desirable as real estate for the wealthy.  Because of its untimeliness, it’s a magnet for loft-dwellers, their places’ value concealed by the tasteful disorder of the street itself.  Some of the most expensive and celebrity-filled co-ops in the city are here.  For these residents, Crosby’s anonymity provides both relief from the paparazzi and a satisfying, faux-hemian sense of keeping it real. 

This may be the time to bring up the great postmodern institution at Crosby and Spring: Balthazar.  Opened in 1997, most first-time visitors would be more likely to guess 1897, so successfully has Keith McNally’s ready-aged restaurant settled in.  At first, it seemed ridiculously contrived, a Parisian brasserie-fantastique composed of cracked mirrors and stained teak, the walls painted the perfect shade of nictotine.  The bathroom attendants were a particularly audacious touch.  Yet over time, Balthazar started to seem less inauthentic, especially by comparison to *actual* classic Parisian brasseries, La Coupole and Brasserie Nord, now owned by the conglomerate that runs the sterile European steakhouse chain Chez Gerrard.  The food’s good, if too buttery (the one false note, like they’re trying too hard), the bakery is just excellent, and the restaurant repopularized of the plateau de fruit de mer.  It’s a set, but one so well art-directed that it makes you question whether no art direction is just one more form of art direction.

Given Balthazar’s confused relation to reality, it makes sense, then, that it’s located on Crosby, which returns me to the question: why do I love Crosby Street?        After all, the things I mention–working life, humility, unreconstructed looks–are things that make it out of place in its neighborhood.  Am I nostalgically romanticizing the street?  Making New York’s industrial past the pastoral idyll and its current incarnation the debased present?  What kind of ethnographer’s lens am I looking through, approving the signs of labor and deprecating idle wealth? 

I don’t want to be the Wordsworth of Crosby Street, endlessly bemoaning lost authenticity.  I just know it will be a more boring city if Crosby turns into Mercer.  And, economically, it makes good sense for me to hope places like the Lahore Deli stick around – I can’t afford their replacements.  And what’s important about Crosby Street is that it renders a diversity that in other places is largely hidden.  Fulton Street Fish Market, like La Pigalle and Covent Garden before it, has been outsourced.  Now it’s free to become another museum.  But we’re poorer for it, culturally.  Likewise, Keith McNally, who hastened the demise of the old Meatpacking District with Pastis, once laughably remarked that he wanted it to be the kind of place where meatpackers might pop in for a croque monsieur and a café au lait.  Sure, Keith, sure.  But I understand his impulse. 

I’ve never been to Beirut but I’ve always held a few romantic, probably somewhat naive, notions about it as the kind of cosmopolitan and complicated city toward which I’ve always been most attracted. The practice of labeling various cities around the world “The Paris of X” has always struck me as distasteful for all the obvious reasons, but calling Beirut the Paris of the Levant sounds more appropriate than many of them. Certainly, given the cosmopolitan ideal that Beirut has represented for some, the traumas suffered by the place in recent decades were all the more heart rending. One wants Beirut to do well. It is a place to root for and the recent attempt’s to find a way for Lebanon to stand on its own two feet, outside the smothering arms of Syria, sounded a note of hope even as they were laced with the dangers that bubble just below the surface of Lebanese life.

Beirut is fragile in the same way that the cosmopolitan mode of life is fragile. It hangs in a precarious balance between mutually coexistent beliefs that must both be robust enough to mean something to people, and flexible enough to give way in the name of tolerance. The glue of this mode of life is that most difficult to define of quasi-institutions: civil society. That’s the transcendental ground, the condition of possibility, and without it the competing sets of traditions and beliefs that somehow manage to negotiate the social space fly apart into the very opposite of the cosmopolitan mode of life. At the heart of urban cosmopolitanism is always that powder keg. It can always go off, as Beirut reminds us. The work of the cosmopolitan mode of life is never over and it never gets any easier. It can’t be solved, it simply has to be lived, day after day, year after year, generation after generation.

Which is why the objection to the current Israeli incursion into Lebanon can step to the side of the political debate about causes and blame. I’m not interested, for the moment, in claims about Israel’s territorial ambitions or the politics of Kadima, about Iran and Syria and the power axis that wields Hezbollah. These are perfectly important things to understand, but they don’t drive to the heart of this particular problem.

And the problem, right now, is that the tenuous fabric of Lebanese civil society is currently caught in a crossfire. There are things that can be accomplished through military force and sometimes military force is necessary. But civil society has never been created or sustained through military force. And the problem, even from the standpoint of Israel’s self-interest, is that a Lebanon without a functioning and reasonably stable civil society teeters toward becoming a failed state once again. And failed states are breeding grounds for further violence, strife, regional instability, political extremism, etc. And thus the terrible cycle renews itself.

The question for Israel is whether its day to day security concerns and military struggles with armed factions in Lebanon and elsewhere are to be waged at the expense of Beirut and its fragile cosmopolitan space. Israel may win this battle in one sense and lose it another. Hezbollah may be suppressed, but Israel will continue to live as an island surrounded by failed states.

It is easy, perhaps, for me to say this but it continues to strike me that there is a road not taken here. It is a difficult road, no doubt, and the political realities on the ground make it difficult to fathom how it would be traversed. But so what. There is a place for imagination in politics, too. In this possible world, Israel would declare itself the avowed ally to the fragile civil spaces of the Levant. We are strong enough, and powerful enough, and confident enough, Israel would declare, not to be goaded into the abandonment of that dream. We do so out of genuine idealism about what the Levant can be, but we also do so out of genuine self-interest. States that can sustain a thriving civil society are states that are naturally less threatening to their neighbors and, by definition, more stable.

And this would not be an acquiescence to the worst aspects of Hamas or Hezbollah, but an attempt to outflank them completely. For extremists in general will suffer in precisely the degree to which the civil society of the cosmopolitan mode of life can thrive.

The one overriding principle of this approach would be a simple motto: “The Levant Must Flourish.” From that perspective, what Israel is doing in Lebanon can only tear apart the fragile fabric that is the very material from which flourishing societies are constructed. And at this moment in particular, I think it is important to take this concept of flourishing very seriously. A flourishing Levant would be a better Lebanon, a better Palestine, and a better Israel too. Israel has shown time and again that it is a strong and powerful state, but that power and strength has begun to feel petty and mean in the paucity of its vision. I think Israel can do better. The little dream that lays nestled in the bruised up body of Beirut deserves at least that much.

This has been an interminably bad summer for movies. Not one of the blockbusters has been interesting or diverting: X-Men 3 was a lackluster addition to the franchise; MI3 was, well, too Tom Cruisey to get me in the theater; and Superman Returns just seems dull. And so in a reversal of the normal order of things, my attention has been drawn lately to the small screen, where the action has indeed been heating up. Back when original programming was limited to the major networks, summer was the worst of all times for television—the season of reruns and never aired pilots. Now that we are fully in the post-Sopranos era, and original programming is a permanent feature of the premium channels and extended tier (HBO, Showtime, FX, and the like), we do not have to wait for the fall for new shows or episodes to appear. While Jack Bauer takes time off to recover from yet another bad day or the team at CSI or House goes on hiatus, we can change channels to catch up with Vinny Chase and his Entourage, or see how the suburban soccer mom-cum-pot dealer is doing on Weeds, or (on my newest favorite) look in on the Irish politico-mobster Road Islanders on Brotherhood.

Of the three I’ve mentioned, Entourage (HBO, Sunday, 9:00 pm) has the largest claim on the zeitgeist. The trick of the series is to blur what is on the show and what is outside the show. Nominally about the exploits of a freshly minted celebrity and his cronies from back-in-the-day, Entourage is “about” the very industry that makes the show itself. And so the real world subject matter of the show is constantly intruding into the fictional world it creates: “real” celebrities play themselves mixing with the “fake” celebrities on the sets of made-up movies shot by real directors. We’ve seen this before, of course, in movies by Robert Altman for example. The difference here is the complete absence of satire. Entourage takes as a given our love of celebrity culture and its industry of images; it just finds nothing in that love to criticize. Rather, it makes celebrity culture all the more alluring for being turned into an aesthetic artifact. After all, what we watch on Entourage is not the tedium of reality itself. Even the “real” celebrities are playing themselves as characters in delicately crafted narratives. Rather, we watch artfully done 24-minute nuggets that serve us our favorite object of interest.

Like many others, I’m sure, I’ve been waiting anxiously for the return of Weeds (Showtime, Sunday, 9:00 pm) for a second season on August 15th. The premise is simple: a recently widowed mother of two from the wealthy “community” of Agrestic California, Nancy Botwin has turned to selling pot in order to maintain the lifestyle to which she and her family have grown accustomed. According to Showtime’s inevitable “behind the scenes” documentary, the creative minds who brought us this series seem to think their insight is to expose the “dark underbelly” of the American suburbs, as if that underbelly hasn’t been exposed time and again (even before the much over-rated and overwrought film American Beauty). What is brilliant about Weeds, in fact, is precisely the opposite. The show takes all the threatening or counter-cultural implications out of dealing and smoking pot. Marijuana blends seamlessly into the give and take of suburban life, with its failing marriages, anxious parents, over-achieving children, and slacker adolescents. The ostensibly outré activity of being a drug dealer is not so much a contrast to the staid and conformist culture of Agrestic as something easy to assimilate to that culture. The result is a very nicely turned comedy of manners, in which selling pot looks a lot like running the PTA.

I was happy to discover last week that Showtime’s new crime drama, Brotherhood (Sunday, 10:00 pm), is as good as suggested by its advance hype and previews. Here setting is everything. Few places seem more provincial on TV than medium-sized American cities: large enough for anomie and crime, small enough for gossip and tradition. Brotherhood is set in a white working class neighborhood of Providence RI, the kind of moldering, forgotten place that is littered with exposed tar paper roofs and detached lonely bars, where everyone knows not only you but your grandfather, where “mom-n-pop” stores are run by consumptive alcoholics, etc. etc. The show has as its backdrop, in other words, the melodrama of Irish New-England culture on the skids, in Boston’s smaller and less storied neighbor. It would be unfair to call the show an Irish Sopranos, though the comparison is inevitable. To the ordinary stuff of mobster theatrics Brotherhood adds the interesting element of local politics. The show follows the parallel and overlapping stories of two brothers, one an ambitious state assemblyman, the other a ruthless gangster. The point is not just to show that local politics is bound up with the mob (a theme explored to a lesser degree by the Sopranos); it is also to show that local politics is not so far from a gangland activity itself, with deals made through force and money, lives threatened and ruined, coffers plundered. Providence is of course a notoriously corrupt city whose notoriously corrupt mayor now lies in Federal custody. But that only serves to underscore what seems so perfect about the setting. Larger cities and more cosmopolitan locales tend to swallow crime narratives of this type— the vastness of the canvas dwarfs what are ultimately small minds. The not so big city on the decline, however, provides in Brotherhood both an image and context of organized crime and organized politics in the petty provincialism of their sleaze.

For Mother’s Day in May 2002, my husband Harvey ordered Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind Of Science for me. Harvey died a few days later and the book arrived after his memorial service. That summer I read the 1200-plus pages of this self-published tome, and I felt grateful to Mr. Wolfram as the book proved to be engaging, exciting, and helped to carry me through the aftermath of losing Harvey.

The British-born Mr. Wolfram has been educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech, published his first scientific paper at 15, received his PhD in Theoretical Physics at 20 (a student of the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman), won a MacArthur genius grant at 21 and then became independently wealthy through his software “Mathematica”. A New Kind of Science may have been the first science book since Darwin’s The Origin of Species to sell out its first printing on its first day. It took him ten years to complete the book, during which Mr. Wolfram lived as a recluse, working all night long and running his software company for several hours during the day. Mr. Wolfram estimates that while writing the book, he typed 100 million keystrokes and moved his computer mouse more than 100 miles.

The reason this book’s message represents a paradigm shift is because of its potential for filling the gap in science related to the limitations of conventional mathematical equations which are unable to predict issues such as the shape that smoke from a cigarette is likely to take or the manner in which a forest fire will burn. At the heart of A New Kind of Science is Wolfram’s revolutionary idea to replace mathematical equations with algorithms and his assertion that the Universe is better explained on the basis of simple computer programs.

This is from The Economist: “Mr. Wolfram unashamedly compares the potential impact of his work to that of Sir Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica”, and suggests that his discoveries can answer long-standing puzzles in mathematics, physics, biology and philosophy, from the fundamental laws of nature to the question of free will.”

Wolfram’s work has its origin in cellular automata invented by the Hungarian physicist John von Neumann. Briefly, a complex system can be represented by using squares on graph paper that can be colored either black or white. Starting with one initial black square, a rule can be written which determines how its neighbors will be colored in each succeeding step forward. The properties of cellular automata are best explored using a computer which can generate thousands of iterations instantaneously. Wolfram found that with repeated iterations, complexity can arise out of simple rules.

From Forbes:

At the center of Wolfram’s research was a quest for a new level of simplicity. To do this, he moved from a two-dimensional grid to the one-dimensional world of the line. Why one dimension? Because, like the Universe itself in the beginning, it is cellular automata in their most elemental form. If Wolfram could find complexity in one- dimensional cellular automata, the simplest construction imaginable, then he could find it anywhere. For years Wolfram worked through the night to determine the unfolding of hundreds of thousands of possible rules, typically going to bed around 5:00 a.m. and getting up in time for lunch. Most of the rules quickly devolved into predictable, endless patterns. He began to fear that he had been lured into one of science’s many dead ends. But then one night in May 1984, an epiphany: Wolfram realized his mistake. He had entered into the project with a predetermined idea of how nature worked, assuming that natural systems begin with randomness and move toward order. But, now, he asked himself, what if you turned the whole idea upside down? What if you began with ordered conditions and looked at which rules spun out greater complexity? Through a long night, Wolfram tore through all his past work, papers flying, looking for examples that would prove his new model. Finally, close to dawn, he found it: Rule 30, a pattern that grew more intricate and unpredictable with each step. It was stuffed with what mathematicians call “emergent effects”: events that cannot be predicted in advance. From the simplest of parts, Wolfram had created infinite complexity. The aha! moment had arrived. “The Rule 30 automaton is the most surprising thing I’ve ever seen in science,” Wolfram told London’s Daily Telegraph. “‘Even though it starts off from just one black cell, applying the same simple rule over and over again makes Rule 30 produce [an] amazingly complex pattern.

And again, from The Economist:

This was Mr. Wolfram’s Eurekamoment: it suggested to him that complex systems in nature—be they weather systems, turbid fluid flow, a zebra’s stripes or the human mind—might all be governed by small and simple sets of rules”. Wolfram’s critical realization was that “many very simple programs produce great complexity” leading to his “Principle of Computational Equivalence: that whenever one sees behavior that is not obviously simple—in essentially any system—it can be thought of as corresponding to a computation of equivalent sophistication.

With repeated iterations, cellular automata can produce pictures of great complexity (such as the one shown here).

Many critical problems are not solvable by conventional mathematics, for example, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation which only applies to two bodies in space, but dissolves into chaos with three bodies when the method of first integrals is applied. Wolfram’s “new” idea is that the Universe functions on the basis of an algorithm and not on the basis of mathematical equations. In fact, he confidently predicts, “Within 50 years, more pieces of technology will be created on the basis of my science than on the basis of traditional science. People will learn about cellular automata before they learn about algebra.”

Implications for Biology: Theseus was able to slaughter the Minotaur because Ariadne gave him a golden thread that allowed him to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth. Wolfram has provided us with the means to solve many complex problems by retracing steps from complexity to simple algorithms. Since I am a cancer researcher, the sections in the book which deal with the implications of this new science for the highly complex biologic systems are the most fascinating for me, particularly Wolfram’s challenge to natural selection as the defining force in evolution. Darwin was able to collect an enormous amount of physical evidence to convince his contemporaries that all living organisms can be traced back to a single origin of life; that species evolve gradually through an accumulation of small changes; and that evolution occurs because there is genetic variation in every generation, and relatively few individuals survive and pass on their favorable genetic characteristics to the next generation. Even if certain genes confer only a very slight advantage, they gradually become more common over a long period of time. Thus, natural selection of favorable traits leads to both survival of the fittest and causes the species to adapt to natural environments. The neo-Darwinists like Dawkins, Maynard Smith and Dennett believe that natural selection is the only driving force in evolution, which occurs gradually over a long period of time. Gould and Eldridge who consider themselves as pluralists (as opposed to the neo-Darwinists who are reductionists) on the other hand, suggest that evolving species should be viewed as complex systems and that evolution is not a slow, gradual process but occurs in short bursts when new species appear, followed by a long period of stasis (punctuated equilibrium). Finally, they also maintain that organisms can often have traits which have no apparent useful purpose, but appear as a mere by-product of evolutionary changes (“spandrels”). In fact, many very important characteristics of humans such as reading and writing are examples of such “emergent properties” since the brain had become large prior to existence of written language. In this debate, Wolfram’s new science supports neither Darwin nor Gould:

One of the most esteemed documents of modern paleontology is Stephen Jay Gould’s doctoral thesis on shells. According to Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. Not so, says Wolfram. He’s discovered a mathematical error in Gould’s argument, and that, in fact, there are only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world. In other words, you don’t need natural selection to pare down evolution to a few robust forms. Rather, organisms evolve outward to fill all the possible forms available to them by the rules of cellular automata. Complexity is destiny—and Darwin becomes a footnote. “I’ve come to believe,” says Wolfram, “that natural selection is not all that important.” The more sciences he probes, the more Wolfram senses a deeper pattern—an underlying force that defines not only the cosmos but living things as well: “Biologists,” he says, “have never been able to really explain how things get made, how they develop, and where complicated forms come from. This is my answer.” He points at the shell, “This mollusk is essentially running a biological software program. That program appears to be very complex. But once you understand it, it’s actually very simple. —Forbes

In order to illustrate how complexity in biology arose from simple programs, I will summarize a few of the salient findings from the book here. (ANKS pp383-428)

• In the past, the idea of optimization for some sophisticated purpose seemed the only conceivable explanation for the level of complexity in biology. Take the example of fish which manifest so many beautiful colors. One Darwinian explanation would be that these colors improved survival through either allowing the creatures to evade being hunted by blending with the environment or shocking the predator with their brilliant, contrasting colors. In other words, every one of these colors and patterns evolved for a purpose. But then why do all the multi-colored fish have the same exact internal structures while having such radically different patterns on the outside? Wolfram’s beguilingly simple explanation is that the most visually striking color differences have almost nothing to do with natural selection, but are reflections of completely random changes in underlying genetic programs. On the other hand, the vital features such as the internal organs have changed only quite slowly and gradually in the course of evolution because those are precisely the ones molded by natural selection.
• “The range of pigmentation patterns on mollusc shells (picture) correspond remarkably closely with the range of patterns that are produced by simple randomly chosen programs based on cellular automata. There are already indications that such programs are quite short. One of the consequences of a program being short is that there is little room for inessential elements and any mutation or change in the program, however small, will tend to have a significant effect on at least the details of patterns it produces. Or biologic systems should be capable of generating essentially arbitrary complexity by using short programs formed by just a few mutations” (ANKS).
• “But if complexity is this easy to get, why is it not even more widespread in biology? The answer is natural selection, which can achieve little when confronted with complex behavior. There are several reasons for this. First, with more complex behavior, there are huge numbers of possible variations. Second, complex behavior inevitably involves many elaborate details, and since different ones of these details may happen to be the deciding factors in the fates of individual organisms, it becomes very difficult for natural selection to act in a consistent and definitive way. Third, whenever the overall behavior of a system is more complex than its underlying program, almost any mutation in the program will lead to a whole collection of detailed changes in the behavior, so that natural selection has no opportunity to pick out changes which are beneficial from those which are not” (ANKS).
• In the picture here, one can see the shell shapes generated by the simple model and those actually found in nature. The computerized array shows systematic variations of just two parameters.

Progress in science occurs when a new order is discovered which can unite seemingly unrelated facts. ANKS has achieved just that by showing that it is possible to get complexity from simple programs in any system. The job of a scientist in the conventional sense is to understand how things work and not why. Wolfram has combined the two by asking not only how evolution occurs, but also the meaning of it all. And the answer is terribly disturbing. No meaning at all. “So why do higher organisms exist at all? My guess is that it has almost nothing to do with optimality, and that instead it is essentially just a consequence of strings of random mutations that happened to add more and more features without introducing fatal flaws” (ANKS p398).

Richard Dawkins observed, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. But for the theists, Wolfram has changed the concept of God from being a mathematician to being a software engineer.

Dr. Stephen Wolfram will be the honored guest speaker at the 4th Harvey Preisler Memorial Lecture to be held at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester on July 28, 2006.

Asad Raza has written an excellent commentary here at 3QD today on the Zidane headbutt incident at the World Cup final, and I just want to add my two cents now. We still don’t know exactly what Marco Materazzi said (and did) to Zidane to make him lose his trademark cool, but out of the cloud of rife speculation two candidates materialize repeatedly: that either Materazzi must have hurled racist slurs at Zidane, or that Materazzi insulted Zidane’s family. Before I examine these two possibilities, let me say something about what I do not believe happened.

It is not possible, in my opinion, that Zidane deliberately chose a moment when the referee was busy elsewhere to headbutt Materazzi, believing that the attack would not be noticed. It is absolutely obvious to me from having repeatedly watched the video that Zidane’s actions were the result of sudden rage, which, as I can well remember from my own hot-tempered youth, always takes a few seconds to swell after the moment of provocation. Zidane could not possibly have looked around to make sure all the officials were busy, and if he were calculating so clearly, he would have known that a stadium full of people (not to mention the billion plus around the world) were watching, and he would have remembered what was at stake. No, that was clearly a moment of uncontrollable anger, the kind when the blood rushes to your head, you feel a kind of heat, your face turns red and throbs, and then you lash out. There is nothing you can do about that kind of mental storm. It is a moment of temporary insanity, not something subject to choice. And it is clear, at least to me, from the video that Zidane tried to trot away as the anger rose, but lost control and turned around…

As for Materazzi insulting Zidane’s mother (and all the possible variations on this theme), it is very unlikely that something like that could or would inflame Zidane. The reasons are twofold: first, these kinds of insults have become so common in everyday discourse that they have lost all their teeth. It is now possible to address a close friend as “Yo, Mofo…” But second, and more important, for an insult to really injure its victim there must be an asymmetry preventing the person from just yelling the insult back. It is then, when the person insulted feels he cannot reply, that he replies physically. And this is exactly what racist insults do. If a white man yells the N-word at a black man, there is no equivalent word that the black man can yell back. By using this word, the white man is essentially taunting the black man by reminding him of the abuse that he, his ancestors, his whole race have have to endure at the white man’s hand, and how he is impotent to stop it. It is like someone taunting you that he raped your mother, and you knowing that it’s true! History denies the black man the opportunity of responding in kind, and the only choice left may seem to be to demonstrate that one is not so impotent after all, that one can hit back. This, that it relies on a history of oppression and injury, and on asymmetrical relations of power, is what is so insidious about racial insult, and why we are so careful to avoid its double-injustice in decent society.

Racism is prevalent in Europe. England has its Paky-bashers and the Germans their hateful skinheads. The Italians are routinely prejudiced against their own darker southern citizens. And Spaniards, to their shame, have recently brought racism explicitly to football. This is from Wikipedia:

Luis Aragonés became Spain’s coach in 2004. During a training session with the national team, a Spanish TV crew caught Aragonés motivating Henry’s Arsenal teammate José Antonio Reyes in a strange way (“Give him the ball, and then show that black little shit that you are better than him.”) The incident caused an uproar in the British media with calls for Aragonés to be sacked. When Spain played England in a friendly match at the Bernabéu later that year, the crowd was hostile. Whenever black English players touched the ball, large segments of the Spanish crowd began to make “monkey chants.” The Spanish football federation — the RFEF — eventually fined the coach €3,000.

When I visited France about ten years ago, the helpful guidebook to Paris I had bought pointed out that “If you look like you might be an Arab, expect some hostility on the streets of Paris.” Naturally, this made me a little nervous, and in a ludicrous attempt at not looking Arab (which I am not, but I am brown and Muslim), I went around everywhere wearing a necktie! I can only try to imagine what a lifetime of dealing with racial insults and very real prejudice must do to a person’s spirit. Given the history of what France did in Algeria, is it so shocking that a person of Algerian descent would be sensitive to racial taunting?

As I write this, some reports are already filtering in that indeed Materazzi racially assaulted Zidane. Frankly, nothing else makes sense. If Materazzi had insulted Zidane’s family, Zidane could have replied in kind; but if he attacked Zidane racially, then Materazzi got what he deserved, and should be punished further. Am I excusing Zidane? If he was racially insulted, yes I am. Zidane could not help himself under the circumstances. I would excuse Zidane for the same reason that a prosecutor will, under certain circumstances, decline to bring charges against a man who comes home to find his wife in bed with her lover and, in a moment of temporary insanity, kills him. In this, there is an acknowledgment that there is not always a right and wrong in everything. Sometimes, a man loses rationality. That is just human nature. Deal with it. (Or hate all men.)

And as Western nations continue to dominate and oppress the third world by economic as well as military means and the cynical manipulation of governments, as they continue to wreak havoc on the environment, as the injustices of extreme inequality in the distributions of wealth continue to grow, it is to be expected that some will be driven to irrational anger, and will break the rules. And hit back. You can’t just show everyone a red card.

Lindsay Beyerstein has a great critical response to my argument here.

Have a good week!  My other Monday Musing columns can be seen here.

Shocking, unthinkable, infamous, ignominious: these are the words instinctively grasped for in trying to make sense of the act that irrupted into the World Cup final last night.  Rarely does an athlete, playing atop so high a mountain of adulation, so utterly confound and defy the hopeful symbolism that has been placed upon him.  It was a heavy blow, certainly, to the preformulated narrative about the exploits of multiracial soccer teams repairing the social fabric of European nations.  If Zidane was always a reluctant poster boy for that story, he has now supplied the reason: temperamental unsuitability to turning the other cheek.  The incident, amplified by taking place in the most watched sports event of the year, nevertheless brutally transcended the game in which it occurred.  It will be publicly understood, digested, for days to come.  It will lose force, be neutralized, but not without having revealed much.

What did Materazzi say?  Could it have been so unfamiliarly offensive that it incited a frenzy?  Or was it merely a petty final straw near the end of a long match, a long career, of being insulted for Zidane?  Insulting a player to incite is common enough that there’s a word for it: sledging, from cricket, where it’s apparently done with the greatest skill by the Australians.  Let’s be blunt: racial insults are the most reliable way to sledge. And Zidane, sadly, gets them not only from Europeans, but in 2001, from Algerians, who stigmatized him as a traitor.  Maybe Zidane correctly surmised that no referees were looking, only to got caught by the replay; maybe he was discouraged by Buffon’s save of his last header, and by his injured arm, and went out with some payback.

Zidane, known for violent outbursts, in a 2004 interview:  “It’s hard to explain but I have a need to play intensely every day, to fight every match hard.  And this desire never to stop fighting is something else I learnt in the place where I grew up. And, for me, the most important thing is that I still know who I am. Every day I think about where I come from and I am still proud to be who I am: first, a Kabyle from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman.”

Will that complex and precarious genealogy now be read as a liability?  Does the constant need to “know who I am” make one vulnerable to sledging?  Even the attack itself was curiously controlled, unleashed swiftly but with the choice of target (the chest, the heart, even) demonstrating an intent not to injure.  Certainly French rightists, already on record against the team’s composition, will want to link Zidane’s hyphenated identity with his unrecuperable failure yesterday as France’s captain and leader.  Those defenders of French multiculturalism wishing to argue back will try and explain the matter by a simpler biography: he has a terrible temper.  Already, many defenses of Zidane seek to sweep away the raw, disruptive moment last night.  This event might, then, fade away into the background, stalemated by insinuations and shamefaced silence in the face of them.

That would mark an occlusion of the dark side revealed by this World Cup, with its surface of friendly national stereotypes amounting to not much more than German efficiency, Brazilian rhythm, English bulldoggedness, and so forth.  The sport itself cannot be fully enclosed within the advertisers’ wholesome branding of it: it is deceptively brutal, whatever your opinions on the intentionality of Rooney.  Top players being sent off in important matches is the rule rather than the exception.  Behind national fervor, for many, lies hatred.  And worst of all, of course, is the endemic racism.  From my perspective, it’s shocking that Spanish fans are given to making monkey noises at black players, that certain players, after scoring, give Nazi salutes to the skinheads in the crowd, that a widespread opinion holds France doesn’t “deserve to win” because of all the “Africans” on their team.  I’m not being sanctimonious; this kind of outright racial prejudice is unutterable in U.S. public discourse, however widely it might be held.

Zidane’s act was also an act of contempt for soccer.  It may have clarified his priority for pride and honor over winning.  This is equally unfamiliar in the U.S., where sports are so heavily corporate that there is little tolerance for figures who do not, like Michael Jordan, always place the game above all else.  Clearly, in European soccer, such divisions cannot be maintained: explosive mixtures of nationalism and race invade the soccer pitch in a more direct way.  The celebratory rhetoric of soccer as the global, multicultural sport masks a great deal of ugly nationalist fantaticism, into which the players are necessarily, and unevenly, co-opted. 

With what disconsolate combination of ambivalence and contempt must the man who gave his name to an entire generation of French youth have left the field of play?  Finally, spare a thought for Thierry Henry, Zidane’s most sublime teammate and the player who leads soccer’s anti-racism campaign.  The bravery with which Henry returned from being knocked woozy in the match’s beginning was a sports moment of a kind we are much more familiar with than the astonishing events of the match’s end.  After all, it’s only a game, right?

Abbas has some additional thoughts on Zidane and Racism.

See some other Dispatches.

Unable to make my way home across the city after Italy’s World Cup victory last night, I was delightfully left with no option but to take to the streets of Rome along with everyone else. By midnight everyone else included: cars full of face-painted celebrants; moped drivers and passengers wearing the tricolor flag as a cape; immigrants as proud, joyous, and decorated as native Romans; a young man with his leg in a cast and a broad smile on his face dexterously moving through the crowd on crutches; a bikini-clad babe standing on the back of her man’s moped, waving the flag and her fine figure to the cheers of everyone nearby; babies in car seats, sound asleep despite the constant horn-blowing and clamor of noise-makers of all sorts; and groups of teenagers on the corner, gesticulating and affectionately yelling phrases full of celebratory expletives at anyone who wasn’t contributing to the beautiful chaos.

For the first time in twenty-four years Italy was able to explode in full World Cup celebration. For some it was, in a way, a matter of life and death—driving around Porta San Giovanni I saw several signs done in the style of the obituary announcement posters that appear around towns following someone’s death, this time mourning the French soccer team’s loss: mors tua vita mea. What is a family to do when Italy triumphs? Get everyone into the car—preferably more people than could or should normally fit into it, hence forcing windows, sunroofs, and doors open—and set the kids on the roof while cruising round the neighborhood, of course. Captured out of context, some areas almost looked like war zones, filled as they were by the smoke and flares of sparklers, sweat-covered bodies, and screams. Two days from now the taxi drivers will begin their official strike, following an angry week of unauthorized strikes and protests about deregulation of the trade, but that didn’t stop them from packing their friends and families into the now infamously inaccessible white, SPQR-labeled vehicles for one last joyride. Much like New York, yet in a very different spirit, Rome is a city where I am acutely aware of life’s overwhelming gorgeousness, and of my own deep foreignness. Yet last night any- and everyone who was out on the street was embraced as part of the champions’ extended family.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be read here.

Cockroaches of New York,

I’m sorry.

I’ll understand if you decline to read this letter; that’s why I’ve put what’s important up top.  I’ve said some mean things about you.  I find your little eyes revolting, and your little knot-sized heart makes me panic, and I hate the little click your adult body makes when you fall from the countertop to the floor.  It was horrible of you to move into my microwave last summer, and the time you somehow got into my mother’s bra during a college information session is really unforgivable.  She had to fish you out in a room full of people.  You’ve made me such a paranoid; each time my roommate S. cuts her eyes to the ceiling or a wall I think she’s seen you.  But I’m willing, right now – just now, so I’d take the opportunity if I were you – to extend the beginnings of a truce.

You might have guessed that this letter has something to do with our encounter yesterday (are you smart?  I don’t know.).  You’re correct.  But for this to make sense, you’ve got to get to know me a bit – at least the bit pertinent to this gesture.  It’s important to know that I’m a punctilious traveler, always early, fingering my ticket.  The size or significance of the journey has no impact on my behavior. I suffer pangs of remorse if I’m not on the subway car nearest to my next exit or transfer. On the way home, I root around for my house keys a block before I reach my apartment.  I’m at the airport an hour and a half before departure, always.  I tell you this because I think you might relate (you time your trips across my kitchen wall particularly well).

Being somewhat of a lazy person, this monstrous dedication to punctuality is tremendously helpful.  If I don’t have a schedule, I’m happy to stay in bed until I get too hungry or think a bath sounds nice.  I can see an elevated train and airplanes from my bedroom window; their cycles lend a pleasant rhythm to my inaction.  It’s only the thought of a place to be and a time to be there that prods me out of bed – I look at that train and those planes as if through the face of a clock, and the sweeping hands interrupt their spell.  The tendency has its drawbacks as well: I fight frustration that my boyfriend H. “walks too slow.”  I am overly resentful of latecomers, but I hate being the first to arrive. 

Yesterday morning (you remember), I flew JetBlue from JFK to San Jose.  The flight was scheduled to depart at 7:05 and the weather was clear on both coasts.  I had set the alarm for 4:45, and when it chirped I gave a morning speech to H. about how I would miss him, and then hopped right out of bed and headed for the shower.  There are only a few things short of flood, fire, and family emergency that could derail my travel agenda.  You’re one, and you stood in the curve of the tub.

I really thought I was hallucinating.  You were big that day, as big as my thumb, and so still.  I’d been  waiting for this moment since the heat set in.  I knew you would crawl up some drain, but I didn’t know when.  And you were so unbelievably still.  I must have made some noise, a strangled scream, because H. said my name.  I didn’t see him as I sprinted back to the bed.  My face felt funny; I gave myself a headache from screwing it up so tight.  H. gallantly made his way into the bathroom with a paper towel, and returned to tell me you’d gone down the drain.  Did you look up at me while I took the shower?  Do you have a sense of humor?  I was in limbo position, feet as far from the drain as possible.  I thought you might have gotten behind my shampoo, or in the soap dish, or on the ceiling.  It was the dirtiest I’ve felt while clean. 

I left fifteen minutes later, fifteen minutes late.  Any other day, I’d have been running a countdown to takeoff in my mind.  Yet: I didn’t even look at the clock.  I didn’t ask my cab driver if he had heard me properly (JFK, not LaGuardia).  I didn’t count the cash I’d just gotten from the ATM.

I got to the airport a bit after 6.  I didn’t take out the money for the cab fare until we were stopped in front of the JetBlue terminal.  I took my time at the check-in kiosk, though I had arrived well into my usual grace period.  And I stood in line to check my duffel bag, one that would probably have fit in the overhead compartment.  Hungry and on a roll, I got in another line to buy breakfast.  My flight, 169, began boarding while I was in line.  I knew this because of the giant screen above cashier, which flashed, “FLIGHT 169 – BOARDING.” But panic-free, I stayed in line. I bought my berries and cheese, and walked up to the gate and right onto the plane.  I sat in my seat, buckled my belt, and we took off 15 minutes later. 

You spent me.  I had nothing left.  An immutable struggle, me and clock, dissipated unremarkably in your wake.  Do I have a certain increment of anxiety to expend each day?  Did you sap it in less than a second?  Or could my day just not get worse?  Maybe I was in shock, just numb to the clock and the plane.  Perhaps you just did quickly what you do regularly – distract me.  In any case, look – I got on the plane on time.  I did it without being a human stopwatch.  And I want to say thank you. 

This is going to be a long road for us.  I’ve never had a positive thought, even a neutral one, about you before.  And please don’t misinterpret this letter: you are fundamentally unwelcome in my home.  But, cockroaches of New York, I’m ready to think about our relationship.

Sincerely,

Jane (Apt 2R)

[Pictured above: Beetle bracelet purchased to ward off cockroaches.]

While most of the world has been fixated on the ongoing FIFA World Cup tournament, a Hollywood film crew has been gallivanting around the globe shooting the next  installment of the hugely successful James Bond movie franchise: Casino Royale, a remake of the 1967 classic spy spoof, based on Ian Fleming’s very first Bond move. The film marks the debut of British actor Daniel Craig as the tres suave 007.

The original, of course, is considered one of the very first satirical send-ups of espionage thrillers, well before the debut 30 years later of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. And it’s every bit as deliciously silly. The incomparable David Niven plays an aging Sir James Bond, who returns from retirement to rejoin Her Majesty’s Secret Service, specifically to head an operation bent on destroying an evil criminal organization called SMERSH.

Naturally, this involves fending off a bevy of nubile beauties desperate for a chip off the old (literally!) Bond block; a double-crossing fellow agent named Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress); a Bond impersonator, portrayed by the always-hilarious Peter Sellers; and a crooked casino owner named Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), who supports SMERSH financially with his winnings at the baccarat tables. All Bond has to do is beat Le Chiffre at baccarat, apparently, to topple a global criminal enterprise bent on bringing about the imminent collapse of civilization. (It is a spoof, people. Work with me, here.) If that weren’t enough to deal with, Bond must also grapple with family troubles, in the form of his neurotic nephew, Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen) and an illegitimate daughter, the product of a brief liaison with the late Mata Hari.

In the Bond Universe of 1967, the fictional fate of the civilized world rested on baccarat. No doubt it’s still 007’s favored game, being the cosmopolitan super-sleuth that he is. But these days, the rarefied game of baccarat has been eclipsed by the huge mainstream popularity of that gambling workhorse, poker, especially the Texas Hold ‘Em variety. Some people attribute this in part to the introduction of online poker and the invention of a camera that can show a player’s “hold cards” to a TV audience, thereby turning tournaments into spectator sports. Not only can we tune in for live coverage of World Series Poker and the World Poker Tour, but now we can combine our love of poker with our celebrity gawking fixation by watching Celebrity Poker Showdown.

I hope nobody thinks the less of me when I confess that I’m a diehard fan of the latter series. It’s not just because of the celebrities, although the comedians who participate in particular provide endless entertainment. Nor is it for the pleasure of rattling off the cool-sounding jargon: you can “up the ante,” “see the flop,” “raise the blinds,” and if you’re really unfortunate, you might get “sucked out on the river.” (That’s what happens when you have the best hand until the very last card is dealt, losing the pot in one fell swoop.) Ultimately, the appeal is the game itself. Watching the hands and rounds of betting unfold is oddly addictive, plus there’s the play-by-play commentary by an in-house poker expert (although I mourn the departure of original commentator, Phil Gordon, who has been replaced by the far doughier — albeit knowledgable — “Captain Sideburns,” a.k.a., Phil Hellmuth).

Devoted fans of baccarat might sniff dismissively at my fondness for this rather crass, bourgeois upstart, but poker is has an equally long history, although not entirely illustrious. There’s some debate as to its specific origins, but it most likely evolved out of early games that all relied on betting against ranked card or domino combinations — not to mention the practice of “bluffing” to bamboozle one’s opponents. For instance, around 969 A.D., the Chinese emperor Mu-tsung reportedly played “domino cards” with his wife on New Year’s eve. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Egyptians used playing cards, as did the Persians in the 16th century. In fact, there’s a Persian game called  As Nas — played with 25 cards in five different suits — that could be considered one of poker’s forebears. Poker derives its name from 17th and 18th century French and German games, called poque and pochen, respectively. Those in turn evolved from a 16th century Spanish game called primero, widely believed to be the game most directly related to modern poker.

That should convince the most hardened skeptics that poker is every bit as international in scope as the ongoing FIFA World Cup. Alas, much of its history in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the New World isn’t quite so civilized. We can blame the spread on the French: poker mania began in Canada with the immigration of French colonials, who brought their national card game, poque, to the New World with them. Those French settlers then drifted south to found New Orleans in the early 18th century. From there the game spread West via Mississippi riverboats, growing ever more popular, until it reached the Western frontier, finding a home in the proliferation of saloons that popped up in response to the California Gold Rush.

The riverboats functioned as lowbrow casinos, and back then, poker was largely the province of cheats and outlaws. A Time-Life book on the history of poker, called The Gamblers, relates the story of a night in 1832, when three professional card sharks aboard a Mississippi steamboat attempted to cheat a young man from Natchez out of his money via a rigged poker game. They succeeded, and the financially ruined young man was on the verge of hurling himself into the river in despair, when a mysterious observer came to his aid. That observer, one James Bowie, took on the three gamblers himself, catching one of them in the very act of cheating. He redeemed the lost money at knife-point on the young man’s behalf — although it must be said, he kept $20,000 of the $70,000 pot for himself as a reward. So he wasn’t entirely altruistic.

There were some “gentlemen gamblers,”  like Bowie, who viewed the game merely as a form of entertainment, to be practiced in moderation, and who abhorred the practice of cheating. But this period also saw the emergence of professional gamblers whose sole aim was to fleece unsuspecting players out of their hard-earned cash. In fact, it was the professionals who are responsible for the evolution of the game’s rules, to enhance their profitability, most notably via the addition of “draw cards” and a second round of betting. In the original version of the game, players received five cards face down, with no chance to improve their hands with draw cards. (Random bit of trivia: the Joker was introduced to the deck as a wild card in 1875.)

Modern tournaments didn’t really start to flourish until the 1970s, when the World Series of Poker debuted, prompting the publication of several books about poker strategies to fuel the growing public interest. And now people are flocking to casinos all over the country, hosting games of Texas Hold ‘Em in their homes, and frittering away untold hours playing in online tournaments. Local bars have even started hosting weekly “poker nights.”

Nonetheless, I managed to resist poker’s irresistible lure for quite some time, despite my fascination with Celebrity Poker Showdown. Still, I suppose it was inevitable that I would purchase that first computer game on CD and begin my descent down the slippery slope to moral depravity. Even now, I primarily play against the computer, and eschew the online tournaments. But then I went to Las Vegas in June for the first-ever YearlyKos conference, and, well, my downfall was complete when I summoned the courage to venture into the MGM Grand casino and join a low-stakes 2/4 table.

It was admittedly a bit intimidating at first, forking over $100 in exchange for a rack of chips and sitting down to a table filled with utter strangers intent on taking my chips away from me. Even though I was familiar with the rules of play and a bit of strategy — thanks to My Main Man, Phil Gordon — it took me a few hands to catch the rhythm of the game. I bided my time, playing tight, folding most of my hands before the flop, finally catching a pair of 8s (dubbed “snowmen”). And with trembling hands, I called the blinds. There’s something to be said for beginner’s luck: I picked up an extra 8 on the flop, and played my “trips” out to victory. Then I relaxed and lost myself in the game for the next few hours. In all honesty, I was prepared to lose that first $100, and I did get sucked out on the river a few times. Those are the breaks. But I made up the losses with a few well-timed wins, and ultimately walked away $90 richer, feeling quite chuffed at my modest fledgling success.

Skeptics would say that’s how they suck you in, much like drug dealers provide the first “hit” for free. Undoubtedly some people have been ruined by an addiction to gambling. But for me, the true allure of poker is not the gambling: the stakes are just a sidelight. Poker, at its heart, is an intricate, complex game, steeped in statistical probabilities, which might explain why it holds so much fascination for the mathematically inclined.

I am not so inclined. In fact, I don’t even pretend to understand the underlying statistics, although I’m slowly developing a deeper appreciation for that aspect of the game. For me, the play is made that much more interesting by the unpredictability of the “human factor”: people tend to follow their hunches, even when the conventional strategy tells them to do otherwise. So every hand unfolds just a bit differently, every round.

Poker experts often bemoan those sorts of people, because such players throw off all their carefully calculated odds with their infernally illogical unpredictability. The best players don’t always win,even on Celebrity Poker Showdown. But even the poker experts might admit, when pressed, that it makes a weird kind of sense. You can’t adhere strictly to the rules all the time, after all; every now and then, you have to take a gamble, although I prefer to think of it as a calculated risk. Sometimes it pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. Poker is a lot like life, that way. Perhaps even James Bond would agree.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette muses about physics and culture on her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics.

Do women deserve the same prize money at Wimbledon as men?  I’ll get back to that – first, a meandering introduction.  Feminism, since at least Mary Wollestonecraft, has always maintained a productive tension between agitating for gender equality and elaborating gender difference.  The very fact that equal rights for women as subjects and citizens is the legacy of feminist thought opens the ground for a philosophical argument about gender difference itself: what is its “nature,” what are its features, and how do these features affect a political program?  These issues, largely irresolvable products of the collision of activism and philosophy, play out as conflicts within feminist thinking between schools, generations, nations, etc.  In the academy, for instance, a theoretical split was seen to develop between French feminists such as Cixous and Irigaray, who argued for the intrinsic difference of women and their language, and those who argued, with Butler, that gender difference is always inessential and ideologically produced.

In more mainstream U.S. terms, in what I think of as “magazine feminism,” a similar argument has been understood as one between two generations, the “Second Wave” of the 1960’s and 70’s and the “Third Wave” of the 80’s and 90’s.  (Incidentally, the “First Wave” mostly concerns the suffrage movement: 1919, remember?)  Here’s the generational conflict in a nutshell: venerable figures such as Gloria Steinem were seen to derogate femininity in order to make the case for women’s equal abilities – their idea being that traditionally feminine traits were imposed upon women as a form of domination.  It’s all a bit unfair to the Second Wavers, since of course the Third Wave rehabilitation of femininity was made possible by the argument over capabilities having been won already.  All the same, by a dialectical movement, we find ourselves in a moment where femininity, having been cast aside in the fight for Title IX and other equal rights, and then diagnosed by high theory as nothing but a social construct anyway, is now being championed again.  (I know, I know, I’m oversimplifying and begging many questions in this little peanut of a summary.)

Let me try and illustrate these shifts using fashion.  Think about it: during the Eighties, while the Second Wave was still dominant in the mass, we had Amazons, tall, striking, intimidating women like Elle MacPherson or Grace Jones.  Just physically they were much larger than the models of other eras, and with the angular shoulder pads of their double-breasted jackets their sillouettes emphasized a masculine strength.  In the movies, overly jocky men were often rejected, while when little geeks like Corey Haim in Weird Science tried to invent the perfect woman, what happened?  Kelly LeBrock showed up and scared the crap out of him: this is the model system for a female identity concerned with appropriating equal power.

By the nineties, with Judith Butler on every sophomore’s dorm desktop, gender was fictive and boys and girls differed only in their ideological software.  What did fashion give us?  Androgyny, duh.  CK One was a unisex scent.  Read that again; is that even imaginable, let alone saleable, today?  Grunge-era Kate Moss and Jenny Shimizu dressed in white tees, combat boots and jeans, while guys dressed in…  the same.  Non-tomboy femininity, where it existed, had to do with ironic appropriations of extreme girlhood: Hello Kitty, little backpacks, Japanese animé.  The one place where extreme femininity was accepted was on men, in drag culture, which by its nature points up the mutability of gender.  The idea of young actresses glamming it up in makeup, heels and dresses every night, a la Jessica Simpson, would have seemed totally anachronistic, premodern. 

Except, of course, that’s exactly where mainstream taste did go, back towards female sexuality considered as power/agency rather than a concession to the male gaze.  First, fashion just dipped a toe in, with the mid-Nineties fetish for artisanal Italian shoes, pace Manolo Blahnik, and then gradually the entire female body was resexualized, through an alliance of endless red carpet shows, lad magazines, and “sex-positive” feminists.  Katha Pollit recently recalled Steinem comparing women who liked pornography to Jews who liked Mein Kampf; nowadays that view is less likely than a young feminist having made some of her own.  Being comfortable as the object of a sexual gaze, anathema to an earlier generation, have become the potential sign of an embrace of femininity, especially for younger women.

And here we stand.  It’s hard at the moment to tell feminism from its backlash, or maybe I should say that which is which depends on who you ask.  Anyway, recently the issue I started with came up in the popular press that brings a lot of this stuff into relief.  In case you forgot: do you think women deserve as much prize money as men at Wimbledon?  No, seriously, it’s a real question and I want your opinion on it.  Cause to be honest, it seemed like a no-brainer to me for a long time: of course they do!!!  But discussing it, several female tennis-fan friends made the case to me that they don’t, and the whole thing started to seem like an object lesson in the philosophical transformations of feminism.  But let me give you the facts first.

Wimbledon, conserver of tennis tradition and requirer of tennis whites, is the last of the four major tennis tournaments (the Grand Slams) to award different amounts to the male and female winners.  This year Roger Federer (whoops, I mean whoever the winner is) will get 655,000 pounds, while the female winner will get 625,000, for a paltry difference of 30,000 pounds, or less than five percent.  The U.S. Open has paid equally for decades (hey! something to be proud of this July 4th, damn it!), Roland Garros (the French Open) began just this year.  But the All-England Lawn Tennis Club hangs on to their petty disparity, infuriating lots of female players and much of British society, and contributing generally to worldwide distrust of old red-faced white men having clubs.  American Venus Williams is the leader of the player’s movement for equal pay, Tony Blair and John McEnroe have come out in support of it, and the Times of London (hardly a bastion of leftism) had this to say: “And by its mean-spirited defence of an anachronism well beyond its sell-by date, the All England Club has forfeited any vestige of quaintness.”  So what’s the problem?

Well, pointed out my interlocutors, for starters, women only play best of three set matches, not best of five as the men do: this means the men are already being paid less per game played (a set is up to six games) than the women.  Secondly, the women’s field is clearly less competitive than the men’s leading to a great number of easy matches in the early rounds.  (And, ugly irrelevant truth though it is, the respective levels of play are not close.)  Now, you might say (and I did say) that tennis is a sport, and sports are entertainment, and we don’t pay entertainers based on how long the album or movie or play is (if so, Andy Warhol might be the richest filmmaker of all time).  You might say that the competitiveness of the respective tours is irrelevant; they are evolving differently, and the principle of equality doesn’t change based on that evolution.  You might say, as Venus Williams did: “It has nothing to do with our campaign for equality. The time spent on court or the sets played is a moot topic. We are not arguing about that. It’s about being treated equal as human beings.”

You might also realize that this is a cosmetic issue that’s easy for politicians to look good decrying (new maxim: the cosmetic is the political?).  Women are underpaid relative to men in all the smaller tournaments, earning about 66% of their counterparts (even though both sexes play best-of-three sets in those), just as they earn less in every other industry (except modeling!).  They even get less as a per diem at many tournaments, which is despicable.  Yet the symbolism of Grand Slam prize money overrides all this: tennis is the most visible womens sport in the world.  And the U.S. Open’s equality on this has rightly and for a long while been a great source of pride: here in the nation of Billie Jean King, Second Waver extraordinaire, we do symbolic equal rights right. 

Yet here’s another difference between Billie Jean and her modern descendants: the sexual marketing of female tennis players (males too, for that matter) has accelerated considerably.  And just as in the world of fashion, modern women tennis players quite consciously trade on their appearance for major endorsements.  The tennis/fashion crossover means that Stella McCartney makes outfits for Maria Kirilenko, and Serena Williams designs clothes with Kimora Lee Simmons.  Of course, the queens of the scene still tend to be not so much beautiful as possessing all the signifiers of commercial beauty: blond hair and long limbs.  (Meanwhile, the truly gorgeous female tennis players, such as Ana Ivanovic, are ignored by the marketers in favor of the Sharapovas and Kournikovas.)  Does this sexualization constitute new-style feminism, or a backlash?  And how does this affect the drive for equality of paychecks?

The several people (all women) who argued with me that women don’t deserve equal money argued that to take the same pay for (shorter, easier) labor is unfair to men, and an unnecessary politics of gesture.  Perhaps this is the sign of truly consolidated strength, a confidence in one’s power and security that means one doesn’t have to accept merely symbolic gifts.  Okay, but the equal-pay movement going on right now is possible because the women’s game is nearly as popular (and occasionally more, in the ratings) as the men’s game now.  And in part, this is because of the women knowingly playing up to tennis’ image as an sanctioned arena in which to watch beautiful female athletes.  If sports are profit-seeking entertainment, and sex helps sell tickets and commercials (“Make every shot… a PowerShot”), then shouldn’t women demand an equal share of the pie, even if it’s for unequal on-court labor?  Or does that demean the principle of equality that women have fought for, as my opponents argued?  Which is capitulation, and which steadfast determination?  It’s a conundrum.  My gut is still heavily with equality, but what do you think?

Here’s the rest of dispatches.

At first, I thought it was an item from that old underground favorite, Tales of the Weird. But no, it was from the Boston Globe, under an April 18 byline by Globe staffer Carolyn Johnson:

Three hundred “pet waste removal” companies are reported to be operating nationwide. They have formed their own trade association, have annual meetings, and an annual “Golden Shovel” award. Poop-scooping has even been franchised by an outfit named “Doody Calls.”

A Boston-based poop-scooper cleans a backyard once a week for $10-15. Business, as he puts it, picks up in the springtime as people put their dogs out in the yard, and “the aroma starts hitting the open window.” Apparently friendly client-provider relationships are formed: 90% of this scooper’s clients come out and talk with him while he scoops their dogs’ poop.

You can chalk it all up, this pooper-scooper story, to another instance of how markets work to satisfy the needs of both buyers and sellers. Yes, it is about dog shit. But poop-scoopers wouldn’t offer the service if they didn’t want to, would they? And, after all, think of how many people make their living, and a good one, off of shit, from the plumber to the sewer worker to the sanitation works supervisor. You might reply that they worry about human, not dog shit. But let’s not forget where all of that Tidy Cat stuff goes…. As someone’s father always says, it is a free country. If people want to scoop up dog shit for a living, well, Godspeed. Or as the Godfather says, as long as their interests don’t conflict with mine, good luck.

Let me switch the context a bit. You are an untouchable in rural India, and your job is to clean the shit out of upper caste people’s outhouses. Lacking baggies, you use your hands. The horror, the outrage your plight ignites in western readers. How can Indian society tolerate your humiliation, your degradation?

Of course, it could be the species shift. Perhaps dog shit is cleaner than human shit. Of course, I forgot salvation by baggie. When picking up my dog’s shit, I myself prefer the blue New York Times wrappers to the Globe transparent plastic wrappers: it places a micro-thin membrane between me and the shit.

However, I don’t know whether the average Westerner would feel that much better if somehow Shiva would shower baggies on the rural untouchables, or even New York Times wrappers for that matter. The degradation is done, not by contract, but by caste.

The contract, that great leveler of social difference, stands between buyer and seller of doody scooper-power in the USA. It saves the seller from degradation and the stigma of being a poop-scooper and the buyer from the responsibility of having degraded the scooper. As long as the doody-scooper scoops up some cash, most moral doubts are resolved. A cancer cure it’s not but not everyone can have interesting, life-affirming work. And if everyone is happy, far be it from me…..

Their mutual consent to a contract prevents us from asking: why is there a market for poop-scooping anyway? Here I would argue that Blim’s Law of Degrading Labor applies: the cheaper labor becomes, the more degrading it becomes. Look, poop-scooping is never going to become my favorite job or yours. When I get the short straw at home, my partner puts the Globe bags in my hand (no blue Times bags are left, the cost of having cancelled our subscription on account of the Iraq War), and hustles me out the door with the injunction: “Let’s be careful out there. It’s a minefield.” Of course, I wish he had drawn the short straw. Does any young child wake up in the morning with the fantasy that she is going to grow up to be a poop-scooper?

Of course not. Two conditions transform my weekend nightmare – and perhaps yours – into a world where mine or your dog’s shit can be picked up for a fee. First, to avoid picking up your own dog shit, you need to have some money. If I had some money, poop-scooping services would not be high on my list, but if a person has a lot of money, my preference-ordering, and my scruples for that matter, become irrelevant. Let us suppose for a minute that everyone would hire a poop-scooper, if they could. The second condition then becomes the key. The cheaper poop-scooping is, the more likely a person would be to hire a scooper.

But what determines the cost of poop-scooping? The supply of poop? The number of scoops(ers)? Only in part. The fact that America has more rich and well off persons as a proportion of its population now than even in the Gilded Age over a century ago counts for something. There are a certain number of people, not just the Buffetts and the Gateses mind you, that have the cash. Examine your own bank accounts, and at least to thine own self be true.

The general cost of labor also weighs in. Poop-scooping labor is cheap. If you can get your yard done for $10 a week (my dog does it 2-3 times a day, so let’s call it 15 poops at 67 cents a scoop), eyeball it. That’s cheap. Economists would say it’s cheap too because people are able to replace the $10 they spend on a poop-scooper in less time that it takes the poop-scooper to scoop up the dog shit. If poop-scoopers charged as much per hour as their clients made per hour, you can bet there would be more people out in their back yards with those Times or worse Globe bags scooping up dog shit.

Don’t believe me. A recent analysis of the Swedish economy by the McKinsey Global Institute, meant to be the business guide to economic policy in social democratic Sweden, laments that high wages protected by government unemployment and welfare policies means that fewer people avail themselves of personal services and fewer frequent restaurants than any other rich society. Why? Because the services and restaurants cost so much, labor being, ahem, much more expensive than in other societies that people end up doing things for themselves. A Stockholm lawyer must reflect on whether she wants to spend $400 dollars on a meal for two at a restaurant, roughly twice her after-tax hourly wage, or stay home and cook it herself. Or per chance, pick up her dog’s shit herself. When labor is more expensive, people degrade workers less. Or it must cost them significantly to do it.

As Blim’s Law of Degrading Labor would predict, as the cost of labor in America slips, more workers do degrading labor.

With July Fourth, summer vacations really begin. If you travel abroad and find yourself in a poor country, notice how so many people do so many things, often embarrassing and degrading things, for a pittance. Or travel in America for that matter, and ask why that hotel room is a bargain, and the maid is so friendly. In both cases, you have entered lands where labor is cheap, Blim’s law applies, and cleaning someone else’s shit, and the degradation it implies, is cheap too.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

If Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich memoirs are to be believed, Stalin was listening to Mozart before he died. And Mahler had a secret passion for The Merry Widow. And Hitler liked The Merry Widow too. And Mahler was a great Wagner conductor. How easy it is to get all worked up about the chance encounters historical figures can make. Are we to enlist Mozart as the avenging angel of Stalinism. Was Mahler a proto-Hitlerite: you know he liked The Merry Widow too and was prone to dictatorial mannerisms just like . . .  The absurdity of thinking in this way is clear. In the case of Wagner, such false historicism seems to be the only way that some people manage to cope with complexity. An important artist is always going to be misunderstood at first. With Wagner the misunderstandings show no sign of diminishing. If only Wagner hadn’t written Judaism In Music or any other of those interminable essays he cooked up in between bouts of supreme creativity. That is just the point. Artistic grandeur survives the unedifying spectacle of an advancing anti-Semitism. Even as Wagner died he was trying to give theoretical shape to the enormity of existence so convincingly conveyed in his music. The theory fails, the art succeeds. Art does not seek to explain. It expresses our mystery, our tenderness and joy, our beauty, and our destructive capacity too. When we listen intently to Wagner’s music we undergo an aesthetic experience which transcends our usual gravitational urge to banality. That some find the experience tedious or incomprehensible is no criticism of Wagner. The art waits for us; if we are not worthy of it there is always some cultural product that will be.

To call Wagner a Romantic does not get us very far. The so-called Romantic poets—Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth—are often lumped together despite the fact that each has an independent sensibility. The mania for classifying performs no useful function for the artist concerned. After all, Schumann, Brahms and Chopin get called Romantic composers too, but does that label really help us to come to terms with each of their unique oeuvres. The appeal of Wagner to modernists as diverse as Baudelaire, Eliot and Joyce should warn us of the dangers inherent in this unsatisfactory label. Wagner belongs to the world of Freud and Ibsen as much as to that of Heine and Caspar David Friedrich.

There are some who regard all this concern with Wagner as so much antediluvianism. They look to Pound, Marinetti, Gertrude Stein, Pollock or whoever as the way forward. The concept of cultural heritage does not figure prominently in their attitude. They favour the approach of the tabula rasa, like Pol Pot emptying Phnom Penh, murdering all the professionals and starting up from primitive scratch. A wholly new approach can sometimes yield worthwhile cultural results—Rimbaud, for example—but most artists know that the inheritance of the past must sit on their shoulders and bear down on them with its splendours. Wagner knew that. The regular readings from the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and Goethe tell us as much as the concern with Beethoven and Weber. Wagner was honest enough to admit that his great bête noire, Mendelssohn, would have been horrified to see how he composed. In other words, Wagner was an artist who cared about musical technique and the degree to which he could use that technique to convey the cultural heritage of the past to the future. If a critic today looks on the basilisk face of Wagner and sees only overweening arrogance, how little do they find of the real Wagner, the Wagner whose insecurities and bad dreams still reach out to us today. We have our bad dreams too. Only now our bad dreams are realities. If we could listen to Wagner with open ears we would hear the voice of an art that, to use Grillparzer’s phrase, transfigures what it consumes. If darkness is visible in this art, so much more truthful is it in portraying the human element in its entirety. The ideal can only be approached after an exhaustive struggle with reality—Parsifal’s lonely years of wandering finally allow him to understand the significance of the Grail. Name calling of the Jews and the French might have been a popular pastime at Tribschen and Wahnfried, and Alberich, Mime, Beckmesser and Klingsor may have begun life as Jewish caricatures—Wagner knew perfectly well that art had to get beyond chauvinism and prejudice if it was to take its place in the great chain of cultural being.

Whereas the Greek work of art expressed the spirit of a splendid nation, the work of art of the future is intended to express the spirit of free people irrespective of all national boundaries; the national element in it must be no more than an ornament, an added individual charm, and not a confining boundary.                                                                                                                                              Art and Revolution

Wagner was an arch-hypocrite on the subject of the Jews, displayed nowhere more clearly than in his investment of a 40 000 thaler gift from Ludwig in 1865 with the Jewish banking firm of Hohenmeser in Frankfurt. However, if we are going to look for moral perfection in an artist we have absolutely no hope of finding within ourselves, then we are participating in the very hypocrisy we criticise the artist for. Science tells us that dinosaurs roamed the Earth for millions of years before the most enigmatic arrival of all—that of Homo sapiens. Artists of Wagner’s significance do not come along very often. To reduce an art as grand and poetic as Wagner’s to the level of a series of moral failings simply wont do. We all of us have moral failings, but we are not very likely to leave a Ring cycle behind as our calling card to posterity.

What a cast of characters can be called in to witness the Wagnerian biography as it makes it stormy progress from one unsettled residence to yet another, dogs in faithful attendance. It is just as well there are biographical remains for us to look at, otherwise we would be hard put to understand just how the art and the life all got fitted into the space between 1813 and 1883. Aspects of that life still fire the imagination with their drama and passion, perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in that great moment when Ludwig summoned Wagner for the first time. How one would have liked to be a fly on the mental wallpaper of that first encounter. Naturally, this friendship has been trivialised and parodied beyond the point of no return. A sober and detached view would reveal one of the most significant cultural and political relationships in the history of artistic endeavour. To sit in the theatre in Bayreuth and see a performance there is to participate in a poetic ideal, an ideal that still comes to the world across minefields of ideology and propaganda. Wagner once commented that every part of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was stained with his and Cosima’s blood. That is probably true but it is terribly unfair to Ludwig. It is all very well to say that Ludwig was unsuited to the task of kingship or that Wagner manipulated the rhetorical tone of his letters to the king so as to ensure a codependent relationship. Let us remember Ludwig’s steadfastness; without it there would be no Bayreuth ideal, an ideal that goes beyond Wagner and Wagnerism, the fairy-tale castles or the drowning in Lake Stamberg. And let us remember too that Ludwig, who must surely be the most perfect Wagnerite of all time, completely rejected Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Adomo once claimed that attending the Bayreuth Festival was akin to actively participating in one’s own oppression. Ludwig gives the lie to this idea right from the start, because not only did Ludwig occasionally tire of the whole Wagnerian circus, staging works in Munich when he lost patience with the composer’s grandstanding; he actually refused to attend a premiere in the Festspielhaus itself. How annoying for the composer that the king, his great benefactor, should turn out to be so independently-minded. In fact, Wagner’s attempt to get the world to think as he did has failed. We are Ludwig’s heirs as well as Wagner’s in that regard. We can honour the greatness of Wagner the artist, but we do not leave our conscience or our critical faculties at the door of the Wagner treasure trove.

Part 3 of Orpheus Ascending can be read here.

The end of the Ring with the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Georg Solti and Birgit Nilsson singing in the Culshaw Decca recording can be heard here. 8′ 30”

I’m currently living temporarily in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a state of affairs that has led me to think quite a bit about locality.  My dreams, of course, before coming here were to finally make contact with authentic American folkways, and hopefully foodways, to find local diners and farm markets and maybe even meet a grizzled trapper, a la Withnail and I, who would supply me with rabbits or venison or brook trout.  Ah, Asad, you idiotic city slicker.  The most popular grocery in town is at Wal-Mart, and the diner is Denny’s.  (Though the Georgian fast-food chain, Chick-Fil-A, and their superbly simple chicken sandwich (toasted buttered bun, fried chicken cutlet, pickles), leaves me overjoyed.  When I get back, I think I’m going to open a Chick-Fil-A on, like, Metropolitan and Lorimer and rake it in.)  If anything, the national food distribution system is more entrenched and dominant here in sleepy P-burg, with its forty thousand people, than in New York, where I can choose which season’s milk I want my Parmigiano-Reggiano from DiPalo’s to have been made from, thank you very much.  (I like winter, and I am insufferable.)  But the experience of extreme difficulty finding any locally, sustainably produced food here in WV has gotten me thinking.

A couple of years back, my aunt was kind enough to invite me to a house she rented in Cape Cod during the summer.  Naturally, given my fish obsession, I visited the well-stocked local fish store, excited about the prospect of partaking of the local catch.  Yet upon questioning the honest staff about the provenance of their selection, I learned that while some fish was locally caught, much of the fish was shipped in by truck – swordfish from the Carolinas, bluefin tuna via Boston or even New York’s now-defunct Fulton Fish Market, etc.  I’d had a similar experience in the charming little English seaside town of Aldeburgh, where there was a great selection of fish trucked in from Billingsgate, London’s wholesale market, resting prettily on ice, or being fried and wrapped in newspaper at the delicious fish-and-chip shop on the high street.  (Random aside: I groggily concussed myself one morning there because of the medievally low doorframes.)  Somehow, this seemed wrong, even though in London I would happily buy little vongole shipped from the Adriatic, cause that seems like a metropolitan prerogative.  I was buying into the pastoral myth of the countryside as the authentic source of food.

So, the fish shops of Wellfleet and Aldeburgh are far better than the fish shops in, say equally picturesque mountain villages, yet the fish they stocked was, for the most part, equally accessible to retailers anywhere.  Why the paradox?  Expectation creates demand, and people expect fish near the sea, and like to assume it came right out of that sea, and usually don’t ask if it did.  So fishmongers do business by the sea, often selling farmed fish like cod and salmon that it’s really hard to catch in the sea nowadays, while local fishermen cannot get distribution locally.  Of course, there is wild seafood to be had in Wellfleet and Aldeburgh, it’s just harder to come by in this confusingly globalized day and age.  In the case of Cape Cod, strolling down to the beach revealed thousands of native Wellfleet oysters lying around; I’m happy to report that we gathered and ate at least two hundred, and that my little nephew Sam really liked the tiny crab hitchhiking in our bucket.  The point, however, is that locality is very difficult to ascertain in our current food system, dominated as it is by supermarkets with global supply systems.  Even regional food preferences, where they exist, are largely now maintained for show rather than for the traditional reason that a particular food is in prolific supply in a region, with a few exceptions, such as Maine lobster, Maryland crab and Pacific salmon.

There’s a reason those three items are all, well, seafood.  Fish and seafood are the last wild creatures we eat much of.  But even farmed food’s origins are increasingly unclear these days, as I was finding here in Parkersburg, where my fantasies of connection with the land were being completely thwarted.  By coincidence, the new Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, had just come out.  Really three books in one, it recounts three meals in Pollan’s trademark analytical goody two-shoes style, one following a confined steer to McDonald’s, one from an organic farm, and one foraged and hunted by Pollan.  The McDonald’s meal comes at the end of a long, and utterly fascinating, description of the dominance of subsidized corn production in the U.S. economy, and how the overabundance of cheap corn threatens to ruin our environment and our very selves.  Pollan makes the astute point that industrial monocultures such as the corn, chicken, and beef industries transform the nation’s landscape into a dystopia.  Rather than the aesthetically pleasing little system of a Georgic ode, we have instead literally disgusting operations the sight and smell of which must be kept in quarantine out of sight.  The synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that industrial agriculture requires pollute water tables and turn frogs hermaphroditic.  The addiction to feeding cheap corn to cows, a ruminant that evolved to eat grass, means that harmful bacteria such as E.Coli multiply in their stomachs.  And finally, the transformation of the rest of that pile of surplus corn into byproducts such as oils, starches, syrups and stabilizers means that most of our cheapest food is just corn byproducts (it occurs to me, with horror: et tu, Chick-Fil-A?).  If I was to propose the simplest possible anti-industrial agriculture diet, I’d say: just don’t eat or drink anything with high-fructose corn syrup or vegetable (i.e. corn and soybean) oil.

To my pleasant surprise, however, Pollan’s second meal is a sunny account of Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in the nearby Shenadoah Valley.  Salatin is a hero of the “managed pasture” movement, which entails rotating animals on pasture and allowing the grass to recover, rather than separately inputting synthetic fertilizers, corn, and antibiotics.  He pioneered moving chickens in mobile coops after his cows, allowing them to pick grubs and worms out of the cow’s manure, in the process fertilizing the fields, keeping the steer disease-free, and filling their own stomachs.  He has created similarly symbiotic relationships between the pigs, rabbits, and sheep on his farms, all of which rotate around the property while never being allowed to exhaust the pasture.  Salatin’s beef eat only grass, which according to Pollan makes for a much healthier and beefier beef, which is confirmed by my experience of Argentinian grass-fed beef (which, sadly and absurdly, is as illegal here as Pakistani mangoes and unpasteurized French cheese).  And I know for a fact that free-ranging chickens eating a varied diet as Salatin’s do make for much better eating than do your average Purdue broiler.  Salatin is a bit of a nutcase (when Pollan asks how people in New York can get access to food like this, Salatin replies, “Why do we need a New York City?”) but his methods are impeccable, and from 100 acres of farm and 450 acres of forest he produces 30,000 dozen eggs, 11,000 chickens, 25,000 pounds of beef, 25,000 pounds of pork, 1000 turkeys, and 500 rabbits annually.  Of course, this is a drop in the ocean: we’d need thousands of farms like Polyface to feed people this stuff, and food would be much more expensive.

Although, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing for meat, at least, to be a great deal more expensive.  Why should we subsidize the cost of disease-ridden meats itself produced from subsidized corn when people spend barely any money on food as it is?  Would less meat and less sugar in the American diet be a bad thing?  Maybe the worst and most objectionable thing of all, though, about contemporary U.S. foodways is the flavor.  Let’s be honest.  The U.S.A. has the worst quality produce in the world.  An apple or a peach or a strawberry from an average supermarket taste like mildly flavored cellulose.  An apple from an orchard, ripe, in October, tastes complex and perfumed; a summer strawberry from an allotment is like an uncloying little sugar bomb; a real ripe peach from, say, Turkey, in summertime is simply absurdly good to eat.  Yet here we are in the richest country in the world, etc, etc, etc, and we eat food that’s fit for the table of some Protestant Low Country in which toil and suffering in this world bring redemption only in the next.  Unpasteurized cheese, which millions of Europeans eat safely every year, is illegal here out of fear.  Yet the FDA would rather irradiate beef, killing its taste entirely, than impose any punishment upon producers whose product is routinely contaminated with lethal fecal matter.  How are we screwing up this bad?

I don’t have an answer, other than to say that I’m going to be heading over to Salatin’s to fill a cooler with grass-fed beef and chickens and eggs soon.  Pretending to be Argentine, by eating that beef with some chimichurri and some Malbec will be nice.  So, I have realized, will eating food that accords with my general philosophy of taste: it’s better to perform labor procuring something that tastes good than trying to redeem something that doesn’t.  A subway ride to a good butcher is better cooking than following thirty-six steps from Eric Ripert’s cookbook with watery scallops and woody rosemary.  The increasing spiciness of American fast food, I think, is tied to an increasing need to camouflage the blandness and insipidity of the main ingredients.  Not that I’m saying spicy food is bad; I’m Pakistani, after all.  But excessive concealment is a sign of bad ingredients – I have my mother’s father’s favorite cookbook, from 1920’s India, and the recipes are amazingly simple: korma has chicken, onions, ginger, red pepper, and saffron. 

New York is as guilty of overcomplexity as anywhere, with its chattering vogues for senseless combinations and magical thinking about this season’s ingredient, be it lotus bulbs or pork belly.  How often do you see pastas or sandwiches that have four or five too many things on them?  And how rarely do you see people with the rigor of gastronomes past, with a steady assurance as to what goes with what, in what season?  Now we ridicule such inflexibility, residing bravely as we do in the great masala of today, where we have  oversweet versions of Thai food served to us by French chefs.  Take that, orthodoxies of yesterday!, comes our adolescent cry.  Meanwhile, we’ve never eaten the simple, decent reduction from which the lemongrass reduction departs, and have no sense of which rules are being broken.  And lest you think that cooking rules are some kind of dead-European-male thing, some sign of domination, remember this: all cuisines are bounded languages in which utterances have a grammar, and Mexicans, Provençals and Indians are equally protective of their regional foodways.  There’s much pleasure to be had from intermingling them, but much to be lost by forgetting that people ate certain ways because long experience and settled tradition embody much more knowledge of their food than we have.

I recently tried to convince my sister that no spices whatsoever are needed to enhance a good chicken, and thusly cooked her the dish whose recipe I’m about to give you, along with some by-recipes that come along with buying a whole animal and using it unwastefully.  But don’t try it with a factory bird from Giant Eagle, as I did recently, the flesh is mushy and dry simultaneously, and the muscle tone is weird, and the bird just doesn’t taste like anything.  So get something good and then don’t do much to it.  Try this if I haven’t convinced you.  All you need is one good chicken; of course, finding one is harder than it should be.

ROAST CHICKEN

This dish is a touchstone of simplicity, and won the argument with my sister.  I like it with mashed potatoes.  I read accounts of roast chickens in food books all the time, and often order it to test a kitchen, the same way you might do with tandoori chicken and naan at a tandoori place.  By the way, Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories is one of my favorite cookbooks, simple and methodologically sound and really indicative of a chef’s whole style, and he recounts some great tales of L’Ami Louis in Paris and their roast poulet de Bresse with fries.  Oh man.

Serves 4

One chicken, smallish (free-range essential, organic preferable)
Half a lemon
Butter
Salt
Pepper (don’t even ask; yes, freshly)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Farenheit.  Take the neck and organs out of the chicken’s cavity, reserving for stock, and put the chicken in a roasting pan.  Put the lemon half in, cut side “up.”  Smear butter all over the chicken, leaving a prodigious amount on the breast.  Sprinkle with a lot of salt and pepper.

Put the chicken in the oven and leave it for an hour.  Open up and check if it’s getting too browned, if so, turn down to 350.  If not, leave and check again in fifteen minutes.  Pull the chicken out, and poke a paring knife into the thigh – the juices will come rushing out clear as a bell.  You should have a really beautiful bird with burnished dark-golden, crackling skin. 

Carve the chicken into pieces (drumsticks, thighs, wings and breast) and remove to platter.  If you don’t know how, just do it; you’ll be fine, it’s dead easy.  Now pour off the accumulated juices into a small saucepan, spooning off excess oil, and squeezing the lemon half into the mix, and boil for a bit (you can mix in some flour here if you want a thick gravy – I prefer thinner juices as a sauce).  Spoon over the chicken, or pass around.  Putting these pieces of chicken over mashed potato provides more starch to absorb the reduced chicken jus, which is a great idea.  Make it with a good chicken, and I guarantee this recipe.

CHICKEN STOCK

Roast chicken bones (including what’s on people’s plates – don’t be shy)
Peppercorns
Bay leaf
Onion, halved
Celery stalk, broken in half
Slice of ginger
Clove of garlic

Put it all in a pot, just cover with water, and bring to boil.  Skim, turn down, and simmer for two hours.  At this point, you’ll have a nice chicken-y stock that beats the pants off any can or cube and you can salt it properly and strain it.  But don’t throw away the bones; take the leftover chicken pieces from the stockpot and pick the meat off the bones – there will be a great deal on the back, especially the two little pearly nuggets on the underside.  French people have some sexy name for them, and they are good.

THREE CHINESE CHICKEN SOUPS

A good way to use chicken stock and meat; funny and old-fashioned but comforting and nice.  Another is to use all the meat for a nice chicken salad.  Another is to cook any vegetable in season (asparagus, celeriac, peas, nettles, you name it) in the stock and then puree it, topping with more pepper and a little Parmigiano, if you want.  Another is to braise lamb shanks in it with onion and fennel and top them gremolata (minced parsley and garlic, mixed).  Another is… well, you get it: it’s good to have some stock around.

Chicken stock with extra chicken meat (see above)
Vinegar
Soy sauce

Flake the reserved meat into the pot of stock, which is simmering on the stove.  Add a little vinegar and a little soy sauce.  Simmer away for a while and then pick one of these three options:

1. Egg Drop: Mix about two tablespoons cornstarch and equal water, then mix into stock, stirring vigorously.  Let thickening magic occur for a while.  Beat an egg in a bowl, and pour into soup, stirring.  You’re done.  Serve with thinly sliced superhot little Indian chilies soaked in vinegar in a little bowl.

2. Chicken Corn: Add a couple of ears worth of corn kernels or a can of corn to the stock.  Then follow the instructions for Egg Drop.

3. Hot and Sour: Add sliced fresh mushrooms, cubed tofu, julienned bamboo shoots, some sliced pork if you have it, extra soy and vinegar, and a mess of white (or black) pepper.  Then follow the instructions for Egg Drop.

The rest of Dispatches.

Dear Shakespeare,

The other day I counted the word “sleep” in 167 passages of your work and I am sure I did not count them all. You have penned sleep in its own image and as a metaphor. You knew sleep:

“The innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.” (Macbeth, Act II)

And you knew sleep’s associated afflictions, especially its deprivation: insomnia.

Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber: Thou hast neither figures nor no fantasies Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep’st so sound. (Julius Cæsar, Act II)

The purpose of my letter is to share with you new information we have learned about sleep and insomnia since your demise in 1616.In the intervening four hundred years; we have invented complex contraptions to study a sleeping person. We can record the brain activity, eye movement, muscle tone, breathing patterns and measure the levels of various substances (chemicals, molecules, hormones) floating in the blood. All these studies have yielded considerable information.

We now describe the architecture of sleep according to the movement of the sleeping eyes, which when moving rapidly is the “rapid eye movement” (REM) phase; the rest is the non rapid eye movement phase (NREM). We start our sleep with NREM and get into REM before waking up. NREM starts with easy arousal light sleep (stage1 and 2) and marches into deep sleep (stage 3 and 4) from which a slumbering person is difficult to arouse. The unpleasant experiences of night terrors, sleepwalking and bed-wetting – the afflictions you are familiar with — occur during deep sleep.

Macbeth had a troubled stage 4 sleep:

“Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly: better be with the dead, Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy” (Macbeth, act III)

And Lady Macbeth too sleep walked in her deep stage 4 sleep:

“Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it,. write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.” (Macbeth, Act V)

Mr. Shakespeare, Did Parolles wet his bed in REM sleep or deep sleep?

“In his sleep he does little harm, save to his bed-clothes about him” (Alls Well That Ends Well, Act IV)

The sleep cycle starts with stage1 during which we drift in and out of sleep, our brain activity slows down. Then we enter stage 2: our brain activity slows down further; our muscles may suddenly jerk but our eyes do not move. Stage 3 shows periods of slow moving delta waves on recording of the brain activity and in stage four our muscles are immobile and brain activity reflects only delta waves. REM sleep follows stage 4: the eyes throw jerky movements, blood pressure rises, breathing becomes shallow and rapid, temporary muscle paralysis ensues, heart pounds faster, men get penile erections and the brain waves gather speed. We indulge in dreams during this active stage of sleep — the brain is hardly idle. (Most mammals and birds show REM sleep, but cold blooded animals and reptiles do not. Do other mammals dream?)

Mercutio got it wrong:

“True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain” (Romeo and Juliet, Act I)

We sleep in cycles of NREM and REM and about 90 to 100 minutes elapse from the beginning of stage 1 to the end of REM. This cycle repeats 3 to 6 times at night. In a cycle of 100 minutes, the duration of stage 1 is 10 minutes, stage 2 is 50 minutes; stage 3 and 4 is 15 minutes and finally REM lasts 25 minutes. If we miss our REM sleep, we fall into REM the next night without other stages, till we catch up with this REM deficit.

We flash signals from the base of the brain which either awaken us or put us to sleep. These chemical signals or neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine exude from the nerve cells (neurons) of the brain stem and keep the brain awake. Other neurons at the base of the brain turn off the awakening process and we fall asleep. The levels of adenosine build up while we are awake and subside during sleep. Caffeine containing potions like coffee and tea inhibit adenosine.

REM sleep is regulated by the part of brain — we call Pons, which sends signals to other parts of the brain and also inhibits neurons in the spinal cord causing temporary paralysis.

We have learnt our bodies function in a cyclic rhythm spread over 25 hours: we call it circadian rhythm. Mere 200,000 neurons in the suprachiasmic nucleus (SCN) of hypothalamus play the role of the body clock. Sunlight or other bright light and even external noise triggers SCN which signals the pineal gland to shuts off the production of melatonin. The pineal gland secrets melatonin (a drowsiness inducing hormone) at night and in darkness. Some people with blindness suffer from sleeping disorders because they are unable to respond to light. Traveling long distance in a short period (jet lag) or change of shift at the work place can disrupt the circadian rhythm.

The neuro-chemical control of sleep is autonomous and we can not voluntarily deprive ourselves of sleep. Cleopatra in her raging defiance may have succeeded in starving herself but to defy sleep was an empty threat.

“Sir, I will eat no meat, I’ll not drink, sir; If idle talk will once be necessary, I’ll not sleep neither: this mortal house I’ll ruin, Do Caesar what he can. Know, sir, that I will not wait pinion’d at your master’s court.” (Antony and Cleopatra, Act V)

Voluntary sleep deprivation may not be possible, yet we have enough reasons to loose sleep: anxiety, depression and body pain. Iago could not sleep because of pain…

“And, being troubled with a raging tooth, I could not sleep.” (Othello, Act III)

And King Richard was anxious.

“For never yet one hour in his bed Have I enjoy’d the golden dew of sleep, But have been waked by his timorous dreams.” (King Richard III, Act IV)

In our “progress” we have added a few more causes of insomnia: jet lag, shift change and stimulant drugs. People who work at night and travel through time zones disturb the sunlight stimulus to circadian regulation.

We have found that sleep is essential for survival – at least for rats. Scientists made rats live on a platform floating in tub of water. When rats drifted into REM sleep their muscles got paralyzed and they slipped off the platform and fell into the water. Poor rats! Wet and drenched they struggled and climbed back onto the platform went into paralyzing REM sleep and fell into water again. Deprived repeatedly of REM sleep, they died in 3 weeks instead of usual 2 to 3 years.

Mr. Shakespeare, do you accuse us of being sadistic? We defend the progress of science at all costs! This very scoundrel race of rats spread the germs that devastated London with bubonic plague which must have caused you a few sleep less nights! Well, we people are adept at taking revenge for historical blood feuds; in his case it is against the rats. Well, they are all rats!

You ask what have we achieved in the past 400 years? We have accumulated wealth and information; yet it is true that our restless days still end up in sleepless nights. King Henry also knew it; money can buy you a bed but not sleep.

“Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,” (King Henry V, act IV)

You probably think the information gained in the last 400 years has cured our insomnia… not so Mr. Shakespeare: 30 to 50 percent of our people now suffer from insomnia; we are a sleep deprived world. Here is some news for you from the Boston Globe:

The Institute of Medicine report said loss of sleep has increased in recent decades due to longer workdays and computer use and television watching taking up more time. Lack of sleep increases the risk of a variety of health problems, the report said, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and heart attacks. It also raises the chances of injury or death due to accidents at work, home, or in automobiles. Studies in the 1990s estimated the cost of medical care for sleep disorders at $15.9 billion, the report said. In addition, fatigue is estimated to cost businesses about $150 billion a year in lost productivity and mishaps, and damage from motor vehicle accidents involving tired drivers amounts to at least $48 billion a year. The National Sleep Foundation issued a report indicating only 20 percent of US adolescents get the recommended nine hours of sleep a night.

So, here we are, four centuries after you! Amazing: so much knowledge, yet how little we have learned! We have coaxed but a few ounces of wisdom from the tons of information we have collected and culled. Our data could fill the cavernous base of a medieval church and all the wisdom will rise but slim as a spire. From you we need to learn to build with in the scaffold of wisdom and not on the foundation of data. We need at least as many seers as we have scientists.

“Not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep, Which thou owedst yesterday.” (Othello, Act III)

Let me confess at the outset that my lack of interest in the World Cup is matched only by my ignorance of the sport itself. Call me what you will. A philistine. A provincial. A vulgarian. An ugly American. But I have not been getting up in the morning to watch the matches. There is a reason for this I think. Sports are an acquired taste and deeply autobiographical. I grew up on the Jewish faculty-brat diet of baseball and basketball. By the time I was in college and self-consciously developing an interest in the arts and literature, televised sports seemed like something from a distant planet. When I returned to watching sports in my thirties, it was with the intense relish of rediscovering forgotten pleasures. I wanted the sweet succor of bygone days and older knowledge. Learning new things was for different regions of my brain and other times of day. Thus soccer fell between the cracks in my life. Too bad for me, I hear you say.

By not developing an interest in the World Cup, or at any rate by not professing one, I am something of a traitor to my own professional class. Even the most sports-averse and tweed-adorned professor these days can be seen taking a break to watch the surprising run of Ghana or the stalwart march of the Germans. (I find no great surprise, for example, that this very website, ordinarily so earnest and sober, so interested in international affairs, science, and medicine, has two separate bloggers reporting from the games.) The World Cup has in other words developed an odd kind of reach. It is both sports and not sports. Clearly billions of people who grew up in countries other than my own feel an intensity of fandom I cannot really understand, but which equally clearly provides the kind of visceral pleasure in viewing I can. I am however not interested here in what motivates soccer fans in the countries where the sport thrives. What I’m interested in, rather, is the acquired situational appreciation of soccer and its elevation into a sport that is more than a sport.

Perhaps I should just phrase this is as a simple question. Why do intellectuals or the chattering classes or the intelligentsia care so much about the World Cup? The least generous answer is simple Europhilia. Like smoking Gauloises or eating haggis, watching the tournament expresses a kind of vicarious belonging to a different continent, a sign that you spent your junior year abroad in Florence or Paris or Edinburgh and, when pressed, even know a word or two in a different language. Seen this way, one’s viewing habits provide a form of cultural capital and means of distinction. The sport is not simply a competition like the World Series; it is rather something of an aesthetic artifact, the appreciation of which becomes a badge of sophistication. It is, in the words of the New York Times, a “beautiful game.”

To be a little less cynical, the World Cup is for some clearly less about sports than about international relations and politics. On this account, the games are interesting for their allegorical significance. Teams really do represent nations after all. If say Ghana defeats France then centuries of colonialism and domination are momentarily upended in a great reversal of fortune. Even the uglier dimensions of the tournament—violence, “hooliganism,” racism, and the like—are interesting because they express some underlying sociological or political cause. One is interested in the sport not because it is a “beautiful game” but because of what it reveals about class tensions, race war, the new Europe, etc.

In either case, viewers of the World Cup watch the game from a sort of distance: the distance of aesthetics or of politics. The first translates the game into a mark of distinction and cultural capital; the second translates the game into an allegory or a symptom. The thing about such distance, at least for me, is that it gets in the way of the deeply intuitive and primal enjoyment that accompanies watching a sport with which one is intimately familiar. So I return to autobiography. Suburban kids now seem to be introduced to soccer as a matter of course. (Hence the specter of the American “soccer mom” looming large over pollsters and politicos everywhere.) When I was in elementary school back in the 70s, however, soccer was only beginning to be touted as the next thing to come. Some day soon, we were told, everyone would be kicking checkered balls, right about the same time as we would be measuring things in metric. The great metric conversion never came. And by the time soccer camps and leagues sprung up I was very much into other things. I simply never developed the self-transcending pleasure watching soccer that I did with other sports.

I tend not to think my own history is that unique, so I doubt that many Americans of my generation did either. While I am interested in the interest in the World Cup, therefore, the tournament itself leaves me bored.

The first part of this essay can be found here.

Inevitably, the exaltation and dreams of unity that she harbored during the Sixties were to disappoint Sontag, as they did everyone else. She was going to have to come down from those heights and find her own version of Zagajewski’s soft landing. And that is another thing that makes Susan Sontag so remarkable. At her most exalted, writing in 1968, just after returning from Hanoi, she says:

“I recognized a limited analogy to my present state in Paris in early July when, talking to acquaintances who had been on the barricades in May, I discovered they don’t really accept the failure of their revolution. The reason for their lack of ‘realism’, I think, is that they’re still possessed by the new feelings revealed to them during those weeks—those precious weeks in which vast numbers of ordinarily suspicious, cynical urban people, workers and students, behaved with an unprecedented generosity and warmth and spontaneity toward each other. In a way, then, the young veterans of the barricades are right in not altogether acknowledging their defeat, in being unable fully to believe that things have returned to pre-May normality, if not worse. Actually it is they who are being realistic. Someone who has enjoyed new feelings of that kind—a reprieve, however brief, from the inhibitions on love and trust this society enforces—is never the same again. In him, the ‘revolution’ has just started, and it continues. So I discover that what happened to me in North Vietnam did not end with my return to America, but is still going on.”

The world did return to normalcy, if not worse. But Sontag didn’t indulge in the outright lunacy of the New Left as it spiraled off into fantasyland. (Though she did endorse something of the mood of the New Left in one of her less successful and rather more hysterical essays “What’s Happening in America? (1966).” Still, when the chips were down she didn’t take that path. She kept her head.)

And the hint as to how she kept her cool is already there in the above passage. Her commitment to the integrity of the individual mind was a buttress for her. The solid structure of her mental edifice, built with that sternness of pleasure she never abandoned, allowed her to come in for a soft landing while people like the Situationists or the Yippies or The Weathermen floundered or came apart at the seams.

More than that, she was able to recognize her own missteps and rethink her exaltation. Even as she continued to lament the way in which her new experiences were sullied and her new consciousness never came to pass, she realized that much of its promise, especially in its political variants, had been an illusion. Increasingly in her essays in the Eighties and Nineties she celebrated the writers and artists of Central and Eastern Europe who fought the disaster of the ‘revolution’. In 1997, she was to write, “Intellectuals responsibly taking sides, and putting themselves on the line for what they believe in . . . are a good deal less common than intellectuals taking public positions either in conscious bad faith or in shameless ignorance of what they are pronouncing on: for every Andre Gide or George Orwell or Norberto Bobbio or Andrei Sakharov or Adam Michnik, ten of Romain Rolland or Ilya Ehrenburg or Jean Buadrillard or Peter Handke, et cetera, et cetera.”

She came to see that communism in Vietnam had been a lie and a farce, even as the Vietnamese resistance to the American war machine had been noble and just. She went to Bosnia again and again and never, for even a moment, indulged in the repellant apologies for Serbian nationalism that many of her colleagues on the Left dishonored themselves with. In fact, she always saw Europe and North America’s failure in Bosnia as another manifestation of the shallow interest in material happiness and comfort.

Such a vapid happiness was not what Sontag was referring to in her quest for difficult pleasure.

***

This is not to say that she was happy about politics and culture after the Sixties. Sometimes she was outright despondent. Sometimes she felt she had been tricked. She marveled how her own arguments had come back to haunt her. Things that she had advocated for in the Sixties were realized in ways completely contrary to her original intentions.

For instance in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation” (1962), she argued that criticism had become too Baroque. It was preventing immediate appreciation of things as things. So she made a call for transparence. “Transparence,” she said, “means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” And then notoriously, at the end of the essay, she proclaimed, “In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.”

Later, she came to realize that history had pulled something of a fast one on her. People did begin to appreciate, even worship, surface and appearance. Camp moved further into the mainstream. But it wasn’t happening in the way that Sontag intended. In a preface to Against Interpretation written in 1995 and entitled “Thirty Years Later . . .” she addressed the issue.

“It is not simply that the Sixties have been repudiated, and the dissident spirit quashed, and made the object of intense nostalgia. The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote–indeed, impose–the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons.”

She won a battle at the expense of the greater victory she was hoping for. There was a revolution in a sense, and a democratizing of culture. But Sontag realized that it wasn’t leading to pleasure, real pleasure. Instead, it led to a devaluation of the seriousness of intellect that Sontag took to be a prerequisite for genuine pleasure. In what she calls her own naiveté, Sontag, in the Sixties, made an appeal for changes that consumer culture was only too ready to provide during the next few decades. But those changes came as an empty package. Talking thirty years later about the essays of Against Interpretation, she says, “The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.”

In response to this cruel trick of history, Sontag did verge dangerously close to nostalgia on occasion. Perhaps that is understandable. Her problem was even more acute than the problem of the Central Europeans for whom she had such sensitivity. Central Europeans might look back with some wistfulness on the intense seriousness of the ‘bad old days’ but they were, still, the bad old days. For all of Sontag’s hesitation in identifying with the Sixties as a movement, it was during those years that she experienced her greatest pleasures in art and understanding. They weren’t bad old days at all for her.

And she felt that as she was getting older she was simultaneously witnessing the disappearance of much of what had given her the greatest pleasure. In 1988, she expressed this as a European elegy. Europe, to Sontag, always represented resistance to the tide of philistinism—she even calls it barbarity—that emanates from America and its consumer culture. She says, “The diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density of European culture constitute an Archimedean point from which I can, mentally, move the world.”

By the late Eighties, she believed that that Archimedean point was drifting away as Europe became more homogeneous and “Americanized”. Without naming it directly, her contempt for the idea of European integration (this, again, in 1988) is palpable. What she calls the ‘diversity’ of Europe is predicated, for Sontag, on preserving the differences that come with national and thereby cultural boundaries. But with all the language of preservation and loss, Sontag manages to rescue the essay from outright nostalgia. She recognized the malleability and relativity of the “idea of Europe”. The idea of Europe is at its most potent, she argued, when wielded by the Central and European intellectuals who used it, implicitly, as a critique of the Soviet domination they were resisting. But Sontag was also aware that the rallying cry of “Europe” was distinctly unpalatable when raised in Western Europe as a warning against the new immigration. This latter point has only become more incisive in recent years. As always, Sontag was ahead of the times.

Indeed, by the end of her lament for Europe, Sontag turns a corner. Having aired her grievances, she begins to move forward. She comes in for another soft landing. She begins to shift onto another battlefield, moving just as quickly as modern experience does. That quickness, that readiness to move at the pace in which new experiences present themselves allows her, in seeming paradox, to find what is solid and lasting in things. “The modern has its own logic,” she writes, “liberating and immensely destructive, by which the United States, no less than Japan and the rich European countries, is being transformed. Meanwhile, the center has shifted.”

Having started “The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)” by veering into a cultural conservatism that she spoke so eloquently against in her earliest essays, she manages to steer herself back into more Sontag-like territory. She is prepared to become an exile again, as she always was in the first place. Exiled in the sense that every intellect of integrity stands alone in the last instance, as a self. In asking what will happen next, as the greatness of Europe fades and transforms, Sontag refers to Gertrude Stein’s answer to those who wondered how she would deal with a loss of her roots. “Said Gertrude Stein, her answer perhaps even more Jewish than American: ‘But what good are roots if you can’t take them with you’.”

***

Susan Sontag always understood the melancholic personality lingering in the back alleys of modern consciousness. She understood the will to suicide in men like Walter Benjamin. She knew why Benjamin lived under the sign of Saturn and could write:

“The resistance which modernity offers to the natural productive élan of a person is out of proportion to his strength. It is understandable if a person grows tired and takes refuge in death. Modernity must be under the sign of suicide, an act which seals a heroic will . . . . It is the achievement of modernity in the realm of passions.”

Sontag understood the will to death and failure in Artaud. She understood the will to silence in Beckett and John Cage. Not only did she understand these things, she could write about them clearly, put her finger on them. She knew that Nietzsche’s prognostication about the coming nihilism had come to pass in much of the modern, and modernist, aesthetic she cherished so dearly.

She felt the exhaustion of the modern spirit. But she wasn’t exhausted by it. In her essay on Elias Canetti, “Mind as Passion,” she wrote the following;

“‘I want to feel everything in me before I think it’, Canetti wrote in 1943, and for this, he says, he needs a long life. To die prematurely means having not fully engorged himself and, therefore, having not used his mind as he could. It is almost as if Canetti had to keep his consciousness in a permanent state of avidity, to remain unreconciled to death. ‘It is wonderful that nothing is lost in a mind’, he also wrote in his notebook, in what must have been a not infrequent moment of euphoria, ‘and would not this alone be reason enough to live very long or even forever?’ Recurrent images of needing to feel everything inside himself, of unifying everything in one head, illustrate Canetti’s attempts through magical thinking and moral clamorousness to ‘refute’ death.”

Sontag is writing about Canetti but she is writing about Sontag too. As much as she measured and reported the pulse of an era in thought, art, morals, . . . as much as she eulogized its passing, she also stood for the brute continuation of life, of pleasure, and of joy. She’s dead now, but there is nothing that stimulates a desire to live more than reading one of her essays. If it so happens that we’re stumbling into an age of new seriousness and new sincerity we’re doing so partly because Susan Sontag showed us how important the world can be.

Justin E. H. Smith

[An extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing can be found at www.jehsmith.com]

Hamburg, Germany

I have just given a talk at the University of Hamburg in the Ernst Cassirer Memorial Lecture Series. What my hosts did not tell me when I was invited was that the event would coincide with some of the early matches of the World Cup, being hosted this year in (just my luck) Germany. I had come to Hamburg to discuss the legacy of Aristotle in the Protestant Reformation, but ended up being practically shut out by the nationwide roar accompanying the Poland-Germany match, with borderline hooligans –and as far as I’m concerned they’re all borderline hooligans– roving the streets shouting ‘Tor!’ as I droned on to an empty auditorium in poorly accented German about Martin Luther’s commentary on Genesis. Today I would like to explain why not just the victory of Germany over Poland, but also the victory in Europe of the drunken rabble over traditional piety, of the circus over the temple, is a thing to be bemoaned. I recognize that some in the 3QD community are ‘pumped’ about this year’s competition, and I do so hate to be a prick. But the fans among you may take comfort in the knowledge that I am grossly outnumbered, and that my quaint plaidoyer will assuredly come to nothing.

How, I want to know, does it manage to command such passions, this month of noise in which the outcome is known in advance? The winning team is of course not known in advance; what is known is that one or the other of them will win, according to inflexible rules that bind all of them equally. The only way the affair can amount to anything more than a mere stochastic process –as when atoms are bound to decay, even if we can’t say which ones– is if something goes terribly wrong, if some non-sportive interference breaks into the flow of events, some interference from the truly interesting domain of politics, a domain from which the fans like to sanctimoniously claim sports gives us a needed reprieve.

Thank God for the irruptions of the political, I say. Without them, there really would be no reason to pay attention to international athletic competitions. With them, we get bizarre reports of Iran’s soccer team being made to watch Sally Field in Not without my Daughter during their visit to France for the 1998 World Cup; we get a Cold War sublimated through doped-up East German shot-putters and 75-pound, slave-driven Chinese gymnasts. And we get Kim Jong Il at his zany best. In 1972, the now-Dear Leader gave a speech to the North Korean national soccer team: “It is very important to develop sports,” he declared. “Pointing out that physical culture is one of the means to strengthen the friendly relations with foreign countries, the great leader [Kim’s father, Kim Il Sung] said that physical culture should be developed. At present, however, the instructions of the great leader are not carried out to the letter in the sphere of physical culture, and sports exchange is not conducted properly, as required by the Party. A common example is the fact that our soccer players were defeated in the recent preliminaries for the Olympic Games.” Kim takes defeat as itself proof that the athletes are lapsing into counterrevolutionary laziness. Should this unsubtle hint that the higher- ups expect to start seeing some victories cause a bit of stress, the Dear Leader has a cure: “As for those whose nerves are on edge,” he assures the team, “they will get better if they live in tents on Rungna Islet.”

(Speaking of geopolitics, why is it that every time American football is brought up by, or in the company of, a European, an awkward apology has to be made for the sport’s name? There are millions of Americans who believe that what they watch on Sunday mornings is football, and as far as I understand language that is enough to make it so. Nor shall I make any apologies for calling soccer ‘soccer’. That is just what it is called where I am from, and to do any differently is nothing but an affectation, like spelling ‘color’ with a ‘u’, or saying ‘bloody’.)

With the end of the Cold War, for the most part sporting events are no longer about nationalism, but about transnational corporations. Nations either prove they can behave themselves, like the perpetually prostrate Germans, or they are not invited, like the North Koreans. An important part of good behavior is to allow yourself, your team, your stadium, and your country to be covered in advertisements.

The corporations have proved better than the old nation-states at pretending that what they are doing is not political. Rather, it is at its dreariest just business, and at its best downright fun. Nike and the other image-makers have convinced us that competitive sports are something that one gets involved in not for love of Fatherland, but for the sheer, personal enjoyment of it. To be Beckham, the suggestion is meant to be, would be to know a life of unmodulated, unadulterated joy.

I am a runner, and so I have no choice but to go into some of the same stores, and think some of the same thoughts, as soccer fans. I buy Nikes and knee-braces, and I run round municipal lakes and parks with athletes and fans of competitive sports. This is the closest I ever come to community with them. When I run in Germany I am often asked by these over-earnest folk, “Ah so, you like to make sport?” Yes, I want to say. Gern. It gives me great joy. It makes me feel like Beckham. With the right shoes on, and the right sport-beverage, I almost feel as though I’m in a commercial, as though I’m moving in slow-motion, as though the promise of the masses chanting ‘We will, we will rock you,’ is at long last coming true.

Bullshit. I run because I’m afraid of letting myself go, as they say, since to do so would be to allow the inevitable unraveling of this mortal coil to define the terms from here on out. It has nothing to do, in other words, with fun. It has to do with sheer terror. In a bygone era, there were many Germans who wrote with conviction and power about terror in the face of death. Now they ‘make sport’.

I do not spend all that much time in Germany, but somehow have managed to be here just in time for the past three World Cups. If it weren’t for these coincidences between my research and lecture schedule on the one hand, and the world’s athletic schedule on the other, I would have no idea of soccer beyond my youth-league misadventures. My first lessons about the World Cup were in 1998, when a gang of German hooligans rampaging outside a stadium in France ended up killing a French policeman. Helmut Kohl went on TV with utmost contrition. He noted, rightly and obviously, that this event brought back distressing memories of a still living history, and declared, wrongly, that this murder had nothing to do with the true spirit of competitive sports. The German people rushed to agree with him on both of these points. Might it be worth considering, though, that far from being the cancer cells of fandom, the hooligans are in fact the true fans, making explicit what it is all this shouting and side-taking is really all about? To wit, violence, in its mild form only vocal and gestural, but not for that reason categorically different from a kick in the shins or a brick in the head.

Heidegger liked to say that the ‘forgetfulness of Being’ that came with the rise of Western rational thought had its ultimate issue in Gerede or pointless small-talk. Heidegger was of course pumped up in his own idiotic way, but still it seems to me that there is something we may justly call ‘forgetful’ about sports fandom. There are, in marked contrast, many other things human beings do in order to come to terms with their fate, rather than to avoid it. These are, in their own way, the opposite of sports. I for my part would rather go to church, I would rather go to a funeral, than to invest one second of my attention in a staged contest between men, in the aftermath of which everything, but everything, is destined to remain the same.

I recently read the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan. I have to admit that in the proverbial sense, despite all the excellent reviews this book has received since its release last year, it really is very good. Near the end, Mr. McEwan’s plot started me thinking about issues related to medical ethics, patient-doctor relationships and the difference between cure and healing. The book tells the story of a Saturday in the life of a neurosurgeon. Right from the start, this weekend is quite extraordinary starting with the doctor chancing upon the sight of an exploding airplane from his bedroom window in the early morning hours and evolving into an increasingly macabre day, finally ending with the doctor and his family held hostage in their own home. Without wishing to divulge any crucial aspect of the plot in this exceptionally well researched and equally well written book, I would like to get to the part that I found thought provoking. In the course of the evening, the criminal who has singularly invoked the wrath of the good doctor by abusing his beloved wife and their twenty-something daughter, retains a head injury. The police and ambulances arrive and the abuser is rushed to the hospital under police custody. No sooner has the family finally soothed their frayed nerves enough to have a drink and think about the dinner they never had does the phone ring and a medical colleague on the line requests the doctor’s expert services urgently at the hospital. The criminal who was just brought in with the head injury is turning out to be a complicated case and therefore in need of greater expertise than what the inexperienced registrar on call could offer. In fact, the neurosurgeon is badly needed. The doctor who called of course has no idea of any connection between the neurosurgeon and the injured patient. The neurosurgeon decides to go and lend his expertise to save that miserable low life who only hours ago had desecrated all that was precious to him. Here is the problem. If he does not go, the man is likely to die. If he does go and operate, can he be trusted to save the life of a man who just a short time ago had inspired the deepest hatred and anger that the doctor was capable of feeling towards another human. Can the doctor be impartial?

I faced an interesting dilemma myself some years ago which made me question my own ability to be impartial. I had received a scientific grant to review from a Government agency. I read it, took detailed notes throughout, and formed a generally negative opinion of the grant. However, before I wrote the formal review, I decided to read it yet another time since something somewhere in the grant had left me feeling uneasy. Sure enough, I realized the source of my discomfort rather quickly upon the next read. There were several passages in one of the published papers sent as supplemental material with the proposal which were much too familiar. In fact, I recognized them as having been written by one of my post docs in a paper we had submitted for publication, and which had been turned down by the reviewers. Now at least we knew who the reviewer was. Apparently he disliked our paper enough to recommend rejection, but liked it enough to plagiarize parts of it. More importantly, we had subsequently submitted our paper to another journal where it was already accepted for publication and was in press. This meant that when our paper finally came out, it would contain passages that had already been published by another author and ironically enough, we are the ones who would appear to be the plagiarizers. Plagiarism is a serious offense and needed to be reported and of course I felt angry and violated. The question was whether I should send in my review of the grant anyway or not. Eventually, I decided to excuse myself from the review process, even though my negative opinion had been formed prior to the discovery of the plagiarized piece, because I did not wish to even give an appearance of a conflict of interest.

It is worthwhile at this point to recall the following Principles adopted by the American Medical Association. These are not laws, but standards of conduct which define the essentials of honorable behavior for the physician.

A physician shall be dedicated to providing competent medical care, with compassion and respect for human dignity and rights.

I. A physician shall uphold the standards of professionalism, be honest in all professional interactions, and strive to report physicians deficient in character or competence, or engaging in fraud or deception, to appropriate entities.

II. A physician shall respect the law and also recognize a responsibility to seek changes in those requirements which are contrary to the best interests of the patient.

III. A physician shall respect the rights of patients, colleagues, and other health professionals, and shall safeguard patient confidences and privacy within the constraints of the law.

IV. A physician shall continue to study, apply, and advance scientific knowledge, maintain a commitment to medical education, make relevant information available to patients, colleagues, and the public, obtain consultation, and use the talents of other health professionals when indicated.

V. A physician shall, in the provision of appropriate patient care, except in emergencies, be free to choose whom to serve, with whom to associate, and the environment in which to provide medical care.

VI. A physician shall recognize a responsibility to participate in activities contributing to the improvement of the community and the betterment of public health.

VII. A physician shall, while caring for a patient, regard responsibility to the patient as paramount.

VIII. A physician shall support access to medical care for all people.

Adopted by the AMA’s House of Delegates June 17, 2001.

Obviously, writing a negative grant review is not the same as saving a life, but the point is how each of our actions would be perceived given that they were performed while we functioned under a spell of psychic violation. Two important tenets of medical ethics are important in this context. In the words of Eric Issacs, M.D., Director of Quality Improvement, San Francisco General Hospital:

Beneficence: refers to acting in the best interests of the patients. This concept often is confused with nonmaleficence, or “do no harm.”

Veracity: is truth telling and honesty.

Clearly, as the only neurosurgeon on hand who could save the patient’s life, the doctor had no choice but to operate and therefore practiced beneficence. However, given the extraordinary circumstances under which the doctor was operating, it was all the more important for him to practice veracity. The patient was unconscious and there was no immediate family to whom he could have spoken, but there were other members of the medical staff and the operation theatre as well as the police escort. I think that under the extraordinary circumstances, the honorable thing to do would have been to practice full disclosure and then proceed with the operation to save the life of a fellow human.

Since the criminal had been caught, one can imagine that now the doctor could overcome his anger and afford to treat him only as a patient. The problem here is the paradox of cure and healing; the doctor may have been cured because the criminal was caught, but not healed. The doctor’s wife asks:

“You’re not thinking about doing something, about some kind of revenge, are you? I want you to tell me.”

“Of course not.”

The distinction between cure and healing is best summarized in this excellent passage by a real life good doctor, Abraham Verghese (“The Healing Paradox” The New York Times, 12-8-02): “If you were robbed one day, and if by the next day the robber was caught and all your goods returned to you, you would only feel partially restored; you would be cured but not healed, your sense of psychic violation would remain. Similarly, with illness, a cure is good, but we want the healing as well, we want the magic that good physicians provide with their personality, their empathy and their reassurance. Perhaps these were qualities that existed in the pre-penicillin days when there was little else to do. But in these days of gene therapy, increasing specialization, managed care and major time constraints, there is a tendency to focus on the illness, the cure, the magic of saving a life. Science needs to be more cognizant of the other magic, the healing if you will, even if we reach for the proven cures. We need to develop and refine that magic of the physician-patient relationship that complements the precise pharmacologic interventions we may prescribe; we need to ensure the wholeness of our encounter with patients; we need to not lose sight of the word “caring” in our care of the patient. And doggedly, in this fashion, one patient at a time, we can restore faith in the fantastic advance of Science we are privileged to witness”.

For a while now, sculpture and painting’s preeminence among the plastic arts has seemed a little anachronistic.  Painters such as Richter or Freud who stick to using paint to do two-dimensional figurations, or sculptors like Serra who stick to ‘raw’ materials like steel over the found objects that decorate so much installation art, feel classic or even old-fashioned.  After Pop art, art and photography that mix media became much more common: Gilbert and George, Lee Bontecou, landscape art, Bruce Nauman.  More recently, the materials of plastic art keep getting more worldly.  Witness the Young British Artists:  Rachel Whiteread (plaster casts of negative space), Chris Offili (dung), Marc Quinn (blood), the Chapmans (figurines), Tracy Emin (household materials and furniture).

While the world has been intruding into art’s materials, and art has been escaping the gallery (as with street art), I’ve been thinking about another development lately, one which leaves plasticity behind altogether: the use of computers, not just to create art, but as the subject of art as well.  For two or three years this field has been gathering momentum, and it feels like a generational shift.  There’s now a group of people approaching thirty who have grown up in an entirely novel social condition, that of having used computers all their lives, and for whom navigating the programmed landscapes of operating systems and icons is as natural as Wordsworth rambling the Lake District.  This is neither a good nor bad development, it’s history.  Anyway, I don’t believe in being too technologically determinist about kinds of art, but looking at the work of this group is incredibly exciting because the kinds of inquiries they make denaturalize and probe their environment, which in their case happens to be the space of computing.  They add computing to the world, and add the world to computing.

Let’s start with the celebrated Cory Arcangel.  Cory’s work usually uses obsolete game systems, computers, file formats, and other computing detritus as the basis for experiments and invasions.  His most famous work is “Super Mario Clouds,” in which he hacked a Super Mario Brothers cartridge to display only the blue sky and floating clouds, a work shown at the Whitney Biennial.  Other stuff includes a shooting game hacked to make Andy Warhol the target, with Flavor Flav and Col. Sanders the decoys;  matching Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter with ads from Google AdSense; rearranging the DVD chapter markers on ‘Simon and Garfunkel Live at Central Park’ to notate all the moments where they look like they hate each other; and so on.  Are you thinking this stuff is juvenile?  You’d be wrong, but in a way, you’d be right: Cory conserves the open-source ethos of young hackers, to the point of supplying instructions for how to replicate his most famous works. 

Cory’s instructions to “Super Mario Clouds” are a very strange and very fascinating kind of aesthetic document.  (They’re also funny.)  As it turns out, his manic methods are refreshingly low-tech, born of a taste for the ground floor of computing.  He writes a new set of instructions that uses the game’s existing graphics, compiles it (translates it into 1’s and 0’s, or assembly language), and burns it onto to the same chip that the original Nintendo uses (he has a chip burner used by Nissan hotrodders who use it to hack their engines).  Then things get even more basic: he takes the game cartridge, desolders and removes the program chip, and solders in his newly burned chip, cutting a hole in the plastic casing to fit it.  The result is a slightly haunting image of a glowing blue sky and those iconic Super Mario Clouds, floating right out of the collective imaginary.

You might wonder why Arcangel doesn’t just make the image on Photoshop; it would be a heckuva lot easier.   Here are his own learned and excitable words:

“A typical NES Cartridge has two chips. One is a graphics chip, and the other is a program chip. Basically the program chip tells the graphics chip where to put the graphics, and thus if you do this in a interesting manner, you have a video game. When making a “Super Mario Clouds” cartridge, I only modify the program chip, and I leave the graphic chip from the original game intact. Therefore since I do not touch the graphics from the original cartridge, the clouds you see are the actual factory soldered clouds that come on the Mario cartridge. There is no generation loss, and no “copying” because I did not even have to make a copy. Wasss up.”

See, these are the real “factory soldered” clouds, chief.  Surely one of the more bizarre yet convincing determinations of authenticity I’ve seen in a while, Cory expresses perfectly the thrill of using the actual relevant materials to create an artwork.  Simply Photoshopping the image would be fake, clearly, yet it’s hard to explain exactly why, a mark of art that applies itself to present conundrums.  Maybe the physical Nintendo cartridge matters because it’s the real physical object that inflected our world, and it’s important to use it, understand it, and work with it.

The first Palm Pilot was exciting to lots of computer geeks because its tiny memory meant ingenious little games were invented and shared, as they were in the initial stages of personal computing.  (I remember writing simple BASIC programs for my Atari 400 and saving them on cassette tapes, which I excitedly played to hear the “sound” of my code, not that I was ever a dork or anything.)  Arcangel returns to the obsolete technologies of his childhood, not as nostalgic fixations (he claims never to have liked playing Mario), but as an aesthetic embrace of the real.  Surrounded by these things, he developed an entirely artistic fixation with changing them, interfering with them, transforming them.  His work, over time, keeps getting simpler, showing how little it takes to get into the cracks of things that appear seamless, like hardware and operating systems.  He takes on challenges for the sake of curiousity: he recently calculated where the exact Manhattan center of Starbucks gravity is, and explained how.  What’s implicit is how just paying the right kind of attention keeps the world interesting, fully alive and of the moment.

The official art world has already begun to sanction this type of work, as the Whitney Biennial makes pretty clear, as well as a recent show at the slightly old-school Pace Wildenstein gallery, curated by Patricia Hughes and featuring Arcangel, Brody Condon, the collective Paper Rad, and others.  Another feature they seem to share is an eclecticism with respect to materials and genres: many of them make music as well as art, and all seem to be feeding off of the whole range of waste-products of consumer obsolescence, rotting eighties junk that begs to be categorized and indexed.  Underneath a lot of this work is a desire for mastery, for lost comprehension, that’s so hard to satisfy in the present condition of unprecedented epistemological overload and confusion.  Cory again:

“We [BEIGE, Cory’s art/music collective] started using fixed architecture machines, computers which are no longer being developed, at this time because it is impossible to keep up with commercial software and hardware. Imagine trying to play Bach on the piano if they switched keys around every few years … and charged you for it! Plus the limited capabilities of these computers allows us to understand every aspect of the machine.”

Hence the attraction to precisely the limitations of older systems.  To take another recent example, have a look at this short animation from Michael Bell-Smith, entitled “Keep On Moving (Don’t Stop).”  The use of the squarish graphical template of early role-playing games has a similarly aesthetic, as opposed to nostalgic, motivation to that of Arcangel’s work.  It’s got the immersion in music too: yellow is color of sunrays.  The cheery quest followed by the recursive, fractal surprise at the end – trapped! – suggests the computer game as a new locale of the culture industry, appropriating all attempts to escape.  Adorno would have liked to have predicted it, but here the feeling isn’t as dour, it’s more pragmatic: we’re stuck with this world, so let’s transform it.  This topos isn’t chosen because of fondness, this is part of the air, part of the world and how we represent ourselves now.  And because computer avatarship is inescapable, it’s all the more important to subject computing to an aesthetic investigation.  I’ve seen works by the macro-photographer Andreas Gursky and the miniaturist painter Shazia Sikander that use computer animation, but this current group goes further.  They make art, not just using computers as a engineering tool, but out of and delving into computing as a cultural form.

See some more Dispatches.