Earlier this year, I wrote a post about Schwarzgerat, a rock opera adaptation of Gravity’s Rainbow by the band The Fundament.
Yesterday, I received word from (Fundament bandmember) Tom that they’ve uploaded a new & improved version. Go forth and listen.
Stephen Hawking, writing for the Daily Mail1, describes how to build a time machine.
An eight-minute video that goes about proving—and does so in an extremely compelling, entirely unscientific way—that we’re all pretty apelike.
In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.
Possibly a crazy, underhanded initiative associated with Project MKULTRA?
Download/listen to the full set.
One of my very favorite things is getting even better.1
An extended, freeform rumination on Lyari, Karachi, Pakistan, of prices paid, ambition, pain, despondency and, yes, amateur boxing. Absolutely stunning. Written by Maniza Naqvi.
What happens when you add water, a silicone surface and a laser? Gravity-defying water, apparently:
[P]rofessor Chunlei Guo and his assistant Anatoliy Vorobyev demonstrate that by carving intricate patterns in silicon with extremely short, high-powered laser bursts, they can get liquid to climb to the top of a silicon chip like it was being sucked through a straw.
A very interesting read in the latest issue of GQ: Robert Baer—the former CIA officer on whom George Clooney’s character in Syriana was based—writes an elegy for the dying art of espionage.
The late anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, writing in Tristes Tropiques:
My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.
Dan Videl unpacks it, then injects it into a rumination on Tino Sehgal’s recent exhibition at the Guggenheim. Via Robert Cottrell.
There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. The debate over healthcare has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.
I’d like to record some thoughts about President Obama’s recent interview with Fox News Channel host Bret Baier1 before they’re lost down the memory hole.
Above all else, what struck me was Baier’s tenacious fixation on what could be called the process of healthcare reform. Which is to say, the closed-door meetings. The numbers. The kickbacks.
Baier repeatedly asked the President about particular things included in the gargantuan, 1990-page House bill, and did so in the terse insider-speak preferred by insiders and conspiracy theorists. Things like, “So the Connecticut deal is still in?” And, “OK, the Florida deal, in or out?” Obama seemed rankled by this crass oversimplification of things. So was I.
But in the wake of the so-called Cornhusker Kickback, such catchall terms have gained significant currency—especially in the cable news format, where making use of shorthand to describe incredibly complex concepts makes sense. It also makes sense in a blogging format. After all, I’ve done it here. I cannot reasonably expect a reader who has not followed the issue these past six months to understand nonsense like ‘Cornhusker Kickback.’ And I can’t spare the vertical space to treat this post as if it the very first dispatch from the center of the HCR storm.
Which is why the notion that a short television interview—an interview in which journalist and subject spent the full 19 minutes in antlers-fully-locked position—would be sufficient to explain a 1990-page bill, not to mention the flurry of developments that have emerged since HR2932 was unveiled in November, is absurd.
An example. Baier asked Obama to answer some viewer-submitted questions. Here’s one sent by Sandy Moody in Chesterfield, Missouri: “If the health care bill is so wonderful, why do you have to bribe Congress to pass it?”
A political science professor could spend a semester lecturing on such a subject, no?
There was a time when Obama would have relished such an opportunity. His professorial bent has been well-documented. He spent much of 2009 referencing how to bend the cost curve, and how to close the doughnut hole. But the 2010 Obama has made a return to the spirit of the bill. He has made an effort to channel the sort of anecdotal electioneering that the Republicans have made famous. Rather than force people to consider an abstract whole, Obama has chosen to ask them to simply consider themselves.
Of course, the Republicans have done the opposite. They’ve turned their focus to the trees, as it were, instead of the forest. Human misery has been displaced by budgetary paranoia.
There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. I believe we’ve reached that moment. The healthcare debate has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.2 It can no longer be unpacked or disentangled.
Where do you go from there?
In essence—and this is the point I’ve been approaching, slowly—the conflict is really over how easily the nuts and bolts of the issue have been slipped into a black box. Republican leaders have been quick to observe that the bill’s deliberations were supposed to have been televised on C-SPAN. Instead, they lament, much of it has taken form behind closed office doors.
It was a nice thought. However, considering the decentralized and often concurrent nature of such meetings, filming it all—and cutting the mountain of footage into a format understandable by human beings—would have been, at best, a logistical nightmare. At worst, it would have been impossible.
Black boxes are inherently polarizing. You either understand the appeals and shortcomings—i.e. average people do not need to replace the hard drive of their iPhone—or you reject the very notion of trusting that there are planets spinning outside the scope of your personal narrative.
Never has that juddering tension been more keenly felt than during Wednesday’s interview.■
In 1984, artist WIll Insley exhibited ONECITY, an “‘imagininary, 650-square-mile labyrinth,’ designed without regard for the ‘utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.’”
The corresponding NY Times article.
Check out the BLDGBLOG post for lots of great pictures that (regrettably) do little to clarify the concept.
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