June 30, 2003

Moral Hazard

Exactly what incentives is this giving Tom Ridge? Seems like he would be less likely to do a good job with this carrot dangling out there.

Irony: A Field Guide

The final irony

A Pretty Little War

Icon War

June 29, 2003

From Bauhaus to Our House

From Bauhaus to Our House
Tom Wolfe

This is the last of three Me Decade books (OK, this was written in 1981, but it still reeks of Carter-malaise and is entirely Reagan-morning-in-America-free) of social criticism written by Tom Wolfe, and it shows. While still identifiably and enjoyably Wolfe, he is getting a bit exhausted. He freely cannibalizes the previous two works (Painted Word and Radical Chic). Whereas in Painted Word, it was the modern art critics whose theories turned in “ever-decreasing concentric circles” before disappearing into their “fundamental aperture”; here it is the modern architecture theorists, and so on.

This book is flatter, less clean, but nonetheless as insightful as the other two. It also, at 111 pages with lots of pictures, spacing and margins, weighs in at the same punching weight as its brethren.

Wolfe delves into the question of why we, the greatest, stompingest, most extravagant nation in the history of nations, have been afflicted with a sparse, Spartan, non-celebratory, neutered architecture of “glass boxes” piled high.

Wolfe ably traces the ailment back to a gaggle of Dieters in German architecture in the 1920s. They’d invented a holistic theory of building buildings that were theoretically pure, beautiful, and consistent, and also rejected such frivolities as how much space, air, light, ornament, and decoration actual living people wanted in their buildings. These theories became immensely popular in the States when their progenitors crossed the pond as war refugees and were quickly installed in the high seats of architecture academe.

Preparing the way for this Coming of the White Gods, was Philip Johnson as John the Baptist. The 26-year-old Johnson and colleague spread the gospel in the form of a 1932 Met show saluting the Europeans:

“Museum catalogue copy, which is a species of forced labor or gun-at-the-temple scholarship, is notorious for its sophistry, when it isn’t patent nonsense. But “The International Style” was literature of a higher order. It shone… with the hallucinatory clarity of a Church of Galilee Walker handbill. The two men were baying at a silvery, princely moon.”

Wolfe presents the battles rather nicely, but it seems that this sliver of a book isn’t up to the size of its task. Unlike Radical Chic, which dealt with the smarmy inhabitants of a couple square miles of northern Manhattan; and Painted Word, whose art world coterie is perhaps 10,000 strong; architecture implicitly encompasses the several million structures erected in the United States each year. And Wolfe, while focusing on a handful of those architect critics, never does quite connect how much or how little impact this hand on the country – it seems as if the theories inflicted on us a few ugly wimpy showcase buildings in each urban center, but is that really perfidy, or simply part of the grand experiment of America?

All in all, $11.16 for a long magazine article that does not quite comprehensively survey sixty years of architecture might be a bit rich for y’all. If you’re a completist, an architect, or a ravenous Tom Wolfian, then this book is for you. If not, then you’d most likely be sufficiently satisfied sticking with his superior “Radical Chic.”

The Painted Word

Radical Chic
Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe’s singular brand of commentary reached it sharp, devastating pinnacle in this biting portrait of that pitiable creature – the wealthy white liberal. With verve, a strong metaphorical flourish, and a ready ability to move the story forward, Wolfe finely details a party that was intended to embody the ethos of an era, and unwittingly did.

This party on January 14, 1970 (Woodstock and the flag on the moon are dissipating euphorium; Altamont is a fresh bruise) brings crafty, radical, violent Black Panthers into the lair of America’s great conductor Leonard Bernstein for a fund-raiser.

It’s all here: the saccharine philosophizing, the goofy earnestness, the willful suspension of reasoning, even the seeds of the increasingly acrimonious relationship between America’s blacks and Jews.

Wolfe adroitly draws the scene for us:

“[Black Panther speaker] Cox seizes the moment: ‘Our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, has said if we can’t find a meaningful life.. you know… maybe we can have a meaningful death… and one reason the power structure fears the Black Panthers is that they know the Black Panthers are ready to die for what they believe in, and a lot of us have already died.’
Lenny seems like a changed man. He looks up at Cox and says, ‘When you walk into this house, into this building’ – and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doormen downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front – “when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!’
Cox looks embarrasses. ‘No, man… I manage to overcome that… That’s a personal thing…’…
‘Well,’ says Lenny, ‘it makes me mad!’

The self-loathing, the fashionable decrial of one’s own self, yet the never quite-so-brave as to deny it. As this is a short, short work, I can’t reveal too much more without giving away the entire plotline, which is awfully enjoyable for you to watch unfold.

I will say that this is Tom Wolfe writing at its boldest, full-throated best. Wolfe has a way of fetishizing a particular object and using it to illuminate the differences among his subjects. He does this to great effect here with the “Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed crumbs” mentioned above, and it is a delight to watch this talented polemicist run this device through its paces.

All the blurbs on the back of this book deem this a “sociological” work, which must have been a Word-in-Vogue at the time of its publishing. This is a hell of a lot more interesting than any sociology, and more important in its way too.

Now, let’s be clear on what you’re getting here – this is basically a long magazine article that even with small book format, generous margins and gutter-sized line spacing only runs to four score and two pages. Hence the need to include the entirely adequate “Mau-mauing the Flak-catchers” to bulk it up to a more decorous triple-digit page count.

Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable, easy-breezy read that you can knock off on a short plane ride. I read it in conjunction with Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House over a weekend, and I’d suggest getting all three.

This is probably Wolfe’s best work as a pamphleteer and certainly his most famous. A fine, devious, dramatic work, this little tome will please the lover of politics, culture, gossip or Americana

The Next Big Lewis

Wall Street-ers are taking up the pen. What I like most about the writing though is how the author pokes fun at the writing style in a way the author himself will never catch on to.

June 25, 2003

Reflexive technologies

Interesting reflections on the interaction between our bodies and our technologies.

a) reminds me of The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins, in which the tools, houses, social relations of humans are viewed as extensions and manifestations of the genotype (much as the beaver's dam, and subsequent pond, are expressions of its genotype)
b) there was an article 8 years ago on how every advance in technology didn’t really change the amount of time we spent on something. i.e., people still spend, say, 8 hours writing a 10-page term paper, they just make more correctable typos and paragraph reorderings.
c) ...like the 'study' that showed urban-dwellers have commuted on average 30 minutes to and from work since 500 B.C.

June 22, 2003

The case in Iraq

A very even-handed, level account of what is going on in Iraq these days. Some good, some bad.

June 20, 2003

Your Graphic Guide

This is Mark Glaser's Guide to the Blogosphere, which provides a very nice summary of Who's Who for Whom.

June 18, 2003

History of Spam

Of course, you coudl've guessed it... Monty Python is behind it.

The New Treo

Is it love, or is it lust? The Treo 600 rocks.

June 17, 2003

Third World Entrepreneur

BBC NEWS | Business | Dot.com tycoon turns to Africa

June 16, 2003

Helpful User's Manuals

The Emoticon -> RealLife Conversion Manual

Human Population Trends

Look at the tremendous explosion of world population at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

June 04, 2003

The Credit Card Prank

One person's quest: How crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice?

June 02, 2003

Geneticists

This is an interesting site.

Paint it Free

What will happen when 20,000 people go free?

Adaptation in Human Populations

The evolutionary results of an aquatic environment:

Moken children can distinguish underwater objects less than 1.5 millimetres wide; Europeans struggle to make out anything less than 3 mm across1, biologist Anna Gislén of Lund University, Sweden, and her colleagues found.

"They use the optics of the eye to the limits of what is [humanly] possible," says Gislén. The team compared the sub-aqua vision of native Moken and holidaying European kids, aged 7-14 years.

Read the big story, it's good.

June 01, 2003

The Evolution of Human Mating: Trade-Offs and Strategic Pluralism

It's late on a Sunday night and I seemed to be focused on sex:

During human evolutionary history, there were "trade-offs" between expending time and energy on child-rearing and mating, so both men and women evolved conditional mating strategies guided by cues signalling the circumstances. For some men, many short-term matings might be successful, whereas others might try to find and keep a single mate, investing effort in rearing her offspring. Recent evidence suggests that men with features signalling genetic benefits to offspring should be preferred by women as short-term mates, but there are trade-offs between a mates genetic fitness and his willingness to help in child-rearing. It is circumstances and the cues that signal them that underlie the variation in short and long-term mating strategies between and within the sexes.

You can read the whole thing.

Mate Choice and Gender Roles

An intersting exploration of mate choice and its implication for gender roles. Species with higher levels of male care for their young have opposite gender role constructs.