Thursday, May 30, 2013
Welcome to the Real Space Age
At dawn one morning last November—just as the edge of Earth comprising Florida spun into the field of light bursting from roughly 93 million miles away—she emerged one last time from the monstrous doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building, twelve stories long but dwarfed. This was what had been billed as the “final mission” of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, a 9.8-mile journey to her final resting place at the Kennedy Space Center’s visitors’ complex. That Atlantis’s journey would begin at the VAB—525 feet tall, the largest single-story structure in the world, having sprouted a half-century ago in the frenzy of the space race, as stupendous an achievement as each of the space-faring rockets that would be assembled inside it—multiplied the emotion.
Very far away, still sheathed in its massive launch-apparatus exoskeleton, one could make out Launchpad 39A, site of the historic Apollo 11 moonwalking blastoff, where Atlantis had also taken off to orbit the Earth, once more and finally, in 2011, marking the last in NASA’s 30-year-old shuttle program. The other surviving orbiters, Discovery and Endeavor, had already completed their extraordinary processionals to museums in northern Virginia and Los Angeles (the latter requiring hundreds of trees cut and roadways reconfigured to accommodate its size). A throng of personnel was on hand, those who had built and maintained and flown her, including some of the 7,000 whose jobs were ending with the program. With signs and T-shirts that read WE LOVE YOU ATLANTIS and THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES and WE MADE HISTORY, they fell in behind her. Many wiped away tears as she crept along at two miles an hour, past the dense, still swampland that had, many times before, exploded along with her, the alligators and pigs and birds flushing at her ignition, the fish heaving themselves from the water, the light from the trail of fire flashing from their scales.
Now the procession was funereal. For NASA’s public-relations machine, desperate to engage Americans’ notoriously fickle interest, it would amount to an odd victory: Stories about Atlantis’s retirement appeared in media outlets across the globe, all written as obituaries. The events of the following evening were equally bleak: A formal dinner at the nearby Radisson commemorating the mission of Apollo 17, whose lunar module had closed its hatch 40 years earlier and ferried the last man back from the moon. In attendance were ten surviving Apollo astronauts, an extraordinary group to say the least, the only men to have traveled to the moon, now gray-haired or bald. Their fears for the nation’s space future were well aired; many of them—including the famously reticent Neil Armstrong, whose recent death had cast a significant pall—had written letters to President Obama saying his space policy portended the nation’s “long downhill slide to mediocrity.” Just as China rushes to land on the moon by the end of this decade, the astronauts noted ruefully, the U.S. is now essentially vehicleless. For a taxpayer-funded fare of almost $71 million per seat, American astronauts are now taxied to the International Space Station by their former archenemies, the Russians, aboard the old, reliable Soyuz rockets against which NASA once raced. The delivery of cargo is now outsourced to private companies. In a tear-stained column titled “In an Earthbound Era, Heaven Has to Wait,” the Times’s Frank Bruni said that for Americans already “profoundly doubtful” and “shaken,” the shuttle’s end “carries the force of cruel metaphor, coming at a time when limits are all we talk about. When we have no stars in our eyes.”
All of which made the scene I’d observed in a desert town in southern New Mexico a week earlier even more exceptional.
In a landscape redolent of Mars, a group of scientists, many of them young NASA astronauts recently decamped to private industry, practically evangelized about this very moment: Unbeknownst to most of the world, after decades of failed Jetsons-esque promises of individual jetpacks for all, people—civilians, you and me, though with a good deal more means—are finally about to ascend to the heavens. If the twentieth-century space race was about the might of the American government, the emerging 21st-century space age is about something perhaps even more powerful—the might of money. The necessary technology has converged in the hands of a particularly boyish group of billionaires whose Right Stuff is less hard-boiled test-pilot, more high-tech entrepreneuring wunderkind—and whose individual financial means eclipse those of most nations. A massive industry is coalescing around them. Towns and states and even some countries are fighting one another for a piece of it. In New Mexico, workers are putting the finishing touches on the first of at least ten spaceports currently under construction around the world. More than 800 people have paid as much as $200,000 apiece to reserve seats on commercial flights into space, some of which are expected to launch, at long last, within a year. Space-travel agents are being trained; space suits are being designed for sex appeal as much as for utility; the founder of the Budget hotel chain is developing pods for short- and long-term stays in Earth’s orbit and beyond. Over beers one night, a former high-ranking NASA official, now employed by Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin transportation conglomerate, put it plainly: “We happen to be alive at the moment when humanity starts leaving the planet.”
Very far away, still sheathed in its massive launch-apparatus exoskeleton, one could make out Launchpad 39A, site of the historic Apollo 11 moonwalking blastoff, where Atlantis had also taken off to orbit the Earth, once more and finally, in 2011, marking the last in NASA’s 30-year-old shuttle program. The other surviving orbiters, Discovery and Endeavor, had already completed their extraordinary processionals to museums in northern Virginia and Los Angeles (the latter requiring hundreds of trees cut and roadways reconfigured to accommodate its size). A throng of personnel was on hand, those who had built and maintained and flown her, including some of the 7,000 whose jobs were ending with the program. With signs and T-shirts that read WE LOVE YOU ATLANTIS and THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES and WE MADE HISTORY, they fell in behind her. Many wiped away tears as she crept along at two miles an hour, past the dense, still swampland that had, many times before, exploded along with her, the alligators and pigs and birds flushing at her ignition, the fish heaving themselves from the water, the light from the trail of fire flashing from their scales.
Now the procession was funereal. For NASA’s public-relations machine, desperate to engage Americans’ notoriously fickle interest, it would amount to an odd victory: Stories about Atlantis’s retirement appeared in media outlets across the globe, all written as obituaries. The events of the following evening were equally bleak: A formal dinner at the nearby Radisson commemorating the mission of Apollo 17, whose lunar module had closed its hatch 40 years earlier and ferried the last man back from the moon. In attendance were ten surviving Apollo astronauts, an extraordinary group to say the least, the only men to have traveled to the moon, now gray-haired or bald. Their fears for the nation’s space future were well aired; many of them—including the famously reticent Neil Armstrong, whose recent death had cast a significant pall—had written letters to President Obama saying his space policy portended the nation’s “long downhill slide to mediocrity.” Just as China rushes to land on the moon by the end of this decade, the astronauts noted ruefully, the U.S. is now essentially vehicleless. For a taxpayer-funded fare of almost $71 million per seat, American astronauts are now taxied to the International Space Station by their former archenemies, the Russians, aboard the old, reliable Soyuz rockets against which NASA once raced. The delivery of cargo is now outsourced to private companies. In a tear-stained column titled “In an Earthbound Era, Heaven Has to Wait,” the Times’s Frank Bruni said that for Americans already “profoundly doubtful” and “shaken,” the shuttle’s end “carries the force of cruel metaphor, coming at a time when limits are all we talk about. When we have no stars in our eyes.”
All of which made the scene I’d observed in a desert town in southern New Mexico a week earlier even more exceptional.
In a landscape redolent of Mars, a group of scientists, many of them young NASA astronauts recently decamped to private industry, practically evangelized about this very moment: Unbeknownst to most of the world, after decades of failed Jetsons-esque promises of individual jetpacks for all, people—civilians, you and me, though with a good deal more means—are finally about to ascend to the heavens. If the twentieth-century space race was about the might of the American government, the emerging 21st-century space age is about something perhaps even more powerful—the might of money. The necessary technology has converged in the hands of a particularly boyish group of billionaires whose Right Stuff is less hard-boiled test-pilot, more high-tech entrepreneuring wunderkind—and whose individual financial means eclipse those of most nations. A massive industry is coalescing around them. Towns and states and even some countries are fighting one another for a piece of it. In New Mexico, workers are putting the finishing touches on the first of at least ten spaceports currently under construction around the world. More than 800 people have paid as much as $200,000 apiece to reserve seats on commercial flights into space, some of which are expected to launch, at long last, within a year. Space-travel agents are being trained; space suits are being designed for sex appeal as much as for utility; the founder of the Budget hotel chain is developing pods for short- and long-term stays in Earth’s orbit and beyond. Over beers one night, a former high-ranking NASA official, now employed by Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin transportation conglomerate, put it plainly: “We happen to be alive at the moment when humanity starts leaving the planet.”
by Dan P. Lee, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic
Making His Life the Party
On a recent Thursday night, go-go girls in silky white capes swung from on high, as art heavyweights like Larry Gagosian and Simon de Pury mixed with fashion celebrities like Vera Wang and Tory Burch, and waiters in crisp white shirts and skinny black ties passed through the room with trays of Dom Pérignon.
Socialites from the old order (Gigi Mortimer and Ghislaine Maxwell) blended seamlessly with those of the new (Nicky Hilton and Hannah Bronfman). Bono talked Knicks with Vito Schnabel. Tony Shafrazi, another art dealer, showed up late with Owen Wilson.
Yet none of the luminaries commanded more attention than Aby Rosen, the developer and bon vivant, who was celebrating his 53rd birthday. Pointedly underdressed in a black T-shirt, Mr. Rosen was gyrating on the dance floor to Kool and the Gang, silver hair flowing, fist in the air. At midnight, a shower of gold confetti rained from overheard. An attempt to raise a celebratory glass devolved into a shirt-drenching Champagne fight, with Mr. Rosen, happily the loser, dripping in the middle of it.
“If you give a party,” Mr. Rosen said in his Kissingerian growl, “you better give it right.”
Consider that a mantra.
Propelled by a bearish charm and a provocateur’s sensibility, Mr. Rosen, the son of a small-scale developer from Frankfurt, has thrust himself into roles typically reserved for scions of New York’s leading families. He is a real estate titan whose company controls the crown jewels of modernism, the Seagram Building and Lever House, and an art collector with 800 postwar gems, including 100-plus Warhols. He is a regular on the charity circuit, particularly since being named chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts, a post formerly held by Kitty Carlisle Hart.
He is married to a pillar of New York society, Samantha Boardman. Dinner invitations to the couple’s 14-room home on Fifth Avenue — opulently furnished with Warhols, Basquiats and Calders — are highly coveted, with the guest list ranging from Barbara Walters to Alex Rodriguez to the Harvard professor Steven Pinker. Attendees say that the star wattage radiates equally from the guests and hosts. “They’re the ones with active minds,” said the artist Rachel Feinstein, who, with her husband, the painter John Currin, is a frequent guest. “They seek him out, he seeks them out.”
But what Aby Rosen really wants to be is a party boy, to judge by his latest endeavor. He already owns a celebrity-packed clubhouse restaurant in Midtown, a fashionable hotel in Gramercy Park and a glassy resort in South Beach that rages during Art Basel Miami Beach. Unknown to most of his birthday guests, his most ambitious foray into night life was under their feet — the $20 million revival of the Diamond Horseshoe, a legendary nightclub in the basement of the Paramount Hotel that was immortalized in the 1945 musical film of the same name starring Betty Grable as the headlining showgirl.
Set to open this fall, the Diamond Horseshoe, as envisioned by Mr. Rosen, will be a new night-life concept: a Dalí-like mix of high art and camp, theater and circus, audacity and calculation. In other words, Aby Rosen at his essence.
“I wake up every morning and I think, ‘You know what, I’m a lucky bastard,’ ” Mr. Rosen said, creeping through traffic in the back seat of a black Mercedes S-class on a recent afternoon.
by Alex Williams, NY Times | Read more:
Yana Paskova for The New York Times
New Flickr: Vast Space for Storage, at No Cost
If you ever want to see just how much whining a million Interneters can produce, try giving them something wonderful at no charge.
Take Flickr, for example, the Web site that Yahoo bought in 2005. Its central concept was cool and useful: It’s an online gallery of everyone’s photographs that the whole world can search, annotate and admire. It’s a place to study photography, to applaud good work by fellow camera buffs, to back up all those precious JPEGs, and to post a photographic record of weddings, vacations and other achievements for friends and families to enjoy.
Flickr was disappointing, however, for two reasons. First, the free account permitted you to display only your 200 most recent photos. The $25-a-year Pro account offered unlimited space.
Second, Flickr was ugly, cramped and baffling. It seemed to display your pictures in only two sizes: tiny square thumbnails (which made no sense — how many photos are perfectly square?) and full size. It took a lot of clicking and experimenting to navigate. And good luck figuring out how to download a photo; the process was so nonintuitive and buried, it could have been a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
Last week, the new Flickr was born. First, the good news: Every free account holder gets one terabyte of storage. That is an insane, historic, vast amount of space. That’s enough room for about 600,000 typical photos, enough to last you the next couple of birthday parties, at least.
That’s 70 times the free space of the next closest competitor, Google Drive. And those are full resolution photos, too — the originals. Flickr doesn’t compress photos, degrading their quality, the way Facebook does.
Flickr, in other words, is no longer just a way to present photos to your admirers. (Indeed, it’s easy to keep them private, or share them only with family or friends.) It’s now an excellent way simply to back them up. An external drive for this purpose costs about $100 — and is worthless in case of fire or burglary. Yahoo is giving you that backup space for nothing.
(Most photo software, like iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom, can send pictures directly to Flickr, or you can upload huge batches using various free Mac or Windows apps. If disaster ever strikes, you may be alarmed to discover that Flickr offers no way to download photos en masse — only one photo at a time. Fortunately, free programs and Web sites like Bulkr or flickandshare.com make bulk downloading from Flickr a piece of cake.)
And now the other good news: Flickr’s redesign is, on the whole, a gigantic improvement. The primary screens are wall-to-wall photos. Not weensy little thumbnails, but big, four-inch-wide representations, tiled to fill your entire browser window, scrolling down and down and down. Point to one to view its title, photographer, and the Favorite and Comment buttons.
This is an incredibly successful way to give you an overview of a set of pictures. They’re big enough to see clearly (unlike the old thumbnails), yet small enough to take in hundreds without having to click to another page. For a visitor who wants to see your shots of some place, person or event, these scrolling views offer a quick, satisfying way to get the (ahem) big picture.
This display is especially effective in displaying panoramic photos, of the sort that, for example, the iPhone and Sony cameras can create automatically. Finally, they get the full-screen-width treatment they deserve.
All right, so the new Flickr is generous and lovely. Then, why are longtime members screaming bloody murder?
Take Flickr, for example, the Web site that Yahoo bought in 2005. Its central concept was cool and useful: It’s an online gallery of everyone’s photographs that the whole world can search, annotate and admire. It’s a place to study photography, to applaud good work by fellow camera buffs, to back up all those precious JPEGs, and to post a photographic record of weddings, vacations and other achievements for friends and families to enjoy.Flickr was disappointing, however, for two reasons. First, the free account permitted you to display only your 200 most recent photos. The $25-a-year Pro account offered unlimited space.
Second, Flickr was ugly, cramped and baffling. It seemed to display your pictures in only two sizes: tiny square thumbnails (which made no sense — how many photos are perfectly square?) and full size. It took a lot of clicking and experimenting to navigate. And good luck figuring out how to download a photo; the process was so nonintuitive and buried, it could have been a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
Last week, the new Flickr was born. First, the good news: Every free account holder gets one terabyte of storage. That is an insane, historic, vast amount of space. That’s enough room for about 600,000 typical photos, enough to last you the next couple of birthday parties, at least.
That’s 70 times the free space of the next closest competitor, Google Drive. And those are full resolution photos, too — the originals. Flickr doesn’t compress photos, degrading their quality, the way Facebook does.
Flickr, in other words, is no longer just a way to present photos to your admirers. (Indeed, it’s easy to keep them private, or share them only with family or friends.) It’s now an excellent way simply to back them up. An external drive for this purpose costs about $100 — and is worthless in case of fire or burglary. Yahoo is giving you that backup space for nothing.
(Most photo software, like iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom, can send pictures directly to Flickr, or you can upload huge batches using various free Mac or Windows apps. If disaster ever strikes, you may be alarmed to discover that Flickr offers no way to download photos en masse — only one photo at a time. Fortunately, free programs and Web sites like Bulkr or flickandshare.com make bulk downloading from Flickr a piece of cake.)
And now the other good news: Flickr’s redesign is, on the whole, a gigantic improvement. The primary screens are wall-to-wall photos. Not weensy little thumbnails, but big, four-inch-wide representations, tiled to fill your entire browser window, scrolling down and down and down. Point to one to view its title, photographer, and the Favorite and Comment buttons.
This is an incredibly successful way to give you an overview of a set of pictures. They’re big enough to see clearly (unlike the old thumbnails), yet small enough to take in hundreds without having to click to another page. For a visitor who wants to see your shots of some place, person or event, these scrolling views offer a quick, satisfying way to get the (ahem) big picture.
This display is especially effective in displaying panoramic photos, of the sort that, for example, the iPhone and Sony cameras can create automatically. Finally, they get the full-screen-width treatment they deserve.
All right, so the new Flickr is generous and lovely. Then, why are longtime members screaming bloody murder?
by David Pogue, NY Times | Read more:
Image: NY Times
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
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Martha Stewart and the Cannibal Polar Bears
[ed. Presented mainly in the context of media messaging. In reality it's pretty normal for adult male bears (black, brown, polar...) to prey on cubs. Ever wonder why momma bears are so ferocious and protective of their young? (Sarah Palin excluded...)]
During the Cold War, a joint U.S.-Canadian military installation was built outside the tiny northern town of Churchill, Manitoba, at the western edge of Hudson Bay. Those stationed at Fort Churchill had several jobs to do, like be ready to repulse the Soviets if they invaded over the North Pole and figure out how to lob nuclear warheads at Moscow through the Aurora Borealis, which was proving, mysteriously, to muck up the guidance systems on their rockets. A lot of the soldiers' time was also spent dealing with a nuisance: hundreds of polar bears that ambled across the tundra there every fall.In November 1958, for example, one ate a pair of boots at the firing range. Another smashed a building's window, poked his head in, and had to be blasted with a fire extinguisher. At least twenty polar bears were loitering near the mess hall and the dump, and, late one Sunday night, three turned up at the central commissary. Soldiers in station wagons drove them back into the wilderness. One report noted, "The most effective, anti-dawdling weapon has been the small helicopter." Even so, occasionally the bears would rear up on their hind legs and try to tussle with the armored flying machines. One helicopter pilot described how unsettling it was to make a low pass and find "some six feet of indignant polar bear throwing haymakers" with paws the size of dinner plates. After a while, military contractors limited the amount of work done outside at night; the higher-ups decided it would just be easier to stay out of the polar bears' way. "So this is civilization," began one newspaper article about military wives at Fort Churchill.
By the time I arrived, one November a half-century later, the military was gone. The fort had been dismantled and carted off, though two massive, ruined radar domes still sat in the distance like some post-apocalyptic Epcot attraction. A dozen specially built vehicles called Tundra Buggies crawled along the network of dirt roads the military had built and abandoned. Each was stuffed with tourists, many of whom had paid several thousand dollars a head to fly to Churchill, now billing itself as "The Polar Bear Capital of the World." They were mostly older vacationers, taken out to the tundra every day to get a glimpse of the animals, then deposited back in town to prowl the gift shops along Churchill's main road, buying polar-bear caps and snow hats, polar-bear T-shirts, polar-bear aprons, polar-bear Christmas ornaments, polar-bear magnets, polar-bear boxer shorts, polar-bear light-switch plates, polar-bear wind chimes, polar-bear baby bibs, and pajamas that say "Bearly Awake."
A Tundra Buggy, if it resembles anything at all, resembles a double-wide school bus propped up on monster-truck tires. Three had pulled off the road to watch a lone polar bear splayed flat at the rim of a frozen pond, asleep in the willows. I was behind them in a scaled-down vehicle known as Buggy 1, one of the storied, original rigs of the fleet. Buggy 1 is now operated by a conservation group, Polar Bears International. One of the group's videographers was shooting footage of the bear through an open window while the other staff on board tried to sit perfectly still so as not to rattle his tripod. The cameraman had been filming the bear for a long time, in Super HD, hoping it would stand up or do something alluring. Up ahead, tourists filed onto the rear decks of their buggies, training their Telephoto lenses and little point-and-shoots at the animal. It lifted its head once or twice, but that was it. After a couple of minutes, I noticed that the tourists had turned ninety degrees and were photographing us, aboard Buggy 1, instead.
It was then that Martha Stewart's helicopter came into view. Everyone turned to watch it as it passed, flying low and very far ahead. Two hundred years ago, Arctic explorers described polar bears leaping out of the water and into boats, trying to "resolutely seize and devour" whichever dog or human being was sitting closest to their jaws, unprovoked and absolutely undeterred even if you tried to set the bear on fire. Now Martha Stewart had come to Churchill to shoot a special segment about the bears for her daytime television show on the Hallmark Channel.
Polar Bears International had been working in a loose partnership with Martha Stewart for many months in advance to handle logistics for her shoot. The group was trying to ensure that Martha told the right story about the animals. It isn't enough anymore to gush about how magnificent or cute polar bears are, as the many travel writers and television personalities that came to Churchill over the years had tended to. The stakes were too high now--too urgent. Climate change had put the bear in severe jeopardy. According to a 2007 study by U.S. government scientists, two-thirds of the world's polar bears are likely to be gone by the middle of this century. And, of course, that's only one of many dispiriting prognoses trickling into the news these days. Another recent study predicts that climate change may wipe out one of every ten plant and animal species on the planet during that same time. Another claims seven of every ten could be gone. Tropical birds, butterflies, flying squirrels, coral reefs, koalas--the new reality will rip away at all of them, and more. The projections range from bona fide tragedies to more niggling but genuinely disruptive bummers: tens of millions of people in Bangladesh are likely to be displaced by sea-level rise and flooding; the Forest Service warns of maple syrup shortages in America.
The polar bear, in other words, is an early indicator of all this other turmoil coming our way. It is, as everyone on Buggy 1 kept telling me, a "canary in the coal mine"--that was the phrase they used, always, with unrelenting discipline. The animal had become a symbol for some otherwise inexpressible pang--of guilt, of panic--that can burble into the back of your mind, or the pit of your stomach, when you think about the future of life on Earth. But, Polar Bears International was arguing, it could also be a mascot--a rallying point and call to action. At this point, bears are all but guaranteed to disappear from a lot of their range. But the science suggests that there's still time to slow climate change down and, in the long term, keep the species--and many others along with it--from vanishing entirely.
Practically speaking, this leaves conservationists like Polar Bears International in a unique and sometimes disorienting position. Unlike with other species, the central threat to polar bears isn't something that can be tackled or solved on the ground, out in the immediate ecosystem. The only meaningful way to save the polar bear now is to influence the energy policies and behavior of people who live thousands of miles away--which means, in part, influencing influential media personalities like Martha Stewart. At some point, polar bear conservation stopped being solely the work of biologists and wildlife managers and became the work of lawyers, lobbyists, and celebrities as well. The bear is dependent on the stories we tell about it. (...)
Robert was literally trying to control the image of the polar bear in Churchill before that image was broadcast around the world. Churchill turns out to be the best, most convenient place in the world to see or film polar bears in the wild. (When you see a wild polar bear on TV or the Internet, the chances are good that you're looking at a Churchill bear.) Because Polar Bears International operates in close partnership with a tour company in Churchill that owns the majority of the permits and vehicles needed to access the animals on the tundra, the group has been able to intercept most of the major media that come through town. They install biologists and climatologists on the reporters' buggies like scientific press agents, trying to make sure an accurate narrative comes across, and they provide B-roll footage of bears plunging into melting slush to help newscasters illustrate the problem. In past years, though, PBI had gone out of its way to help television crews only to feel betrayed by the finished product: the reporters ignore climate change altogether, or regurgitate the junk theories of climate change deniers. Most television crews are now asked to sign memorandums of understanding, outlining certain guidelines, before working with PBI. (As a rule, one PBI staffer told me, Robert regards all journalists as "pirates and thieves.") But that fall, Martha Stewart hadn't signed one. And in the days before her arrival, her producers had become a little incommunicative about their plans. We'd all headed out on Buggy 1 that morning because PBI had initially hoped to tour the tundra alongside Martha and her crew, docking back to back with Martha's buggy to pass people back and forth periodically for interviews. But that was starting to feel unlikely now. Though no one was quite saying it, there seemed to be concern that Martha Stewart was going rogue. (...)
All day, a strange paparazzi-like triangle had been materializing: Martha wanted good access to polar bears, and PBI wanted good access to Martha. I wanted to watch the whole process of brokering access, since I was quickly understanding that the media relations dimension of polar bear conservation was a critical part--maybe the most critical part--of the preservation of this five-million-year-old species.
Our driver pushed Buggy 1 as fast as it would go, which wasn't very fast, trying to gain ground. Something that I'd kind of suspected for hours was suddenly obvious: we were chasing Martha Stewart across the tundra.
by Jon Mooallem, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Jon Mooallem
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Why I Hate Dreams
I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust. The wisdom of dreams is a fortune on paper that you can’t cash out, an oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand. I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.
Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours. “I was flying over Lake Michigan in a pink Cessna,” you begin, “only it wasn’t really Lake Michigan…,” and I sink, cobwebbed, beneath a drifting dust of boredom.
Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors. At the breakfast table, in my house, an inflexible law compels all recountings of dreams to be compressed into a sentence or, better still, half a sentence, like the paraphrasings of epic films listed in TV Guide: “Rogue Samurai saves peasant village.” The recounting of a dream is—ought to be—a source of embarrassment to the dreamer, sitting there naked in fading tatters of Jungian couture. Whatever stuff dreams are made on, it isn’t words. As soon as you begin to tell a dream, as Freud reminds us, you interpolate, falsify, distort; you lie. That roseate airplane, that wide blue arc of cold water: no, it wasn’t like that, not at all. Better just to skip it, and pass the maple syrup.
Worse still than real dreams, mine or yours—sandier mouthfuls, ranker lies—are the dreams of characters in books and movies. Nobody, not even Aunt Em, wants to hear about Dorothy’s dream when she wakes up at the end of The Wizard of Oz. As outright fantasy the journey to Oz is peerless, joyous, muscular with truth; to call it a dream (a low trick L. Frank Baum, who wrote the original story, never stooped to) is to demean it, to deny it, to lie; because nobody has dreams like that. Nobody has dreams like the dreams in Spellbound, either; or like those in Little Nemo in Slumberland, Alice in Wonderland, Inception, or even, quite, in Meshes of the Afternoon, the 1943 film by Maya Deren which, in the flickering of its pseudonarrative, the ostinato of its imagery, the strange urgency of its tedium, comes closest, and yet still rings false, camera-bound, hokum-haunted.
If art is a mirror, dreams are the back of the head. A work of art derives its effects from light, sound, and movement, but dreams unfurl in darkness, silence, paralysis. Like a recipe attempted in an ill-provisioned kitchen, “dreamlike” art relies on substitutions: dutch angles, forced perspective, absurdist juxtapositions, arbitrary transformations, and, as Peter Dinklage’s character points out in the film Living in Oblivion, a lamentable superabundance of dwarfs. Dreams in art either make sense, or they make no sense at all, but they never manage to do both at the same time, the way dreams do while we’re dreaming them..
Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours. “I was flying over Lake Michigan in a pink Cessna,” you begin, “only it wasn’t really Lake Michigan…,” and I sink, cobwebbed, beneath a drifting dust of boredom.Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors. At the breakfast table, in my house, an inflexible law compels all recountings of dreams to be compressed into a sentence or, better still, half a sentence, like the paraphrasings of epic films listed in TV Guide: “Rogue Samurai saves peasant village.” The recounting of a dream is—ought to be—a source of embarrassment to the dreamer, sitting there naked in fading tatters of Jungian couture. Whatever stuff dreams are made on, it isn’t words. As soon as you begin to tell a dream, as Freud reminds us, you interpolate, falsify, distort; you lie. That roseate airplane, that wide blue arc of cold water: no, it wasn’t like that, not at all. Better just to skip it, and pass the maple syrup.
Worse still than real dreams, mine or yours—sandier mouthfuls, ranker lies—are the dreams of characters in books and movies. Nobody, not even Aunt Em, wants to hear about Dorothy’s dream when she wakes up at the end of The Wizard of Oz. As outright fantasy the journey to Oz is peerless, joyous, muscular with truth; to call it a dream (a low trick L. Frank Baum, who wrote the original story, never stooped to) is to demean it, to deny it, to lie; because nobody has dreams like that. Nobody has dreams like the dreams in Spellbound, either; or like those in Little Nemo in Slumberland, Alice in Wonderland, Inception, or even, quite, in Meshes of the Afternoon, the 1943 film by Maya Deren which, in the flickering of its pseudonarrative, the ostinato of its imagery, the strange urgency of its tedium, comes closest, and yet still rings false, camera-bound, hokum-haunted.
If art is a mirror, dreams are the back of the head. A work of art derives its effects from light, sound, and movement, but dreams unfurl in darkness, silence, paralysis. Like a recipe attempted in an ill-provisioned kitchen, “dreamlike” art relies on substitutions: dutch angles, forced perspective, absurdist juxtapositions, arbitrary transformations, and, as Peter Dinklage’s character points out in the film Living in Oblivion, a lamentable superabundance of dwarfs. Dreams in art either make sense, or they make no sense at all, but they never manage to do both at the same time, the way dreams do while we’re dreaming them..
by Michael Chabon, NY Review of Books | Read more:
An image from Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland
A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille. (...)It’s fashionable nowadays to view the social movements of the late sixties as an embarrassing failure. A case can be made for that view. It’s certainly true that in the political sphere, the immediate beneficiary of any widespread change in political common sense—a prioritizing of ideals of individual liberty, imagination, and desire; a hatred of bureaucracy; and suspicions about the role of government—was the political Right. Above all, the movements of the sixties allowed for the mass revival of free market doctrines that had largely been abandoned since the nineteenth century. It’s no coincidence that the same generation who, as teenagers, made the Cultural Revolution in China was the one who, as forty-year-olds, presided over the introduction of capitalism. Since the eighties, “freedom” has come to mean “the market,” and “the market” has come to be seen as identical with capitalism—even, ironically, in places like China, which had known sophisticated markets for thousands of years, but rarely anything that could be described as capitalism.
The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs. This is precisely the system that has imposed free market orthodoxy, and opened the world to financial pillage, under the watchful aegis of American arms. It only made sense that the first attempt to recreate a global revolutionary movement, the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy.
Future Stop
In retrospect, though, I think that later historians will conclude that the legacy of the sixties revolution was deeper than we now imagine, and that the triumph of capitalist markets and their various planetary administrators and enforcers—which seemed so epochal and permanent in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—was, in fact, far shallower.
I’ll take an obvious example. One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures, since they did not appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. But afterward, those controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar popular unrest—and even more, with unrest within the military itself, which was genuinely falling apart by the early seventies—that they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years. It took 9/11, an attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome the notorious “Vietnam syndrome”—and even then, the war planners made an almost obsessive effort to ensure the wars were effectively protest-proof. Propaganda was incessant, the media was brought on board, experts provided exact calculations on body bag counts (how many U.S. casualties it would take to stir mass opposition), and the rules of engagement were carefully written to keep the count below that.
The problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of women, children, and old people would end up “collateral damage” in order to minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much guarantee that the United States couldn’t obtain its military objectives. And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this. It didn’t matter. They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.
Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an intriguing question: What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?
by David Graeber, The Baffler | Read more:
Illustration: Randall Enos
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