Artful Dodger

About a month ago, following a rather dissatisfying evening, I found myself scurrying to the subway. I was crossing Astor Place in downtown Manhattan when I came across a strange scene. It was about midnight, and parked by the curb on a side street was a rental truck. I was approaching the front of the truck but I could see a small knot of people behind it, and they all seemed rather excited by what was going on. Like any good New Yorker, I'd thought I'd lucked into the chance to buy some nice speakers, 3000-count sheets or some other, umm, severely discounted merchandise. Wallet in hand, I came round the truck and had a gander, and realized I couldn't have been more wrong.

For the interior of the truck had been transformed into a jungle diorama. There were plants and flowers, which looked real, and stony cliffs, which did not. But there was a small waterfall that plashed gently into a pool, and recorded birdsong playing from hidden speakers, as well as the somewhat unnerving sight of insects and butterflies buzzing about the interior. Far in the background were painted a bridge, a sun, a mountain, and a rainbow.

As delighted as I was (because serendipity insists that such a discovery is always partly thanks to me), I still didn't really know what was up. Next to me was an Italian gentleman with an enormous camera, who had just about wet himself with excitement. "It's him! It's him!" he said, giggling like a schoolgirl. "Who?" "Banksy! We've been chasing after this all day." I don't really know what it means to chase after street art but, once Banksy's name had been floated, I realized that I'd stumbled across one of several dozen Easter eggs the reclusive artist had begun laying all over the city for the month of October.

This "residency," in Banksy's own words, is sparely documented on a website thrown up for the occasion, but the site doesn't reflect the kerfuffle caused by those who have come into contact with the works or their interlocutors. Without attempting to define the quality that makes art great, I will humbly suggest that, for the present discussion, it may be that it becomes a mirror in which society has no choice but to view itself. I realize how horrifically unoriginal this is. As a defense, consider that Banksy's anonymity makes this not just inevitable, but desirable.(...)

Such a brutally enforced anonymity means we have already played into his hands. Banksy's work neither asks for permission or forgiveness, and the intrinsically ephemeral nature of street art generates a scarcity economy par excellence. This virtuous circle has continued its widening gyre, as the value of his works now far outstrips those of his contemporaries on the international art market. In turn, this gives Banksy a larger megaphone with which to sound his trickster yawp. In a sense, Banksy is a prime beneficiary of his countryman's dictum, "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

So when everyone is talking about it, there's a good chance that what's really at stake is not Banksy's art, which at its best has the conceptual bite of an above-average New Yorker cartoon, and at its worst is just dead on arrival (two examples from the recent stint in New York include a kludgy reference to the Twin Towers, and balloon-letter throw-up of his name made from – wait for it – balloons). Nor is there anything very compelling in the yawning of the critics, as exemplified by Jerry Saltz, or the outrage of NYC's teeming graffiti underground, who are understandably upset at the idea of a British Invasion of their turf. Of far greater interest is what happens to the art once it has been put out there – that is, when the city's collective, chaotic decision-making apparatus swings into full force.

by Misha Lepetic, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

Image: Banksy

Elsa (Elsita) Mora for Cosmopolitan, China
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Privacy Isn’t a Right

Privacy isn't your right anymore. We sold it for pictures of cats and the ability to tell anyone in the free world what we had for breakfast.

I'm not saying it was a bad trade, either. The Internet as we know it came about through the monetization of metadata—information about us—instead of by replicating traditional models of content sales. As a result the Internet exploded into a plethora of useful services and platforms of every shape, size, and description. What's more, it was a great leveler—nobody had more valuable personal information than anybody else, so everyone was able to trade it in for the same kinds of services.

The problem with all this is that "privacy" as a notion was abdicated the instant you clicked "agree" to the online services agreement you didn't read. And yet most consumers haven't yet realized that their date has left the restaurant and they're stuck with the bill.

Part of the reason for that is that Big Data has finally begun to produce some very real, tractable, monetizable techniques. As an example, see a couple of patents Microsoft filed several years ago. Roughly described, the first one allows the company to put a number on any identity's ability to influence others around a particular word or topic. So for the word cheese, you might have a high score of 88 because you run a popular cheese blog, whereas I might be lactose intolerant and only have a score of 17. The second patent is more interesting: It allows Microsoft to dynamically price a good or service based on your score.

This means that if you go online to buy some cheese, Microsoft can ask Kraft if it wants to give you a big discount in the hopes that you'll say something nice about its cheese and thus drive up sales. Conversely, if I go to buy some cheese, it can ask Kraft if it wants to jack up the price to the point where I'm unlikely to buy it, to save the embarrassment of a potentially bad review. Is that wrong? Is it a violation of privacy? Materially, it no longer matters. We clicked "agree" and now they legally can—and by doing so make a whole lot more money.

This emphasis on our data and its uses as a marketing tool has grown so fast and so far that competitors to the traditional credit card companies are now starting to drive down their collective margins by consistently underbidding one another. Square (a company whose dongle plugs into your phone and lets you accept credit card payments), Simple (an online-only bank), and others are happy to charge less of a percentage of each transaction because they know they'll be able to make up the lost profit through resale of the metadata they've collected—the "who bought what from whom, where, and when." It's not by accident that they emphasize the use of mobile phones (which have built-in GPS) for facilitating their transactions and Web browsers (which connect to all your other online identities) for managing related funds.

At least these "insights" are happening in a restricted online space, you might think. After all, I can certainly choose not to spend my time looking at ads on Facebook. But you'd be mistaken. Many stores use infrared cameras to determine what products you look at and for how long before you buy. Cell service providers have started reselling information about what data you access on your phone at which physical location. For example, Telefonica, one of Europe's largest cellphone providers, recently released a product called Smart Steps that would tell retailers who entered their stores and when, allowing them to tailor products, promotions, and staffing.

On the face of it, a lot of this can, as with online advertising, be chalked up to companies simply wanting to be better able to give us what we want. After all, most people don't complain about getting useful search results from Google or helpful product suggestions from Amazon. But it may not be in our best interest to be sold as much as we can buy at the highest price we can afford. (...)

But a better option might be to simply raise our prices. We can limit how our personal information is gathered and utilized, and in doing so we can demand that it be purchased at higher rates than just access to Instagram. It may not mean cold hard cash (at least not at first), but we can certainly expect more premium services, more discreet advertising, or even just better control over who gets our data and for what purposes.

by Josh Klein, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Siri Stafford/Digital Vision/Thinkstock

Seattle
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Charles Schulz
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A Discourse on Brocialism

[ed. I missed Russell Brand's rant last week (and really don't want to Google it, thank you) but it seems to have set off a shit-storm of commentary. Despite the wide range of topics covered (apparently), there's been quite a bit of blow-back on some misogynisitic statements that he made (apparently). At least I've learned some new terms: manarchism, brocialism, Brandwagon, etc.]

It’s a good job I wasn’t in the office last week, or the week before, when comedian, celebrity-shagger and saviour of the people Russell Brand was sashaying around. Not that there’s anything wrong with a good sashay. The revolution - as Brand’s guest edit of this magazine was modestly titled - could do with a little more flash and glitter. It’s just that had I been in the office I would probably have spent a portion of my working hours giggling nervously, or hiding in the loos writing confused journal entries. My feelings about Russell Brand, you see. They are so complex.

Brand is precisely the sort of swaggering manarchist I usually fancy. His rousing rhetoric, his narcissism, his history of drug abuse and his habit of speaking to and about women as vapid, ‘beautiful’ afterthoughts in a future utopian scenario remind me of every lovely, troubled student demagogue whose casual sexism I ever ignored because I liked their hair. I was proud to be featured in the ‘Revolution’ issue that this magazine put out, proud to be part of the team that produced it. But the discussions that have gone on since about leaders, about iconoclasm and about sexism on the left need to be answered. (...)

I know, I know that asking that female people be treated as fully human and equally deserving of liberation makes me an iron-knickered feminist killjoy and probably a closet liberal, but in that case there are rather a lot of us, and we’re angrier than you can possibly imagine at being told our job in the revolution is to look beautiful and encourage the men to do great works. Brand is hardly the only leftist man to boast a track record of objectification and of playing cheap misogyny for laughs. He gets away with it, according to most sources, because he’s a charming scoundrel, but when he speaks in that disarming, self-depracating way about his history of slutshaming his former conquests on live radio, we are invited to love and forgive him for it because that’s just what a rockstar does. Naysayers who insist on bringing up those uncomfortable incidents are stooges, spoiling the struggle. Acolytes who cannot tell the difference between a revolution that seduces - as any good revolution should - and a revolution that treats one half of its presumed members as chattel attack in hordes online. My friend and colleague Musa Okwonga came under fire last week merely for pointing out that “if you’re advocating a revolution of the way that things are being done, then it’s best not to risk alienating your feminist allies with a piece of flippant objectification in your opening sentence. It’s just not a good look.”

I don’t believe that just because Brand is clearly a casual and occasionally vicious sexist, nobody should listen to anything he has to say. But I do agree with Natasha Lennard, who wrote that “this is no time to forgo feminism in the celebration of that which we truly don’t need - another god, or another master.” The question, then, is this: how do we reconcile the fact that people need stirring up with the fact that the people doing the stirring so often fall down when it comes to treating women and girls like human beings?

It’s not a small question. Its goes way beyond Brand. Speaking personally, it has dogged years of my political work and thought. As a radical who is also female and feminist I don't get to ignore this stuff until I'm confronted with it. It happens constantly. It's everywhere. It's Julian Assange and George Galloway. It’s years and years of rape apologism on the left, of somehow ending up in the kitchen organising the cleaning rota while the men write those all-important communiques.

It comes up whenever women and girls and their allies are asked to swallow our discomfort and fear for the sake of a brighter tomorrow that somehow never comes, putting our own concerns aside to make things easier for everyone else like good girls are supposed to. It comes up whenever a passionate political group falls apart because of inability to deal properly with male violence against women. Whenever some idiot commentator bawls you out for writing about feminism and therefore 'retreating' into 'identity politics' and thereby distracting attention from 'the real struggle'.

But what is this 'real struggle', if it requires women and girls to suffer structural oppression in silence? What is this 'real struggle' that hands the mic over and over again to powerful, charismatic white men? Can we actually have a revolution that relegates women to the back of the room, that turns vicious when the discussion turns to sexual violence and social equality? What kind of fucking freedom are we fighting for? And whither that elusive, sporadically useful figure, the brocialist?

by Laurie Penny, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Dina Litovsky
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A Death in Year Three

By the time I began my emergency medicine rotation, I had come a long way from making that first tremulous incision into a cadaver during anatomy class. Back then, at the beginning of first year, I remember trying to conceal my apprehension as we removed an opaque plastic sheet from the supine body.

We had all prepared for this moment, as a class and in our own ways, but still my heart raced as we uncovered first the feet, then the legs, then the torso, like an outgoing tide slowly revealing hidden details of a beach or rocky shore. Once the sheet was fully lifted from the body, the face remained shrouded by a damp cloth. We would get into that later in the course.

Less than three years later, I had been around a fair amount of death. I had seen children born without brains on pediatrics, known people who died in code-blues on the internal medicine floors, and seen others bleed out on the operating table during surgery.

In the emergency department we got a bit of everything, and one night a call came in from an approaching ambulance carrying a teen-aged female in cardiac arrest. They didn’t tell us anything more, and in the eerie minutes before the ambulance arrived doctors and nurses took their places and we got one of the trauma bays ready with IVs, medications, and intubation equipment. There was a respiratory technician student there as well, and we both positioned ourselves behind our respective instructors, close enough to be available if called upon, but far enough to be out of the way. (...)

The mind is a real place. Thoughts and memories not only guide our actions, but they can change the pace of our heart, the rate of our breathing, even the size of our pupils. That we live on in the thoughts of others may offer little consolation in the face of one’s own death, but what could be more important than the half-hidden tracks we leave upon the minds of those close to us, and the marks they leave, in turn, on us.

It is little wonder that preoccupation with mortality and existential angst go hand in hand with underlying feelings of disconnectedness and isolation. Little wonder one of the most terrifying things about death for the famously withdrawn Philip Larkin is “nothing to love or link with.” Little wonder baby monkeys choose the cloth-covered figure over the wire one with food. Or, at least, little wonder we are moved by that gesture.

by Caleb Gardner, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: "The Doctor", Sir Luke Fildes. 1891. Wikimedia Commons.

Henri Matisse Bathers by a River, 1909-1917
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[ed. Interestingly, Matisse continued to revise this piece over a period of several years.]

Heart

[ed. I hope Heart will be honored at the Kennedy Center someday.]

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Blue

All I want

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
traveling, traveling, traveling
Looking for something, what can it be?
Oh I hate you some, I hate you some
I love you some
I love you when I forget about me
I want to be strong I want to laugh along
I want to belong to the living
Alive, alive, want to get up and jive
wreck my stockings in some juke box dive
Do you want- do you want- do you want
to dance with me, baby
do you want to take a chance
on maybe finding some sweet romance with me, baby
well come on.

All I really really want our love to do
is to bring out the best in me and in you too
and renew you again and again
Applause, applause- Life is our cause
When I think of your kisses
my mind see-saws
do you see- do you see- do you see
how you hurt me baby
so I hurt you too
then we both get so, blue.

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
looking for the key to set me free
Oh the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling
I tell you it’s the unraveling
and it undoes all the joy that could be
I just want to have fun, I want to shine like the sun
want to be the one that you want to see
want to knit you a sweater
and want to write you a love letter
want to make you feel better
want to make you feel.
Want to make you feel
I want to make you feel.

[ed. Happy Birthday, Joni]

Massive Attack (feat. Horace Andy)

[ed. See also: Horace Andy - Skylarking]

Paris, You're Bringing Me Down

[ed. See also, this companion piece: The Other Paris, Beyond the Boulevards]

We should be grateful to be jolted from our anesthetized routines, confronted when we can be with surroundings and neighbors that are not injection-molded to the contours of our own bobo predilections. Too much of modern urban life revolves around never feeling less than fully at ease; about having even the minutest of experiences tailored to a set of increasingly demanding and homogeneous tastes — from the properly sourced coffee grounds that make the morning’s flat white to the laboriously considered iPod soundtracks we rely on to cancel the world’s noise. The logical extension is to “curate” our urban spaces like style blogs or Pinterest boards representing a single, self-satisfied and extremely sheltered expression of middle- and upper-middle-class sensibility.

Outside my window, and adjacent to a baby boutique that stocks cashmere swaddle blankets, is a nondescript Asian massage parlor. On nice summer days, there is one masseuse who likes to prop open the door, pull her chiropractic table into the fresh air and sunbathe between clients. Once I watched a well-turned-out mother with toddler approach as the woman was smoking a cigarette. Instead of giving the kind of not-in-my-backyard glare I imagined her Park Slope counterpart might unleash, she just asked the masseuse for a light. They shared a few friendly words before going their separate ways, leaving me to wonder why I thought that should be odd.

Such encounters are getting rarer by the week, but they remind me that genuinely engaging with an urban space means encountering and making room for an assortment of lifestyles and social realities — some appealing, some provocative, and some repulsive. This is what the Situationists meant by pyschogeography, or, as Guy Debord put it, the “specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”

Down the street, where Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec once had his studio, you now must pass a store called “Pigalle” — a high-end streetwear purveyor — and then Buvette Gastrotèque, the handsome new Paris outpost of a faux-French restaurant and bar from the West Village.

From there a left turn puts you at the intersection of Rue Victor Massé and Rue Frochot, where, in the space of one half-block, three hostess bars have recently been shuttered and reopened as upscale cocktail lounges. That number includes the famous Dirty Dick, now a Polynesian-themed luxury rum bar, with the name and grungy facade kept ironically intact. Inside, the atmosphere is far more beach bum than bordello; the most subversive element is a smoking room in the back.

Directly opposite, beside a dilapidated DVD shop, black-clad bouncers assemble a velvet rope each night in front of a pristine new bar called Glass. It is the brainchild of a polyglot team of N.Y.U. grads who have decided (correctly, judging by their success) that what Parisians want most these days are tacos, hot dogs and homemade tonic water in their G & Ts. Le F’Exhib — the lone holdout on the block, where the girls and the ravaged exterior seemed to age in tandem — finally closed its doors this fall.

And so a vivid and storied layer of authentic Paris is being wiped out not by not-in-my-backyard activism, government edict or the rapaciousness of Starbucks or McDonald’s but by the banal globalization of hipster good taste, the same pleasant and invisible force that puts kale frittata, steel-cut oats and burrata salad on brunch tables from Stockholm to San Francisco.

by Thomas Chatterton Williams, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jean Jullien

Jean Yves Lemoigne
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Christopher Sturman
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How Muggers Size Up Your Walk

[ed. The point light walker is pretty cool. I've always had an unnatural gait that seems to attract pamphleteers and panhandlers. I wonder what that means.]

How you move gives a lot away. Maybe too much, if the wrong person is watching. We think, for instance, that the way people walk can influence the likelihood of an attack by a stranger. But we also think that their walking style can be altered to reduce the chances of being targeted.

A small number of criminals commit most of the crimes, and the crimes they commit are spread unevenly over the population: some unfortunate individuals seem to be picked out repeatedly by those intent on violent assault. Back in the 1980s, two psychologists from New York, Betty Grayson and Morris Stein, set out to find out what criminals look for in potential victims. They filmed short clips of members of the public walking along New York’s streets, and then took those clips to a large East Coast prison. They showed the tapes to 53 violent inmates with convictions for crimes on strangers, ranging from assault to murder, and asked them how easy each person would be to attack.

The prisoners made very different judgements about these notional victims. Some were consistently rated as easier to attack, as an “easy rip-off”. There were some expected differences, in that women were rated as easier to attack than men, on average, and older people as easier targets than the young. But even among those you’d expect to be least easy to assault, the subgroup of young men, there were some individuals who over half the prisoners rated at the top end of the “ease of assault” scale (a 1, 2 or 3, on the 10 point scale).

The researchers then asked professional dancers to analyse the clips using a system called Laban movement analysis – a system used by dancers, actors and others to describe and record human movement in detail. They rated the movements of people identified as victims as subtly less coordinated than those of non-victims.

Although Professors Grayson and Stein identified movement as the critical variable in criminals’ predatory decisions, their study had the obvious flaw that their films contained lots of other potentially relevant information: the clothes the people wore, for example, or the way they held their heads. Two decades later, a research group led by Lucy Johnston of the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, performed a more robust test of the idea.

The group used a technique called the point light walker. This is a video recording of a person made by attaching lights or reflective markers to their joints while they wear a black body suit. When played back you can see pure movement shown in the way their joints move, without being able to see any of their features or even the limbs that connect their joints.

Research with point light walkers has shown that we can read characteristics from joint motion, such as gender or mood. This makes sense, if you think for a moment of times you’ve recognised a person from a distance, long before you were able to make out their face. Using this technique, the researchers showed that even when all other information was removed, some individuals still get picked out as more likely to be victims of assault than others, meaning these judgements must be based on how they move.

Walk this way

But the most impressive part of Johnston’s investigations came next, when she asked whether it was possible to change the way we walk so as to appear less vulnerable. A first group of volunteers were filmed walking before and after doing a short self defence course. Using the point-light technique, their walking styles were rated by volunteers (not prisoners) for vulnerability. Perhaps surprisingly, the self-defence training didn’t affect the walkers’ ratings.

In a second experiment, recruits were given training in how to walk, specifically focusing on the aspects which the researchers knew affected how vulnerable they appeared: factors affecting the synchrony and energy of their movement. This led to a significant drop in all the recruits’ vulnerability ratings, which was still in place when they were re-tested a month later.

by Tom Stafford, Mind Hacks |  Read more:

Image: Biomotoin Lab

Why the Truth About MSG is So Easy to Swallow

In 1908, over a bowl of seaweed soup, Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda asked a question that would change the food industry forever: what gave dashi, a ubiquitous Japanese soup base, its meaty flavor? In Japanese cuisine, dashi, a fermented base made from boiled seaweed and dried fish, was widely used by chefs to add extra oomph to meals–pairing well with other savory, but meatless foods like vegetables and soy. For some reason that was generally accepted but inexplicable, dashi made these meatless foods meaty–and Ikeda was determined to find out why.

Ikeda was able to isolate the main substance of dashi–the seaweed Laminaria japonica. He then took the seaweed and ran it through a series of chemical experiments, using evaporation to isolate a specific compound within the seaweed. After days of evaporating and treating the seaweed, he saw the development of a crystalline form. When he tasted the crystals, he recognized the distinct savory taste that dashi lent to other foods, a taste that he deemed umami, from the Japanese umai (delicious.) It was a breakthrough that challenged a cornerstone of culinary thinking: instead of four tastes—sweet, salty, bitter and sour—there were now five. A new frontier of taste had been discovered, and Ikeda wasted no time monopolizing on his discovery.

He determined the molecular formula of the crystals: C5H9NO4, the same as glutamic acid, an amino acid designated as non-essential because the human body, as well as a large smattering of other plants and animals is able to produce it on its own. In the body, glutamic acid is often found as glutamate, a different compound that has one less hydrogen atom. Glutamate is one of the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitters in brain, playing a crucial role in memory and learning. The FDA estimates that the average adult consumes 13 grams of it a day from the protein in food. Non-meat food sources like tomatoes and Parmesan cheese have high levels of glutamic acid.

In 1909, Ikeda began mass-producing Ajinomoto (meaning “essence of taste”), an additive that came out of his creation of the first method of industrially producing glutamate by way of fermented vegetable proteins. The resulting sodium salt form of glutamic acid (the acid with just a single sodium molecule) became famous for its ability to imbue a meaty flavor into dishes, or just naturally enhance the flavor of food. It was touted as a nutritional wonder, helping bland but nutritious food become delicious. A growing number of Japanese housewives used the product, and by the 1930s, recipes included Ajinomoto use in their directions. The sodium salt of glutamic acid remains prevalent today–anyone who has eaten KFC or Doritos has ingested it; it’s just known by a different name: monosodium glutamate, or MSG.

Few letters have the power to stop conversation in its tracks more than MSG, one of the most infamous additives in the food industry. The three little letters carry so much negative weight that they’re often whispered sheepishly or, more often, decidedly preceded by the modifier “NO” that seems to make everyone breathe a collective sigh of relief when they go out to eat. Nobody wants MSG in their food—the protest goes—it causes headaches, stomachaches, dizziness and general malaise. It’s unhealthy and, maybe even worse, unsexy, used by lazy chefs as an excuse for flavor, not an enhancement.

On the other side of the spectrum lies umami: few foodie buzzwords pop off the lips with such entertaining ease. Enterprising young chefs like David Chang (of Momofuku fame) and Adam Fleischman, of the LA-based chain Umami Burger, have built their culinary careers on the basis of the fifth taste, revitalizing an interest in the meaty-depth of umami. It’s difficult to watch the Food Network or Travel Channel or any food-based program without hearing mention of the taste wunderkind, a host or chef cooing over the deep umami flavors of a Portobello mushroom. Where MSG is scary, umami is exciting.

What few people understand is that the hated MSG and the adored umami are chemically related: umami is tasted by the very receptors that MSG targets. At a MAD Symposium in Denmark, a TED-like conference for the food industry, Chang spoke about MSG and umami: “For me, the way that I’m looking at umami, it’s the same way I look at MSG. It’s one in the same.” But if chefs like Chang (neither inept nor lazy when it comes to flavor, as his Michelin stars would attest to) are down with MSG, why does the additive retain such a bad reputation?

by Natasha Geiling, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia

CL4v.4 by studio Judith
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