Terry O'Neill (1938-2019)

Photographer of swinging 60s Terry O'Neill dies aged 81 (Guardian)
[ed. See also: Terry O'Neill: a life in pictures; and O'Neill images from the National Portrait Gallery.]

The Future of Live Music Lives on Your Smartphone

Think back to the first time you saw a high-definition TV program.

After a lifetime of looking at standard-definition shows (and perhaps fuzzy black-and-white ones before that), you likely felt that a new world was opening in front of your eyes, allowing you to see television in much the same way you take in the real world. You probably never wanted to go back.

Something similar happened to me recently, at a concert for the rock band Incubus.

Incubus, who you may remember from their seminal 1999’s single “Drive,” use a new technology from a startup called Mixhalo to enhance its live shows. All concertgoers have to do is install Mixhalo’s app, connect to the concert, and plug in their headphones. I got to test it out when Incubus recently played in New York, and was greeted with a live-music experience like none I’d ever had.

Using the app, I could hear the mix of the musicians coming right from the venue’s soundboard, as the band themselves were hearing it. I could choose to listen to specific mixes of the show, swapping between lead guitar parts, pulling out singer Brandon Boyd’s vocals for the most emphatic parts, and at other times listening in to the “alien sounds,” as DJ Chris Kilmore calls them, that he produces and are often lost in the cacophony of a live performance. I could turn up or down the volume of the show and flit between mixes as much as I’d like. I was standing to the side of the stage, and although the band was facing outwards, it felt as if they were just playing for me, and I managed to somehow forget there were thousands of fans around me. I could actually make out what Boyd was singing, and hear the drum lines, instead of being subjected to the multitude of adoring fans, who, although not lacking for energy or enthusiasm, often don’t have the vocal chops or rhythmic skills of the band onstage.

Mixhalo changes the fan’s experience at live events, allowing them to hear the show as the band (or sound engineer) intended. It no longer matters whether Madison Square Garden has poor acoustics or if you’re sitting too far away from the PA system—with Mixhalo, every seat in every venue can hear perfectly. Thanks to Incubus.

How Mixhalo came to be

Mike Einziger, the guitarist in Incubus, told Quartz that he had a slow-burning realization of the idea for Mixhalo over the better part of two decades. Around 2000, he, and many other touring musicians, started wearing radio packs and headphones that allowed them to hear the soundboard’s mix of what they were playing at concerts. Live venues are often so loud that without technology like this, it can be difficult to hear yourself—even with onstage speakers (called monitors) pointed at you—let alone your bandmates.

Eventually, that germinated into an idea. “Onstage we’re having a different experience than people are having in the audience,” Einziger said. “I had the thought in my head that it would be interesting if people in the audience could hear what I’m hearing.”

In 2016, while rehearsing for the Grammys, the band had a guest listen to one of their rehearsals; a member of their crew asked if he’d like to borrow a spare radio pack so he could hear what the rehearsal sounded like to the musicians. Einziger had “an epiphany” when he wondered if it would be possible to replicate the radio pack on regular smartphones. (...)

How it works

Although your phone sees a Mixhalo network like any other wifi network, the company’s proprietary technology is actually closer to how a radio network functions. On a wifi or cellular network, the more people connecting to an access point, the slower the connection to each individual device will be, as each person vies for the amount of data they need. With a radio broadcast, that doesn’t happen—the number of people who tune in to a radio broadcast from their car doesn’t affect the quality of anyone else listening. “The first person who logs on to the Mixhalo network will have the same experience as the 10,000th,” Simpson said.

This primarily comes down to the way the network is set up. On wifi or cellular, you have to apportion just about as much bandwidth for information flowing to a smartphone as coming out of it. Using the internet is a constant exchange of data, whether you’re listening to a song on Spotify and the network needs to know where you are and whether you’re moving, or if you’re playing a game online and the network needs to send you game visuals that change as you move the controls. With Mixhalo, the majority of the data is just flowing to devices, with little coming back in return. This allows for considerably more people to connect to a single Mixhalo access point to stream high-quality audio than they would if they were all connected over traditional wifi.

Simpson said that just about any band would be covered by Mixhalo, as the technology could theoretically stream up to 150 different channels at once. Even the London Philharmonic Orchestra doesn’t have that many musicians in it. But this could prove massively useful for events where many people want to hear one thing—that could be as simple as providing everyone in an audience with good sound, even if they’re in the nosebleed seats, or as complex as a UN general assembly, where a diplomat’s speech could be translated into dozens of languages at once.

by Mike Murphy, Quartz |  Read more:

Image: Erik Kabik Photography/Mediapunch 

Gimme Shelter

That year, the year of the Ghost Ship fire, I lived in a shack. I’d found the place just as September’s Indian summer was giving way to a wet October. There was no plumbing or running water to wash my hands or brush my teeth before sleep. Electricity came from an extension cord that snaked through a yard of coyote mint and monkey flower and up into a hole I’d drilled in my floorboards. The structure was smaller than a cell at San Quentin—a tiny house or a huge coffin, depending on how you looked at it—four by eight and ten feet tall, so cramped it fit little but a mattress, my suit jackets and ties, a space heater, some novels, and the mason jar I peed in.

The exterior of my hermitage was washed the color of runny egg yolk. Two redwood French doors with plexiglass windows hung cockeyed from creaky hinges at the entrance, and a combination lock provided meager security against intruders. White beadboard capped the roof, its brim shading a front porch set on cinder blocks.

After living on the East Coast for eight years, I’d recently left New York City to take a job at an investigative reporting magazine in San Francisco. If it seems odd that I was a fully employed editor who lived in a thirty-two-square-foot shack, that’s precisely the point: my situation was evidence of how distorted the Bay Area housing market had become, the brutality inflicted upon the poor now trickling up to everyone but the super-rich. The problem was nationwide, although, as Californians tend to do, they’d taken this trend to an extreme. Across the state, a quarter of all apartment dwellers spent half of their incomes on rent. Nearly half of the country’s unsheltered homeless population lived in California, even while the state had the highest concentration of billionaires in the nation. In the Bay Area, including West Oakland, where my shack was located, the crisis was most acute. Tent cities had sprung up along the sidewalks, swarming with capitalism’s refugees. Telegraph, Mission, Market, Grant: every bridge and overpass had become someone’s roof.

Down these same streets, tourists scuttered along on Segways and techies surfed the hills on motorized longboards, transformed by their wealth into children, just as the sidewalk kids in cardboard boxes on Haight or in People’s Park aged overnight into decrepit adults, the former racing toward the future, the latter drifting away from it.

To my mother and girlfriend back East, the “shack situation” was a problem to be solved. “Can we help you find another place?” “Can you just find roommates and live in a house?” But the shack was the solution, not the problem. (...)

Growing up in rural upstate New York, raised on food stamps and free school lunches, my dad off to prison for a spell, I never met anyone who made a living in publishing. But in 2007 I was accepted into U.C. Berkeley’s graduate program in journalism. I saw the school, and the scholarship it offered, as a possible entrée to a world I had believed wasn’t available to working-class people like me. So, at age twenty-five, I stuffed my Toyota Camry with books and clothes, and, accompanied by my then girlfriend and $500 in savings, I drove west to a state I’d never even visited, hoping Cormac McCarthy was right when he wrote, in No Country for Old Men, that the “best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.”

The Great Recession had not yet hit, and cheap housing was easy enough to find, even for someone with no credit or bank account. When my girlfriend and I broke up, I landed at a ratty mansion, Fort Awesome, in South Berkeley. My rent for one of the mansion’s eleven bedrooms was about $300 a month. There was an outdoor kitchen the size of a large cottage, three guest shacks, and a wood-fired hot tub built from a redwood wine vat. About thirty people lived on the compound, including a few children. The adult residents were a mix of hippies, crusties, anarchists, outcast techies, chemistry grad students, addicts, and activists—a cohort that shouldn’t have lasted a day, but in fact had lasted six years, ever since some of the residents had banded together and, with the help of a community land trust, bought the plot for $600,000. (Today, the property is worth about $4 million.)

I was unwittingly among the vanguard of a wave of gentrification—a transient “creative” living in a “rough” neighborhood not yet fully colonized by the white middle class—and sometimes it was tense. I almost brawled one night with three teens who shoved me out front of a liquor store; another night I fought off a mugger and came home with a black eye. But otherwise the Bay was astonishingly convivial—for the first time in Oakland’s history, the city’s populations of African-American, Latino, Asian, and white residents were almost exactly equal in size—and I fell in love with dozens of squats, warehouses, galleries, and underground bars, where black hyphy kids and white gutter punks and queer Asian ravers all hung out and partied together, paving the way for later spaces like Ghost Ship. It felt like the perfect time to be there, like I imagined the Eighties on New York City’s Lower East Side. (...)

Across the street from my shack was Easy Liquor. A few weeks earlier, I’d been walking home in a downpour when I stumbled on a shirtless man circling its parking lot, shouting angrily, his hands clutched over his stomach. I asked if I could help. “Pull it out!” he shouted, and he shook his fists at me, revealing a knife handle where his belly button should have been. Another evening, on West MacArthur, I watched a large man shove his shopping cart into the path of a techie on a bicycle. The techie swerved and fell, and the homeless man put one foot on his victim’s chest and tugged at his Google laptop bag. “Help me!” the techie shouted as they played tug-of-war. I sprinted over and pushed the two men apart, yelling, “Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back!” I was talking to them both.

My neighbors’ homes were mostly blighted bungalows with peeling stucco, dust-bowl lawns, and barbed-wire fences. Men bench-pressed weights in driveways. Cars left on the street overnight would often appear the next morning with smashed windshields and cinder-block tires. The neighborhood’s boundaries were drawn by the “wrong” side of the BART train tracks and Telegraph Avenue to the east, bleak San Pablo Avenue to the west, and its southern and northern borders were marked by 35th Street and Ashby Avenue, beyond which were the newly bourgeois enclaves of Temescal and Emeryville. It wasn’t really a coherent neighborhood but its proximity to BART and the general scarcity of housing in the Bay had led developers to try to rebrand it “NOBE” (North Oakland Berkeley Emeryville), an absurd neologism I never once heard used except by real estate boosters.

Yet the rebranding was working, at least on paper. I seldom saw well-to-do white people on the streets, except when they were hurrying home or being mugged, but two- and three-bedroom cottages in the neighborhood were going on the market for $1.5 million, $2 million, and sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars more, often bought in cash by coders or executives who’d come east from San Francisco or west from the eastern seaboard to work for LinkedIn or Twitter or Atlassian or Oracle. As soon as a for sale sign went down, the ghetto bungalow behind it would be remodeled, landscaped, and encircled by a steel gate. The new inhabitants would only appear in public twice a day. In the morning, the jaws of their gated driveways opened, spitting tasteless Teslas and BMWs out into the streets, their drivers racing past the Palms, the Bay View, the Nights Inn, and Easy Liquor en route to the freeway or BART’s police-patrolled parking lot. At night, their gates would open to swallow them again, so they might sleep safely in the bellies of the beasts they called home, safe from the chaos outside.

At the end of our block was a monument to the housing wars: an eight-story, 105-unit, half-completed condo building that no one had ever lived in, and that no one ever would, casting its Hindenburg-size shadow over my shack. Just before my return to California, and amid rumors of anti-gentrification arsons, it mysteriously caught fire. This blaze devoured more than $35 million in labor and materials, and now the steel skeleton bowed and buckled. The entire top floor had collapsed, and the facade was seared with black smoke stains. (When someone torched this same building again several months later, police decided definitively that it was arson. I recall riding through the smoke on my bike that day.) As a result, the funders, Holliday Development, had ringed the property’s perimeter with chain-link and posted a twenty-four-hour armed sentry in a little matchbox booth inside the fence, a fat, tired man who waved to me cheerily when I cycled by.

Beside the half-destroyed condo complex was the 580 on-ramp to San Francisco. Clustered there on the highway’s margins was yet another of the city’s countless, nameless tent cities, a patchwork of a few dozen tarps and tents lit up at night by flaming oil drums. Beyond this homeless depot was Home Depot. I locked my bike outside the store and wandered the immaculate fluorescent-lit aisles. I bought four sheets of O.S.B. board, a box of three-inch drywall screws, and an armload of two-by-fours. Outside with my haul, I heard the loud thunk-thunk-thunk of E.D.M. and the squall of rubber tires skidding into the parking lot—Jenny’s Jeep, a crack down the center of the windshield like a busted smile, swerved into view and stopped in front of me, Jenny’s grinning face and tousled black hair framed by the rolled-down window.

“Check out this cute work outfit I bought,” she said, jumping out of the Jeep and modeling a pair of black thrift-store overalls.

“Portrait of an urban homesteader,” I said. (...)

Living in the shack, I came to realize that part of my motivation in moving back to the Bay Area was an urge to return to my younger self, a desire for freedom from the pressures of adulthood. After grad school at Berkeley, I’d gone to New York City, wanting to be a writer—but there weren’t, and aren’t, really full-time jobs for writers, not the kind I wanted to be, anyway. So I chose to become an editor, which seemed to be a way to split the difference between the precarity of the artist and the banality of the white-collar wage slave. But my role in the middle class was by no means secure or guaranteed no matter how hard I worked, and I had come to feel deceived by the mirage of upward mobility: after almost a decade of uninterrupted employment, of doing everything “right,” I owned no property, I had no stocks, no investments, no wealth, no inheritance, no safety net or support system beyond a few thousand dollars in my savings account. One disaster—being fired, sustaining a serious injury, needing to help out a desperate friend—could wipe me out, and if that happened, what would I have gained in a decade as an editor? I had decided I no longer cared about ever becoming middle-class; the cost of earning a living this way was too high. The terror of poverty had become far less frightening than the wages of having wasted my life.

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out,” George Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London. “You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.” (...)

The powerful thing about smallness, it occurred to me, isn’t actually smallness for its own sake—the point, instead, is a matter of scale. If you reduce the size of your life enough, then the smallest change can be a profound improvement. Yet the hardest thing is to recognize your smallness without being diminished by it. In my shack I was always balancing that tension—I didn’t want to become so small that I disappeared, I just wanted to hide for a little while.

by Wes Enzinna, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Matt Rota

Against Economics

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability. We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth. These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors.

We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.

One expects a certain institutional lag. Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths. “Heterodox” theories of economics do, of course, exist (institutionalist, Marxist, feminist, “Austrian,” post-Keynesian…), but their exponents have been almost completely locked out of what are considered “serious” departments, and even outright rebellions by economics students (from the post-autistic economics movement in France to post-crash economics in Britain) have largely failed to force them into the core curriculum.

As a result, heterodox economists continue to be treated as just a step or two away from crackpots, despite the fact that they often have a much better record of predicting real-world economic events. What’s more, the basic psychological assumptions on which mainstream (neoclassical) economics is based—though they have long since been disproved by actual psychologists—have colonized the rest of the academy, and have had a profound impact on popular understandings of the world.

Nowhere is this divide between public debate and economic reality more dramatic than in Britain, which is perhaps why it appears to be the first country where something is beginning to crack. It was center-left New Labour that presided over the pre-crash bubble, and voters’ throw-the-bastards-out reaction brought a series of Conservative governments that soon discovered that a rhetoric of austerity—the Churchillian evocation of common sacrifice for the public good—played well with the British public, allowing them to win broad popular acceptance for policies designed to pare down what little remained of the British welfare state and redistribute resources upward, toward the rich. “There is no magic money tree,” as Theresa May put it during the snap election of 2017—virtually the only memorable line from one of the most lackluster campaigns in British history. The phrase has been repeated endlessly in the media, whenever someone asks why the UK is the only country in Western Europe that charges university tuition, or whether it is really necessary to have quite so many people sleeping on the streets.

The truly extraordinary thing about May’s phrase is that it isn’t true. There are plenty of magic money trees in Britain, as there are in any developed economy. They are called “banks.” Since modern money is simply credit, banks can and do create money literally out of nothing, simply by making loans. Almost all of the money circulating in Britain at the moment is bank-created in this way. Not only is the public largely unaware of this, but a recent survey by the British research group Positive Money discovered that an astounding 85 percent of members of Parliament had no idea where money really came from (most appeared to be under the impression that it was produced by the Royal Mint).

Economists, for obvious reasons, can’t be completely oblivious to the role of banks, but they have spent much of the twentieth century arguing about what actually happens when someone applies for a loan. One school insists that banks transfer existing funds from their reserves, another that they produce new money, but only on the basis of a multiplier effect (so that your car loan can still be seen as ultimately rooted in some retired grandmother’s pension fund). Only a minority—mostly heterodox economists, post-Keynesians, and modern money theorists—uphold what is called the “credit creation theory of banking”: that bankers simply wave a magic wand and make the money appear, secure in the confidence that even if they hand a client a credit for $1 million, ultimately the recipient will put it back in the bank again, so that, across the system as a whole, credits and debts will cancel out. Rather than loans being based in deposits, in this view, deposits themselves were the result of loans.

The one thing it never seemed to occur to anyone to do was to get a job at a bank, and find out what actually happens when someone asks to borrow money. In 2014 a German economist named Richard Werner did exactly that, and discovered that, in fact, loan officers do not check their existing funds, reserves, or anything else. They simply create money out of thin air, or, as he preferred to put it, “fairy dust.”

That year also appears to have been when elements in Britain’s notoriously independent civil service decided that enough was enough. The question of money creation became a critical bone of contention. The overwhelming majority of even mainstream economists in the UK had long since rejected austerity as counterproductive (which, predictably, had almost no impact on public debate). But at a certain point, demanding that the technocrats charged with running the system base all policy decisions on false assumptions about something as elementary as the nature of money becomes a little like demanding that architects proceed on the understanding that the square root of 47 is actually π. Architects are aware that buildings would start falling down. People would die.

Before long, the Bank of England (the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve, whose economists are most free to speak their minds since they are not formally part of the government) rolled out an elaborate official report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy,” replete with videos and animations, making the same point: existing economics textbooks, and particularly the reigning monetarist orthodoxy, are wrong. The heterodox economists are right. Private banks create money. Central banks like the Bank of England create money as well, but monetarists are entirely wrong to insist that their proper function is to control the money supply. In fact, central banks do not in any sense control the money supply; their main function is to set the interest rate—to determine how much private banks can charge for the money they create. Almost all public debate on these subjects is therefore based on false premises. For example, if what the Bank of England was saying were true, government borrowing didn’t divert funds from the private sector; it created entirely new money that had not existed before.

One might have imagined that such an admission would create something of a splash, and in certain restricted circles, it did. Central banks in Norway, Switzerland, and Germany quickly put out similar papers. Back in the UK, the immediate media response was simply silence. The Bank of England report has never, to my knowledge, been so much as mentioned on the BBC or any other TV news outlet. Newspaper columnists continued to write as if monetarism was self-evidently correct. Politicians continued to be grilled about where they would find the cash for social programs. It was as if a kind of entente cordiale had been established, in which the technocrats would be allowed to live in one theoretical universe, while politicians and news commentators would continue to exist in an entirely different one.

Still, there are signs that this arrangement is temporary. England—and the Bank of England in particular—prides itself on being a bellwether for global economic trends. Monetarism itself got its launch into intellectual respectability in the 1970s after having been embraced by Bank of England economists. From there it was ultimately adopted by the insurgent Thatcher regime, and only after that by Ronald Reagan in the United States, and it was subsequently exported almost everywhere else.

It is possible that a similar pattern is reproducing itself today.

by David Graeber, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Dana Schutz: Men’s Retreat, 2005

Pat Kirtley

A photographer captured the exact moment a squirrel stopped to smell a daisy (Insider)

Image: Dick Van Duijn

Mark Webber, Leave The Light On

via:

“OK Boomer” Escalated Quickly

“OK Boomer” escalated quickly — a reddit+BigQuery report (Medium)
Image: uncredited
[ed. Evolution of a meme.]

via:

I Relented on My Toy Gun Ban. Here's What I Learned.

Toy guns were never part of my parenting plan. In fact, for a long time, I had a no-guns-at-home policy that was total and unwavering, extending even to the Nerf and water varieties. The ban was instituted for ideological and safety reasons; it bears repeating that we have a crisis of gun violence in America. According to the Pew Research Center, almost 40,000 people in the U.S. died of gun-related violence (homicide, suicide, or accidental shooting) in 2017. Three in 10 American adults own at least one gun; many own more. I am not one of them, and I loathe for my kids to grow up believing that anything made to kill another living being is cool, or fun, or normal.

But to my great surprise, I've recently come around on the issue of toy guns. I wouldn't recommend gifting them at a baby shower, or a second birthday, nor would I supply them automatically to any child. But, if I were to relive my kids' earlier years, my emphatic no would perhaps become a maybe. After all, toys — even toy weapons — are about make-believe, and my kids seem to understand that better than I did.

Many children, regardless of their backgrounds or parental proclivities, delight in toy guns and other gun-like things. I've heard stories of households without toy guns where little ones fashion them out of clay or sticks or toast. Maybe this is because, at one point or another, even the most sheltered of kids will meet other kids with toy guns. Maybe kids are drawn to guns because in our society — and in mainstream media especially — guns are a symbol of power. Or maybe it's just that, in my son's own words, shooting stuff is fun.

But for upwards of nine years, my ban never wavered. When my daughter and son, now seven and nearly 10, were tiny, shielding them from toy guns was simple. I kept them away from mainstream media and informed any potential gift-givers of the no-gun policy. Then, once my kids were old enough to realize they were missing out on a certain ilk of plaything, they pined after shooting implements. How they begged for the forbidden. But if anything remotely gun-like breached my defenses, I was sure to weed it out. My protections may have been, in retrospect, a tad extreme, but — in service to their innocence — I regret nothing.

Then, everything changed, as my family prepared for a long-distance move. Toy-by-toy, my kids were required to cull their stash. They sensed my weakness in the moment, and ruthlessly exploited it the way kids do. "Mom," they asked, "in our new house can we have just one Nerf gun?"

Distracted and overwhelmed by the towers of boxes and the even taller to-do list — I relented, hoping they'd soon forget my lapse. But once we were settled again, they remembered. One Nerf weapon turned into two. Two Nerfs required the purchase of more Nerf "darts." And belts. And camo. And eye protection. And another Nerf weapon each. Plus water guns.

I tried to comfort myself. They're brightly-colored, I thought. I have not exchanged hard-earned cash for AR-15 lookalikes.

Nevertheless, the once-banned toys crept insidiously, inexorably into our lives, our cupboards, my dreams. The first time a neighbor kid showed up at our house with an arsenal, I nearly slammed the door in the 6-year-old's face. But, swallowing my aversion, I stepped aside, both physically and symbolically, to yield my own kids the privilege of self-determination.

Meanwhile, my inner hippie mom (who, long before parenthood, earned a Master's in conflict resolution) screamed, How did this happen to us?! And my mind raced: What if toy guns draw my kids' interest to shooting-style video games? What if violent media encourages the use of real guns to solve problems? Would they streak through the yard like miniaturized warriors, aiming guns at faces or hearts, shouting, "Bang! You're dead!"?

by Danielle Simone Brand, The Week |  Read more:

Image: Three Lions/Getty Images, Aerial3/iStock

via:
[ed. See also: Existentialist Firefighter Delays 3 Deaths (Onion).]

How "The Memory Police" Makes You See

Earlier this year, Pantheon Books published Yoko Ogawa’s masterly novel “The Memory Police,” in an English translation by Stephen Snyder. (It was published in Japanese in 1994.) It’s a dreamlike story of dystopia, set on an unnamed island that’s being engulfed by an epidemic of forgetting. In the novel, the psychological toll of this forgetting is rendered in physical reality: when objects disappear from memory, they disappear from real life.

These disappearances are enforced by the Memory Police, a fascist squad that sweeps through the island, ransacking houses to confiscate lingering evidence of what’s been forgotten. Otherwise, Ogawa’s forgetting process is fittingly inexact. Things tend to disappear overnight; in the morning, the islanders—“eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air”—sense that something has changed. They try to acknowledge these disappearances, gathering in the street and talking about what they are losing. Sometimes the natural world complies, as if in a fairy tale: as roses disappear, a blanket of multicolored petals appears in the river. When birds disappear, people open their birdcages and release their confused pets up to the sky. Less poetic objects—stamps, green beans—vanish, too. Ships and maps are gone, so no one can leave or really understand where they are. A period of hazy limbo surrounds each disappearance. There are components to forgetting: the thing disappears, and then the memory of that thing disappears, and then the memory of forgetting that thing disappears, too.

The narrator, who, like the island, is unnamed, is a novelist. Her mother, a sculptor, was murdered by the Memory Police, who regularly round up and disappear the few islanders who still have working memories, and her late father was an ornithologist. (He dies five years before birds disappear and is spared the sight of his life’s work being carted away in garbage bags.) The narrator has published three novels, all of which revolve around disappearance: a piano tuner whose lover has gone missing, a ballerina who lost a leg, a boy whose chromosomes are being destroyed by a disease. Throughout “The Memory Police,” she works on a novel-in-progress about a typist whose voice is vanishing. She’s processing reality through a metaphorical device, re-creating the mechanism of the book that she herself is embedded in.

The narrator spends much of her time with an old man, a former ferryman who lives on a boat that now registers to them only as an unusable object. “I mean, things are disappearing more quickly than they are being created, right?” she asks him. She goes on, “It’s subtle but it seems to be speeding up, and we have to watch out. If it goes on like this and we can’t compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it’s completely hollowed out, we’ll all disappear without a trace.” The old man says yes—when he was a child, the island seemed fuller. “But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow,” he says. Ogawa expresses this attrition in the novel’s unembellished language and the eerie calm that pervades it—as the novel progresses, you feel as if a white fog is slowly thickening. On the island, possibilities are becoming foreclosed both literally and spiritually. When the residents forget birds and roses, they forget what these things conjure inside them: flight, freedom, extravagance, desire.

Allegories of collective degeneration have a tendency toward the phantasmagoric, as in José Saramago’s novel “Blindness,” which was published in 1997. In that novel, all the people in an unnamed city lose their physical sight, and the place swiftly descends into hellish depths of degradation and despair. But one of the most affecting aspects of “The Memory Police” is the lack of misery in the narrative. At first, this feels comforting, moving—an assurance that life is worth living even in the most reduced circumstances. The narrator adopts a dog that’s left behind after a kidnapping; she spends days gathering small treasures to throw a birthday party for the old man. The two of them take care of each other, and they protect the man who edits the narrator’s novels: he still has his memories, so they help him to hide from the Memory Police in a secret compartment in the narrator’s house.

But then it begins to seem possible that despair itself has been forgotten—that the islanders can’t agonize over the end that’s coming because the idea of endings has also disappeared. The narrator asks her editor if he thinks that the islanders’ hearts are decaying. “I don’t know whether that’s the right word, but I do know that you’re changing, and not in a way that can be easily reversed or undone. It seems to be leading to an end that frightens me a great deal,” he says.

I thought, then, about non-magical disappearances. We are often unable to conceptualize the true magnitude of certain inevitable losses. Even when regularly confronted with the most concrete and urgent sort of reality—that we have less than a year and a half before the planet’s climate is irreversibly headed toward catastrophe, for example—we tend, like the people in Ogawa’s novel, to forget. “End . . . conclusion . . . limit—how many times had I tried to imagine where I was headed, using words like these?” the narrator wonders. “But I’d never managed to get very far. It was impossible to consider the problem for very long, before my senses froze and I felt myself suffocating.” She finds herself, in conversation, “feeling that I was leaving out the most important thing—whatever that was.”

by Jia Tolentino, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Yann Kebbi

What's Blockchain Actually Good for, Anyway?

What's Blockchain Actually Good for, Anyway? For Now, Not Much (Wired)

Image: Ariel Davis
[ed. See also: Blockchain is Dead? Crypto Geeks Debate Merits of Once Dear Tech (Bloomberg).]

Real ID is Really Coming

Four of the country’s largest airlines have begun to accept reservations to fly on or after Oct. 1, 2020, but those carriers offer little, if any, warning on their booking sites about the new security documents that will be required to board a plane after that date.

Under federal law, a traditional state-issued drivers license or identification card won’t be accepted to board a plane. Starting Oct. 1, passengers can only fly with an enhanced identification card or drivers license — known as a Real ID — or a federally approved form of identification such as a passport or military ID.

Travel industry experts estimates that 99 million Americans currently don’t have a Real ID, passport or another valid ID, according to a survey commissioned by the U.S. Travel Assn. That means nearly 40% of American adults won’t be able to board an airline to visit family for the holidays next year. (...)

Congress passed the Real ID act in 2005, based on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, to set a nationwide standard for state-issued identification cards and driver’s licenses. But the deadline to impose the changes on all 50 states has been postponed several times over the last few years.

Forty-seven of the nation’s 50 states are now issuing the enhanced identification cards and drivers licenses that comply with the new standards. The Real ID cards and license are identified with a gold or black star in the top right corner. Oregon and Oklahoma have been given extensions to comply with the law and New Jersey’s ID is under review.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a request Nov. 8 to private firms that do business with the federal government for technologies that could streamline the process for applying for a Real ID card or license. The move opens the way for development of faster application online and the potential of carrying the enhanced identification on phones.

In California, residents need to produce several forms of identification to obtain a Real ID card, including utility bills, a birth certificate, a social security card or tax forms. The state will continue to issue traditional driver’s licenses or ID cards that can be renewed by mail but those can’t be used to board a commercial plane starting Oct.1. (...)

The Transportation Security Administration, which for months has been posting signs about the requirement at airports across the country, doesn’t plan to delay the implementation of the new requirements again, TSA spokeswoman Lorie Dankers said.

“The TSA does not encourage people to wait,” she said. “Waiting is not a good strategy.”

The worst-case scenario, said Barnes of the travel trade group, is that Americans ignore the requirements until next fall when more than 80,000 Americans who don’t have the proper identification documents show up at airports across the country to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday only to be turned away.

by Hugo Martin, LA Times |  Read more:

Image: DMV

[ed. Good luck getting one. It took me three tries at DMV to get the specific documentation they'd accept (you do know where your original social security card, birth certificate, et al. are stored, right?]

Tech Duopoly Killed the Headphone Jack

The reviews are in and they are almost universal: Apple's new AirPods Pro are great. And why wouldn't they be? Despite many flaws in the original AirPods — poor fit and mediocre sound quality, to name a couple — they quickly became the most popular headphones in the world. All Apple had to do was make some obvious changes and apply their considerable engineering talent and, presto, they have another hit.

It's not just engineering quality and design that has millions of people ready to pony up a full $250 for the new earbuds, though. Rather, despite not being quite as good as some competing models from Sony or even Amazon, the AirPods are like all Apple products: they work best with other Apple products — pairing quickly, activating Siri, and so on. It's convenient — and perhaps all a little bit too neat. Apple removed the headphone jack from their phones, ostensibly to make thinner devices, and then released expensive wireless buds that yet again take advantage of the walled garden of Apple. Now the iPhone 11 phones are out, thicker than last year's model, and the AirPods Pro are the perfect match for your $1,000 phone.

The problem? When Apple and Google control the two major computing systems, things that work best with those systems tend to be the ones that succeed. So first, companies kill the headphone jack — and soon, perhaps, they will also start to kill competition.

This isn't merely theoretical. Google famously flopped in the smartwatch market, in large part because, unlike Apple, it had no in-house department to design chips, and instead had to rely on partner Qualcomm, who haven't been able to compete with Apple for years. That's the corporate case for vertical integration: when you control all the parts, you can make better stuff.

Now, looking to make up for its past mistakes, Google has bought FitBit, the maker of wearable fitness trackers and smartwatches. Just as antitrust chatter starts to ramp up amid worries of tech's increasing consolidation of power, one of the world's largest companies swallows an ostensible competitor not only to absorb talent to make its own smartwatches, but also to hoover up its data.

The smartwatch example is illuminating. More than any other tech, smartwatches currently rely on the smartphone they are paired with for much of their functionality. An Apple Watch only works if you have an iPhone — and speaking as an Apple Watch owner, it's a powerful form of lock-in. In one sense, it's about tech companies pairing products with each other because they'll work more effectively together. But it also shows how the vertically integrated system encourages both users and companies to form little silos of tech which end up discouraging interoperability, and with it, competition.

So we're left with a situation in which a Google thing might work better with a Google thing, but if you want to buy a phone from one company, headphones from another, and a smartwatch from another, they're never going to work quite as well as if they're all from the same company. That's not a monopoly exactly, but it is a subtle or passive form of coercion.

Making matters more complicated is the way in which services and digital assistants get baked into operating systems. Google's Assistant, for example, works best when it knows more about you — specifically, your appointments through Gmail and Google Calendar, your interest via search, and your whereabouts and travel habits through Maps. Similarly, Apple's AirPods can raise Siri hands-free but not Google's Assistant or Amazon's Alexa. It's all about tie-in, and in this case, "tie-in" means "less consumer choice."

What this means is that there isn't so much competition between individual products — between this phone or that, or these headphones or another — as much as between ecosystems: Apple's, Google's, and perhaps Amazon's and Microsoft's — though the latter two don't really have their own as much as piggyback on the other two. That isn't really competition; instead, it's a scenario in which the ecosystem owners either swallow or overshadow those who oppose them.

by Navneet Alang, The Week |  Read more:
Image: erllre/iStock, Andrea Colarieti/iStock, DickDuerrstein/iStock

How Ambient Chill Became the New Silence

Kate Cooper has a story she likes to tell. Once, while riding in a taxi in Montreal on the way to the airport to visit family in Brisbane, Australia, she heard a strain of music playing in the background on a screen in the cab. It was music licensed from PremiumBeat, a royalty-free music library owned by Shutterstock that together contain upwards of 22,000 songs, and where Cooper works as a producer.

When Cooper arrived at the airport, she felt another flicker of recognition: the music playing inside the terminal sounded familiar to her, despite being pointedly inconspicuous. Then it happened again, after she boarded her flight. This time, it was the music playing in the background of the in-flight safety video. “I was like, ‘Can you just stop?’” she told me about the experience. “‘I’m going home for a holiday.’” After she landed in Australia and spent a few days sleeping off her jet lag, she went to the movies. There it was, again. “I was sitting in the theater and three ads came on in a row before the movie started,” she explains. “It was all our music.”

Cooper’s story isn’t really about transcontinental coincidence. It’s about the ubiquity and increased homogeneity of certain kinds of mood-setting songs. Background music has been big business for nearly a century, and in recent decades it’s been transformed by factors that are reshaping the music industry at large: streaming, algorithms, and social media. The demand for royalty-free music is growing, in large part because of the explosion of YouTube and Instagram, where influencers—especially in the beauty and travel realms—display an enormous appetite for sonic content, but often lack the pocket money to pay royalties on popular songs. YouTube claims that 500 hours of content are uploaded to the platform every minute. “Almost all of that needs music,” Cooper says; demand is “off the hook.”

Background music comes in a variety of flavors: piped-in playlists curated by sound designers for hotels or fast food restaurants; custom-made background music for big-budget commercials; algorithmic Spotify playlists with chill, lo-fi beats; and stock music, which permeates our environment often imperceptibly, in airports, Instagram Stories, furniture showrooms, grocery stores, banks, and hospital lobbies.

There’s almost no question that our lives are increasingly filled with sound. Noise pollution in urban spaces is also on the rise, as Kate Wagner noted in a 2018 article from The Atlantic. Wagner’s piece, “How Restaurants Got So Loud,” explains how some restaurants are louder than freeways or alarm clocks, at 70 decibels, making it almost impossible to hear a dinner companion, since trendy building materials such as slate and wood don’t absorb much sound. (Wagner measured “80 decibels in a dimly lit wine bar at dinnertime; 86 decibels at a high-end food court during brunch; 90 decibels at a brewpub in a rehabbed fire station during Friday happy hour.”)

Adding ambient music to these spaces is about setting and controlling a nearly invisible emotional forcefield for consumers; ambient music for shopping spaces, these days, is meant to soothe you or pump you up, and generally nudge your habits toward consumption. The specific calculus about mood varies by business type. A 1982 study conducted in supermarkets revealed that slow-tempo music was shown to slow customers, and they purchased more as a result. On the opposite end of the spectrum, loud pounding music may be effective for bars; one 2008 study showed that men ordered an average of one more drink in louder bars than in quieter ones, and finished their drinks more quickly.

Background music is also increasingly used to create a branded “experience,” one that’s meant to connect a customer and a brand in an intimate way, relying less on the type of song (country, rap, folk) than on its mood (sexy, aggressive, uplifting). The less complicated the mood, the better. “A good song has a single emotion in it,” Cooper tells me. “The average length of a song is two minutes and 30 seconds, which is not a lot of time. If it tries to be really happy, and then really sad, it’s confusing.” Happy stock music sells better than PremiumBeat’s sad libraries, she explains, perhaps in part because people are spurred toward purchases by happy tunes. But, Cooper says, the point of a library like PremiumBeat is that clients can find a song in a library for any emotional occasion: “I just approved a track called ‘Eulogy,’ and I was like, ‘Well, there’s only one use for that.’” (...)

Mood Media remains the global corporate giant of playlist curation; the company curates music for everyone from KFC to Gucci to Chase Bank. Mood boasts more than 500,000 clients worldwide and reaches about 150 million ears daily. The company also dabbles in other facets of the branded “experience,” including signage, audiovisual systems, and even custom smells.

“Collectively we’ve all learned that the way brick and mortar retail survives and thrives is by creating elevating experiences, without question,” says Danny Turner, global senior vice president of Mood Media. “Music is such an emotional and strong bond of connectivity with brands.” It doesn’t matter, maybe, if you buy something on-site; if the music leaves you with a positive feeling, a clear sense of a brand’s “personality,” it has done the trick.

Today, Mood Media doesn’t produce much original content; it serves to market a massive existing library of songs, some of which are popular, while others are totally unknown. Unlike the Muzak of yesteryear, a lot of Mood’s music has lyrics, though Turner says that a certain type of ambience is back in fashion. “We are seeing an overall very large swing toward a sort of ambient, chill, down-tempo, sort of like house kind of sound,” Turner says. “I’ve joked that ambient chill is the new Muzak.”

Today, the emotional manipulation of ambient music is growing increasingly specific. And we, the listeners, have become more mood-oriented too—mostly thanks to Spotify. In 2015, the company helped to engineer the shift from listening by artist or album or genre to listening by mood, building data on users’ emotional states through playlists like “Chill” or “Happy Hits,” and selling that data to advertisers and marketing firms. Spotify now claims that, “unlike generations past, millennials aren’t loyal to any specific music genre.”

Musicians who write for stock libraries need to keep up with the trends. Liam Clarke, who’s been making music for stock libraries since 2013, has a few Instagram accounts that he uses to follow bloggers, influencers, and brands of all stripes in order to keep his finger on the pulse of what people are listening to. After a more dancey, upbeat phase that lasted for a few years, Clarke says, the popular ethos today tends to be chill lo-fi, but with a beat.

Clarke got into making stock music the way many musicians do: messing around on the computer. He’d always written and played music, starting in school orchestras, but when he got the Apple program GarageBand, released in 2004, which allows people to write their own music, he could begin quickly writing music in any genre or style. Clarke also writes songs for other musicians and plays his own music. “I don’t think that’s all too different from producing for a library,” he says.

Because they have their personal brands, many artists, including Clarke, use pseudonyms in stock music libraries; his is Liam Aidan. (“You could have a song that’s the most licensed song in the world and no one would know who you are,” he says.) Once musicians upload a song to a library, it can be hard to track where it goes; they receive checks when a song is licensed and may get sent audio clips by friends or family who recognize their tunes, but, often, their work fades into the digital ether. This sometimes leads to the surprising flicker of recognition that comes from hearing one’s song out in the world, like Kate Cooper’s uncanny trip through the airport. (One stock musician found out weeks after the event that his song had been played on the red carpet at the Met Gala; another got a check for $1,800 because his song had been broadcast in Romania.)

by Sophie Haigney, Topic | Read more:
Image: Jovanna Tosello

MyTwangyGuitar

[ed. See also: Ridin' My Harley and many more (archive).]

The Seahawks-49ers Rivalry Is Back, and the NFL Is Better Off for It

When I started covering the NFL in 2011, the last version of the Seahawks-49ers rivalry was still in its infancy. The Niners went to the NFC championship game that season, but lost to the Giants in a wild contest that was swung by Kyle Williams’s botched punt return. Seattle hadn’t quite reached the same heights, finishing just 7-9 that year, but the bones of the dominant Legion of Boom teams were already in place. Marshawn Lynch had rushed for more than 1,200 yards in his first full season with the franchise, and young building blocks like Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor, Richard Sherman, Doug Baldwin, and K.J. Wright were starting to make an impact. The embers of a rivalry may have been there, but things really ignited in 2012.

That’s the year Seattle drafted Russell Wilson and the Niners transitioned from Alex Smith to Colin Kaepernick at quarterback. Over the next two seasons, those teams would lock horns in some of the most memorable and heated NFL games of this decade. And as they emerged as the best teams in football, Seattle and San Francisco redefined nearly every aspect of the modern NFL: from roster-building, to schematic approach, to how teams used their QBs.

As the Steelers-Ravens rivalry hit a relative low point in the early 2010s, with Pittsburgh slowly transitioning to the early years of its high-scoring Three-Bs era, the Seahawks and Niners filled the void. Their feud burned fast and bright, flaming out after an 8-8 finish in 2014 led the Niners to fire Jim Harbaugh. But after lying dormant for several years, it seems like both teams are finally ready to rekindle the flame. On Monday night, the 8-0 49ers host the 7-2 Seahawks in one of the biggest games of the season. The stakes between these teams are sky-high once again—and the NFL is better off for it.

It’s hard to believe that the most recent version of this rivalry lasted only a couple of years, because it gave us a decade’s worth of memorable moments. Plenty of those came when both teams shared the field, but each built their own mystique against other opponents, too. I was at Candlestick Park in January 2013 when Kaepernick racked up nearly 450 total yards and four touchdowns in a divisional-round win over the Packers. It was the most physically dominant performance I’d ever seen from a quarterback to that point—the Packers defense didn’t look like it belonged on the same field as Kaepernick.

With Kaepernick at the helm, the Niners built a reputation as a dynamic power-running squad with a hulking offensive line that could grind defenses into oblivion. And with Patrick Willis, Justin Smith, and NaVorro Bowman on the other side of the ball, San Francisco had a terrifying defense to match. Harbaugh was there to provide the comic relief with some of the most memorable sideline temper tantrums ever, and together they produced some incredibly thrilling performances. (We don’t talk about the 2012 divisional-round win over the Saints nearly enough.)

At the same time, the Seahawks emerged as the loudest (in more ways than one), coolest group in football. It had been years since an NFL team had cultivated as many personalities as the Seahawks did at the start of this decade. Sherman had no qualms about chirping in Tom Brady’s face after a win. Chancellor made a habit of erasing anyone who crossed his path. Lynch trucked countless helpless defenders on his way to becoming an icon. (...)

The aspect of that game that stuck out most, though, more than any individual play, was the sense that you were watching two teams that were playing a different sport than the rest of the NFL. The pure physicality and speed on display was unlike anything else in the league during that time. And in ways both big and small, the Seahawks and Niners became the teams of the era.

by Robert Mays, The Ringer |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images/Ringer illustration

[ed. Tonight. See also (from the links above): Bigger, Faster, Stronger, Louder: How the Seahawks Became the Coolest Team in the NFL (Grantland).]

photo: markk (via:)

Ted Gioia on Music as Cultural Cloud Storage

To Ted Gioia, music is a form of cloud storage for preserving human culture. And the real cultural conflict, he insists, is not between “high brow” and “low brow” music, but between the innovative and the formulaic. (...)

He joined Tyler to discuss the history and industry of music, including the reasons AI will never create the perfect songs, the strange relationship between outbreaks of disease and innovation, how the shift from record companies to Silicon Valley transformed incentive structures within the industry– and why that’s cause for concern, the vocal polyphony of Pygmy music, Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize, why input is underrated, his advice to aspiring music writers, the unsung female innovators of music history, how the Blues anticipated the sexual revolution, what Rene Girard’s mimetic theory can tell us about noisy restaurants, the reason he calls Sinatra the “Derrida of pop singing,” how to cultivate an excellent music taste, and why he loves Side B of Abbey Road. (via)

Here is the audio and transcript, the chat centered around music, including Ted’s new and fascinating book Music: A Subversive History. We talk about music and tech, the Beatles, which songs and performers we are embarrassed to like, whether jazz still can be cool, Ted’s family background, why restaurants are noisier, why the blues are disappearing, Elton John, which countries are underrated for their musics, whether anyone loves the opera, whether musical innovation is still possible, and much much more. Here are some excerpts:

GIOIA: …Spotify still isn’t profitable. I believe Spotify will become profitable, but they’re going to do it by putting the squeeze on people. Musicians will suffer even more, probably, in the future than they have in the past. What’s good for Spotify is not good for the whole music ecosystem. 

Let me make one more point here. I think it’s very important. If you go back a few years ago, there was a value chain in music — started with the musician, worked for the record label. The records went to the record distributor. They went to the retailer, who sold the record to the consumer. At that point, everybody in that chain had a vested interest in a healthy music ecosystem in which people enjoyed songs. The more people enjoyed songs, the better business was for everybody. 

That chain has been broken now. Apple would give away songs for free to sell devices. They don’t care about the viability of the music subeconomy. For them, it could be a loss leader. Google doesn’t care about music. They would give music away for free to sell ads. In fact, they do that on YouTube. 

The fundamental change here is, you now have a distribution system for music in which some of the players do not have a vested interest in the broader musical experience and ecosystem. This is tremendously dangerous, and that’s the real reason why I fear the growth of streaming, is because the people involved in streaming don’t like music.

And:

COWEN: Do you think music today is helping the sexual revolution or hurting it? Speaking of Prince… 

GIOIA: It’s very interesting. There’s market research and focus groups about how people use music in their day-to-day life. Take, for example, this: you’re going to bring a date back to your apartment for a romantic dinner. So what do you worry about? 

Well, the first thing I have to worry about is, my place is a mess. I’ve got to clean it up. That’s number one. The second thing you worry about is, what food am I going to fix? But number three on people’s list — when you interview them — is the music because they understand the music is going to seal the deal. If there’s going to be something really romantic, that music is essential. 

People will agonize for hours over which music to play. I think that we miss this. People view music as distance from people’s everyday life. But in fact, people put music to work every day, and one of the premier ways they do it is in romance. 

COWEN: Let’s say you were not married, and you’re 27 years old, and you’re having a date over. What music do you put on in 2019 under those conditions? 

GIOIA: It’s got to always be Sinatra. 

COWEN: Because that is sexier? It’s generally appealing? It’s not going to offend anyone? Why? 

GIOIA: I must say up front, I am no expert on seduction, so you’re now getting me out of my main level of expertise. But I would think that if you were a seducer, you would want something that was romantic on the surface but very sexualized right below that, and no one was better at these multilayered interpretations of lyrics than Frank Sinatra. 

I always call them the Derrida of pop singing because there was always the surface level and various levels that you could deconstruct. And if you are planning for that romantic date, hey, go for Frank.

There is much more at the link, interesting throughout, and again here is Ted’s new book.

by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution |  Read more: