Skill Extinction

A quick Google search indicates the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world to be Gaziantep, Turkey - evidence has been found dating it back to at least 3650 BCE. That's 5660 years old, more or less (the dating is an estimate). So let's assume people have been building with reasonable sophistication and across a fairly large geographical area for not less than 6000 years. We have certainly been building for longer than that but I think it is a reasonable assumption that massive skill extinctions - the loss of the knowledge or ability to either perform certain tasks or build create particular forms - have not been general. They have been the exception rather than the rule. Cases like losing the knowledge of concrete (as happened in Europe after Rome fell) or the loss of sophisticated ship-building techniques (as occurred in China around 1450) are rarities. In general, we can assume that until very recently craftsmen have been trained on the basis of a slowly but continuously growing body of knowledge kept intact by the practice of their trades for hundreds (and in many cases thousands) of years.

Craftspeople were trained by masters in a time-honoured and orderly way. They started as apprentices, learned enough to become journeymen (sorry but journeypeople isn't a word) at which time they were expected to gain knowledge through travel. Hence the name. This practice is still used in some parts of the world; carpenters in Germany are expected to travel for at least a year before they can become masters. They also have a customary costume so they are easy to identify when you see one working in North America. When the rank of master is attained, they become eligible for membership in their guild and start taking on apprentices of their own. The amount and sophistication of knowledge that is carried and maintained in this way is astonishing. I studied (all too briefly) under a master who had apprenticed in Germany after the war. His father, also his master, knew all their tools would be smashed or stolen when the allied armies captured their town so they hid one plane iron, one chisel, and one saw. From those three tools they were able, with the help of a blacksmith, to rebuild all the tools necessary for them to practice their profession and began rebuilding their town. This guy could make anything with the simplest tools; he was awesome. He was also a great teacher. Every day I worked with him I heard the same things, "Why would you do it like that?" and "Always with you the most difficult way!" He criticized everything I did and the closest he came to a compliment was, "Satisfactory, I suppose."

I might make him sound like a hard-case impossible to work for but it was the opposite. Since I knew he could fix any mistake I made and would never approve of anything I did, I had no fear of trying new things. When I messed up, or got myself into a difficult situation, I'd hear, "Why would you do it like that?" and he'd show me the next step. I think he liked me because I appreciated the old way of doing things and took extremely good care of my tools. He might have thought I was a jerk. It didn't make any difference; his job was to teach me, not to be my friend. I have very few regrets in life (a kind of predisposition not an indication I have had a blameless and perfect existence) but one is I blew my back before I completed my apprenticeship. 2 or 3 more years with him, plus another 20 or 30 years of working constantly on improving my skills, and I might have become as skilled as he is. Then I could have started working with apprentices of my own.

The world doesn't work that way anymore. I read part of the instruction manual printed by the Cabinetmakers Guild in England around 1800. The first page instructs apprentices to cut several hundred board feet of choice timber and stack it in a specified manner so that, 10 or 12 years later when they are competent to start using it, the lumber will be "seasoned" and ready for them. Now a Cabinetmaker's ticket takes 6 semesters of classroom experience and 3000 hours of on the job training. 3 1/2 years. Most of it spent at a table saw or a shaper. Those people who are trying to keep traditional ways of doing things, that immense pool of knowledge compiled over thousands of years, alive do so at a substantial financial penalty to themselves. If they are lucky, they find a few collectors who will pay for the time it takes to make beautiful things that will last a lifetime. Most wind up working another job to sustain themselves. But since furniture is, even at its very best, a relatively inexpensive proposition, they have a better chance of maintaining their skills than most other trades. Even an expensive piece of furniture is cheap next to a building.

I remember a case in my hometown, London Ontario, of a restoration of a building on the Campus of the University of Western Ontario. The building was of stone, in a style common for prestige buildings at the time it was completed. There was no masons in Canada capable of handling that kind of stonework - ubiquitous across the province and the country only 150 years earlier. Specialist were flown in from Ireland, at great cost, and public outcry, to complete the restoration.

So, the sum of human knowledge has been growing continuously, minus a few notable set-backs, for 6000 years until the last century. We have been losing skills at an astonishing rate in the last hundred years. In the last 50 years we have lost the last generation of tradespeople trained to do things that would have been considered basic at any time in the previous 5 millennia. Every mason could lay an arch with brick for at least the last 3000 years. Really fancy ones with complex geometries got popular in Europe about 1000 years ago. Try getting a mason to do it now. And I'm not bad mouthing masons; I may not care overmuch for the organization but as a trade they are top notch. Check out this list for examples of architecture and construction we can't achieve anymore.

Try finding someone who can carve stone or a good waller (someone who can make a wall by stacking stones without mortar). Take a look at any prestigious building more than 200 years old and count the things we are no longer capable of doing.

This is Divinity Hall at Oxford University. Try to find anyone who could do that stone work. You can hang it up because it ain't going to happen.

This is the ceiling of the Great Hall at Hampton Court. I can't even count the things in this image we are no longer capable of doing.

It isn't just prestige buildings we are losing the ability to make. My father was a tool and die maker. He was also the person who started teaching me about making things. To a tool and die maker, cabinetry is kind of a joke. They work by the rule of ten, I worked by the business card. To me, a joint was tight enough if I couldn't fit a business card in any of the gaps (this was when I was just starting out). To my father, plus 0 minus 1/1000th of an inch was a reasonable tolerance. A human hair is 3/1000ths. And the rule of ten is "The tool made to make a part must be ten times more accurate than the part. The instrument used to check the tool must be ten times as accurate as the tool." So at that point you are working with tolerances that required their own system of measurement. The guys who taught him could make things of extraordinary accuracy by hand, judging by touch and by eye. It sounded super-human to me and it still does but I have never questioned the fact of it. The ability to tell if a steel plate is flat to within 1/3rd of a human hair just but touching or looking at it is of questionable relevance but it leads me to wonder what else we have lost and what we were once capable of.

I'm going to sound like a grumpy old bastard for a second here but my experience is these days people don't really give a fuck when it comes to building things. When I visited the American Folk Art Museum (a wonderful building in NYC with its fate currently undecided but possibly subject to immanent demolition) the architect I was touring it with wondered aloud how the contractors possibly got concrete that good in North America. Good concrete shouldn't be too much to ask for a high prestige building in North America's first city but it is. Tadao Ando used to keep two separate concrete crews competing against each other - that's how he got such consistently fantastic concrete. But that's Japan and they have a very different ethic about craft than we do.

I don't know how to end this. Part of me wants to beg and plead everyone to stop buying shit from big retailers like Ikea and, instead, invest in heirloom quality pieces by people who actually know what they are doing. But how can I say that seriously to people who live in a city where you have earn enough to be in the top 10% of all Canadian households just to afford a "normal" house? For most of the people I know, extravagance is a dinner in a restaurant with linen rather than paper. They can't drop $10K on a piece of furniture. So I suppose this is nothing but a lament. I believe skill deserves to be celebrated. I believe you should never reach a point when you stop getting better at what you do. And I believe all the systems, all the organizations, all the efficiency experts who have somehow conspired to leave me in the minority are wrong and dangerously so. Wrongerous or dangeroung. Or something.

Complex Systems

NOTE: This was published 5 months ago. Yesterday I noticed a the lights hung above the middle lane that tell you whether it is for North or South bound traffic. I have lived in Toronto for about 2 and a half years and I never saw them before. So I should probably take this post down but I let it stand as evidence (as if any were needed) of the quantity and significance of all the things I don't know. And because the argument is essentially true even tho my example is massively (and obviously to anyone who actually looks for traffic lights) wrong.

Lately I've become oddly fascinated with how complex systems can be with almost no rules. Traffic is a great example of this. Cars are getting lighter and smaller both for city driving and fuel efficiency. I picked two cars - the Ford Focus and Toyota Corolla - that are popular and kind of generic; they both weigh close to 2800 lbs, so call it 1250 kg. Because we are so accustomed to seeing cars driving we don't get freaked out by 1250 kg of metal moving at 60 kph but that is a lot of momentum. Highways often have concrete barriers separating traffic moving in different directions but smaller (two or three lane) highways don't, so two cars (2500 kg) of metal can be moving towards each other at 200 kph. What separates them? A line of paint. And that line of paint keeps us safe.

Aside from traffic lights, stop signs, yield signs, and signs indicating one-way traffic most vehicular movement is regulated by lines of paint. There are only 4 kinds of lines: solid white, broken white, solid yellow, and broken yellow. In case you use a different system where you live, solid white means the cars on the other side of the line are going in the same direction but you can't change lanes, broken white means same direction and you can change lanes, solid yellow means opposite direction no lane changes, broken yellow means opposite direction passing allowed. Here is an image of Jarvis Street in Toronto:

You might need to blow it up but at full size you can clearly see five lanes of traffic, all separated by broken white lines. Jarvis isn't one way. And whether three lanes are southbound or northbound seems to depend on the amount of traffic, which is to say it is a continuous negotiation made instantly by every driver using it. There is no rule to govern the use, no authority to make a determination. It is figured out minute by minute by people pointing 1250 kgs of car at each other and stepping on the gas.

Aside from being kind of cool in and of itself, systems of this type illustrate what makes some things more - I'm tempted to call them human because there is a social process involving expectations, perceptions, understanding of obligations and a social contract that is happening in a matter of seconds all day, every day on streets like this one. The same process works when new roads are opened before the paint goes down, or when circumstances make using the suggested lanes impossible but traffic still needs to move. These situations are almost never handled by cops (or any authority), they are handled by instant and non-verbal communication. This, to me, is the essence of politics. And that might sound like a let down if you think this is going to degenerate into me pumping for one party or another. I don't mean politics in the electoral sense. I mean politics as the autochthonous coeval of cities - the sometimes gentle, sometimes brutal art of living together without killing each other.

Politics is why we cannot "inhabit" the internet in the same way we inhabit cities. The distinction, or difficulty, has less to do with the dumb fact of our physical existence than the absolute necessity of over-arching rules that arbitrate almost everything that would, in the physical world, be the domain of politics. The rules of digitalia in its current form specify everything from how I interact with the machine physically (through the design of the object I touch, whether it's a phone or a pad or a full-on machine) to how I navigate the set of sites that compose digital space to how I can use (and the absolute limits of what I can do with) any particular site. There is neither room nor necessity for those almost instantaneous negotiations that are so much a part of every minute spent in the city - whether in a car or on foot or sitting down.

Someone obsessed with efficiency would make sure the entrances and exits to major transit hubs were physically separated. Think of a subway station with street level access, people trying to get in from different directions, people trying to get out in different directions. It should be a perfect illustration of chaos but at almost every moment there are spontaneous agreements reached (these are the IN doors, those the OUT) without discussion or planning or authority of any kind. It is part of the human condition to self-organize in temporary, consensual ways. I love that about cities.

I have a friend who told me when you don't know where you are going, follow the most people. He wasn't speaking metaphorically. When I find myself in an airport, train station, or even shopping mall that I don't know how to navigate, I remember his advice and just look for the direction more people are moving in and I go that way. The strange thing is, without any knowledge of where those people want to go or what they think they are doing, they almost always wind up taking me where I want to go. The systems self-organize regardless of my volition (or anyone else's). The same rule works in social situations - when is it time to leave the party? In the absence of other information, leave when most other people leave.

So much of how we live is based on a consensus we cannot articulate, almost never consider, yet follow with remarkable accuracy. It is only when things get fubar that we need to bring out politics as the term is usually understood, that we have to discuss how things should go or be rather than just working with and abiding by how things are at that moment. I sometimes wonder how small the set of explicit rules could be that would still allow a complex system like a city to function. I think the general rule is about half as many as are in place. I'm not sure there is a way to test this in the abstract but empirically you have tested it every time you travelled to a place with a different culture. Try ordering food in Rome, for example. It's a clusterfuck for North Americans and most Northern Europeans because people don't form lines - which happens spontaneously here even when no one suggests it should. Instead, people just yell to get the attention of someone behind the counter. Crossing the street is another example. Here, you wait for a light or sign or break in traffic; in Rome, you just step into the road and trust the cars not to hit you. I strongly suggest finding a beautiful woman and using her as a shield the first few times. A beautiful woman can step into the densest, most hideous traffic at any moment and cross with impunity, you just follow in her wake (unless you are a beautiful woman, then you can do whatever you want). Before I went to Rome my mother (a retired school teacher) told me when it comes to crossing the road, just grab your balls and tell yourself, "Don't be a bitch!" This piece of advice was extremely helpful to my classmates.

The farther you travel geographically, the more the unspoken consensus changes and the more likely you are to get yourself in serious trouble through nothing more than ignorance. Every traveller has at least one story of causing a situation (or finding themselves in one) both completely unexpected and really really odd. My brother travelled to India and, while there, lost control of a rented scooter and landed badly. Before he knew what was happening the crowd of people who just happened to be there scooped him up in the air and were running for the nearest hospital with him held over their heads (not an easy feat with a man who is more than 6 foot and 200 pounds). When he made the mistake of complaining (freaking out more accurately) they dumped him on the ground and started cursing him out for shockingly ill-mannered behaviour. His host had to spend several anxious minutes explaining to the assembled crowd he was a barbarian with no knowledge of how to behave before the crowd dispersed.

Different places have different expectations, different consensus agreements about how to behave when the official rules either don't apply or don't work. And yet no one in Rome, or India for that matter, would be able to verbally articulate the set of rules they abide by - just as no one here can. We can partially explain particular instances but mostly it is non-verbal (non-declarative) knowledge, nothing more or less than how we live.

Ah Fuck. Lou Reed is Dead.

I want to write an obituary for Lou Reed but I understand now, after several tries, obituaries are only easy for people you hate (like H.L. Mencken writing about William Jennings Bryan, the most savage piece of professional journalism I've ever read) or don't give a shit about. If you knew the person or wanted to, an obit is not an easy thing to write. 

He was cool for four consecutive decades. That's him and Miles Davis. I can't think of anyone else who has done it. Some people might make an argument for some French or Italian "celebrity" I have only vaguely heard of but being cool in Italy or France is a breeze compared to being cool in America. Lou made it in the coolest city in the world. He was the coolest person in New York, New York was the coolest city in the world - you do the math. And in the 40 some years he remained as cool as ever, the culture around him turned to complete shit. It isn't possible to be cool in America anymore. At least not in New York or L.A. You can only be famous. While the culture around him devolved into a shit-storm of celebrities made famous by reality TV or home-made porno, with careers of the same duration as the super-heavy atoms created in particle accelerators, Lou was still in New York. Still writing songs. Still the cool. He got left behind by fame, renowned more for his ill-will towards TV producers and the poor fucks who tried to give 2 minute interviews than his music. But I watched him talk openly and intelligently to Elvis Costello for an hour and started to wonder how the fuck he earned his reputation as "difficult". I can't find it on Youtube. Too bad. Maybe someone will post it now to mark his death. It wouldn't be the worst memorial. 

All the World's Problems

This is an interesting interview with Russell Brand. The interviewer acts like a dick for some presumably British reason that I can't understand but Brand is a very intelligent man and a very fast talker. He ends the interview with a restatement of the classic principle "Liberties are always taken,  never given." No one has given Brand the right to try to solve the world's problems, he has taken it for himself. Which made me think if more people did that we might actually have a hope of solving them - an extremely slim hope but better than nothing, which is what we have now. So it seems to me worth making a list of those problems most likely to cause global catastrophe(s) even if I have no solutions to offer. I suspect the list will be pretty short and yet illuminating for those of us who live in democracies. Because in the approximately five minutes I have been thinking about this list, I have also been trying to think about how frequently they are major topics in elections and the answer is almost never. They almost never enter the political dialogue at all. So this list will be, if nothing else, useful to me in determining how much interest I should have in what any given politician is saying at any given time.

Each of these problems constitute a ongoing threat to ourselves, our children, and our ideas about what we can expect from this life. In Canada, at this moment, the biggest story in the media is about members of our Senate misusing their expense accounts. Is it a betrayal of public trust? Sure. Is it on par with any of the items that will make this list? Not even close. So long as shit like this dominates our politics, our politics remains trivial - it is the politics of the status quo, which, as this list (or the one you have already started to make in your head) makes abundantly clear is not something we can allow to continue. So...

First, the economy. I struggled with whether to put this before the environment or after it but since most people seem to believe the economy is a genuine political issue and the environment is a fringe issue, the economy comes first. And I should point out, I'm not talking about local economies but national and global ones. I'm not certain there are local economies in developed nations anymore.

As Brand points out in the interview, if nothing else the Occupy Movement served to place the issue of the 1% vs the 99% in the public mind. A recent study has shown you have to be in the top 10% of earners (per family) in Canada to afford a typical house in Toronto (where I live). Here is a video showing income disparity in the US perceived versus actual. It surprises most people. And anyone who has even a basic concept of human dignity has to be offended by the income disparity, the worst in the G8 nations. Still, even the poorest Americans, people with no options left but panhandling on the street, earn more on an average day than the majority of the population in the mega-cities of the Southern Hemisphere. Something like 1 billion people (that's a conservative number, it might be closer to 2 billion) survive on the equivalent of less than $2(US) per day. So if that infographic included the whole world, instead of just the United States, the results would be even more appalling. If you want a terrifying and immensely depressing overview I suggest Mike Davis's Planet of Slums.

Even people who might be comfortable with some kind of income redistribution in wealthier countries, for example the progressive taxation and socialized redistribution of the Scandinavian countries, don't often talk about the necessity to create a redistribution system on a global scale. There are limits based, if not on national borders, on some kind of psychological geography. There is no need to redistribute income from the US (still the richest nation in the world) to Sierra Leone (for example) because they are so far away (and, in the case of the US, race, nationalism, cultural attitudes and extremist politics/economics would also enter the picture).

Even if we leave all arguments about fairness and human dignity aside, which I think is a good idea, there are strong pragmatic arguments for income redistribution. Here is Richard Wilkinson presenting evidence, collected over many years and in many nations, demonstrating income disparity is inversely correlated to quality of life. Still, societies tend to see themselves as having fixed, rather than porous or permeable, boundaries. Canada is not the US, the US is not Mexico. North America is not South America. I think it is naive to think a solution that only works in one part of the world is a solution at all. It is a good start and nothing more. The Scandinavian nations I love to rave about are separated from the rest of Europe by geography and culture but the economies are all connected. I think 2007 showed us the extent to which the global economy is a single entity with little regard for national or cultural borders. And yet, the First World is not the Third World. So, other than sponsoring a child through some organization for "less than the cost of a cup of coffee" or giving micro-loans through Kiva, why should we be expected to care about the Third World? This is a hard argument to make with any immediacy without invoking notions of fairness and human dignity and to do it I'll have to move on to the second big problem.

The Environment. This one is a no-brainer. The fact NTE theory has been out there for a while but even someone like me, reasonably well informed and interested, only heard about it recently (and randomly) shows the extent to which concern for the environment has devolved into arguments about local problems. Again, at this moment the big environmental issue in Canada is the Keystone Pipeline. It's a monumentally terrible idea that makes perfect sense within the completely fucked up set of ideologies and economic realities that generated it. Essentially, a couple huge corporations want to build a pipeline that is guaranteed to leak through very sensitive (and at least legally, or nominally, protected) areas. In another world this would not even be an issue - no one could be persuaded to argue for it. Say the pipeline wasn't carrying oil, say it was carrying heavy water from nuclear reactors instead. No one would support it, it would be laughed out of everyone's lives and we could forget about it. But the world doesn't run on nuclear energy, it runs on oil so very heavy-hitters have convinced a whole lot of people the economies of both the US and Canada will collapse imminently if this thing doesn't happen.

This is a local issue that has been pumped up to national importance because it is easier to talk about than any environmental issue of real importance. Like the possibility the Earth's aggregate global average temperature might increase sufficiently to cause the extinction of homo sapiens. That's a big problem. And the first politician I hear mention it, I will devote my life to getting them elected to anything they run for. I can make that promise without fear of derailing my (currently non-existent) career because no one will ever say anything about it to the media - not even the Green Party wants to freak people out that badly.

But sometimes local issues become global. And environmental issues become economic ones often and quickly. Sometime during my lifetime and for the first time in human history, the majority of our species live in cities. And the majority of city-dwellers live in the mega-cities of the Southern Hemisphere. I saw a series of documentaries on the BBC about life in Nairobi, following the lives of some of its poorest residents. I'm not going to link it because it was, as impossible as it sounds, a feel-good human interest story. A "these people make the best of their situation and don't complain" complaint against anyone who has a problem in Britain. If we look at global slums, as Davis does, we see they are all scary - and not in the sense of not a place I'd like to live. I hesitate to include this link but I will. It's a list of the biggest slums in the world. When you read it, keep in mind they are referring to specific areas. Dharavi, for example, is not the only slum in Mumbai; it's just the most populous. And the blurb at the end about opportunities through transit and new forms of housing is hideous. Dharavi is going to get bull-dozed (it's right beside the most expensive private home in the world) it isn't going to get better transit lines and more advanced architecture. Aside from the daily human cost these slums have on their residents (which is enormous when looked at in terms of infant mortality, crime, and any other statistic that measures either indifference or degradation), they are likely to have a human cost that spreads beyond their borders. I'm not a scientist but I know those are the perfect environments for a new disease (or variation on an old one) to develop. Those people, living in some of the most contaminated places in the world, will have immune systems like junkyard dogs. If it takes them down, it will go through the rest of us like a scythe through long grass. So maybe it makes sense to try to prevent that from happening. It would have the side benefit of improving the lives of millions of people.

I only thought of two major areas that could throw large sections of the planet into chaos and possess the possibility of creating world wide catastrophes on a biblical scale. I'm going to stop anyway because I am depressed.

Person of Interest

I have very few TV shows I like and I like them for various reasons. Grey's Anatomy because of Sandra Oh, The Walking Dead because of zombies (duh), The Mentalist because it's another reinvention of Sherlock Holmes but one in which the Holmes character actually possesses emotions, Elementary because of the Holmes connection and Lucy Liu. Person of Interest works off the same control fantasy as the Mission Impossible series or James Bond.

Harold is a reclusive billionaire who has an almost unmatched mastery of computer technology - his money and his skill with technology allow him to control his environment. Reese is the modern male fantasy of the well-dressed man who knows how to fight, how to dress, and how to handle weapons. It's not a very complicated fantasy world. The ease with which they clone phones, access surveillance cameras and personal computers, capture and manipulate information is a crutch the show relies on a bit too heavily but, fuck, it isn't meant to be Shakespeare. The person on Person of Interest who deserves far more credit than they get is the wardrobe designer. Harold is the best dressed man on TV by a mile.

 Aside from the reddish pocket square, the vest is what captures my attention in this ensemble. It takes guts to match a grey/green vest with a blue-ish suit and purple tie.

 This is a lovely 3 piece with absurdly high peaked lapels. Again, a gutsy move to put a purple pocket square with a red-ish tie and pink oxford stripe.

While looking for images I found a fanpage for Michael Emerson - the actor who plays Harold: you can check it out here. Looking for the Wardrobe Director I found a site where someone who knows a lot more about clothing than I do has dissected the clothing of all the characters, I recommend it. Check it out here.

On Hipsters

Note: This one has been edited.

I never thought about the whole Hipster thing much while it was happening (is it over now?) but looking back I wonder if there wasn't some element in the media coverage of it that was far less about Hipsters themselves than something else. And media coverage was how I experienced the subculture.

I never found Hipsters annoying. The term was used as an insult by people I knew - implying a kind of deeply flawed desperation to be cool. Flawed in that being a hipster was precisely uncool. And it implied a longing to fit in, to conform. But no one used any other sub-culture in the same way or to the same extent. When I was Hipster aged - my sense was the sub-culture was largely composed of white people aged 18-30 - Slackers were the Hipster equivalent. The difference, aside from cataloguing the attributes of the two types, was being a Slacker implied a social and political position - Slackers were Slackers because there was no point in trying. The game was rigged. Slackers were non-political because there was no way for them to be political. They didn't want the successful career because success was determined by factors beyond their control - a fact that is still largely true but more widely ignored. Hipsterism never implied much to me except a preference for tight jeans and facial hair (for guys) or straw hats (for ladies). The skinny jeans weren't attractive (at least to me) but since many of those making fun of Hipsters had once worn bell bottoms, or stone washed jeans with strategically torn knees, I question their right to make aesthetic judgements. I also question why they cared.

In retrospect, there seems a weird antagonism not just to hipsters but to the youth culture of the time (of which hipsterism was nothing more than the prevalent mode). My experience of the culture was mostly through the media. The young people I knew during that era (say 2005 to 2010) were architecture students. And no matter what is happening in either the dominant or sub-cultures, architecture students have their own thing. They care about details - well designed shoes, carefully chosen watches and pens, little things like jewelry and accessories. For the most part they lean towards monochrome - a trend that probably began with the original hipsters in the 50s and has been preserved in that highly artificial environment. There have been a lot of discussions (within the architecture community) about why architects wear black. The most absurd position I ever heard was that they were representing themselves as the "vanishing point" in a perspective drawing. I vacillate between thinking they (we) want to look kind of formal without sacrificing our prerogative as "creatives" to forego the suit and tie and thinking it is because we don't want the world to know we can't match colours. Anyway...

The media didn't just disdain Hipsters or Hipsterism, they were kind of hateful about it. It isn't unusual for someone like John Stewart to be mean or angry for comic effect (or more sincerely as in the case of the 9-11 First Responders) but for him (or the Daily Show correspondents) to be excessively mean to any aspect of youth culture is strange. I can't think of any other sub-culture (particularly youth sub-culture) that was derided in the same way.

I think anger against an almost entirely harmless sub-culture was about something fundamentally else. Something that had very little to do with the sub-culture itself - with the possible exception of its membership. Why else would people get seriously bothered by other people taking pictures of food? Or wearing straw hats? Or moustaches? There was nothing offensive about them. They weren't dangerous, or political, or adversarial towards anyone. I have difficulty thinking of a less offensive sub-culture. Serious sport fans are far more annoying to me than people excessively proud of their facial hair.

"The joke is over when even victory is a downhill run into hardship, disappointment, and a queasy sense of betrayal. If you can laugh in the face of these things, you are probably ready for a staff job with a serious presidential candidate" - Hunter Thompson, Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks the media acted like the whole world had changed. It hadn't. Almost nothing had changed (unless you believe some element of the US government destroyed the Twin Towers, a theory I'm neither willing to accept or reject). But the US went crazy. And, as a result, people started thinking politics really mattered again. Then the Bush White House got the Patriot Act enacted and started invading people. That made politics seem to matter even more. It is my belief people on both sides were offended by a group of relatively affluent, relatively educated group of people who chose to be more interested in Instagram than Congressional races. Who valued Pabst Blue Ribbon more than the Freedom of Information Act. Who didn't Occupy anything except antique stores and coffee shops.

Skinny jeans aside, I think the Hipsters were fundamentally right in their political stance. I like watching politics. It's a blood sport with no winners. Since no one is worth cheering for that doesn't matter much. I think Hunter Thompson captured the mood in America in 1992 perfectly. The only thing that mattered was defeating George Bush the Greater. When his son successfully stole the 2000 election that was the final straw. Global terrorism or no, run-away economy set to self-destruct or no, immanent environmental catastrophe or no, one thing you can control is the filter on the picture you just took with your iPhone (probably of a meal you are about to eat).

The Hold Steady

There are music nerds out there who will be offended by my lack of general knowledge about The Hold Steady - a band I first heard in Chicago the same day I first heard Andrew Bird perform. It was a festival of some kind notable for not sucking. Most festivals do suck. They are feats of endurance, long waits between acts in summer heat with a bottle of water $5 and an hour in line away. This festival was small-ish. It had two stages so no waiting, and the line-up included not only Andrew Bird and The Hold Steady but Dungen (a nutty Scandinavian mix of metal and hippy sentiments all sung in a language I don't understand). Dungen's guitarist flipped out and smashed his amp because the special connectors intended to allow American electricity to work in Norwegian amplifiers weren't working. Then The Hold Steady played and I remember being only moderately impressed. Bands that have a keyboard player shouldn't try to rock out - the guy with the electric piano always looks like an ass. Then Bird played and I lost my mind. Watching and listening to Andrew Bird live is one of life's greatest joys. I include watching because at that time he was solo and recorded all his loops during the performance, playing guitar, violin, xylophone, and whistling along. I'd never seen anything like it so it was a couple weeks before I got around to buying The Hold Steady's Separation Sunday (the album they were touring then).

The Hold Steady, and particularly Separation Sunday, require serious listener involvement. It isn't a concept album as such but all the songs revolve around a cast of characters who reappear throughout the album. I was thinking of writing an essay trying to demonstrate there are only three characters in Separation Sunday and the narration is not from the POV of the singer but from each of the characters in turn. Holly (or Halleluiah) the Hood Rat, Charlemagne, an unnamed female, and the unnamed protagonist one can assume is based on lead singer Craig Finn. Other names get dropped but those are the main three. Why would you do such a thing? one might reasonably ask. It would be a difficult document to publish anywhere except The Hold Steady Wiki - and that would be asking for a never ending series of flame wars. So I held off. But while I was composing this theory I listened to Separation Sunday about a dozen times. Most albums that reward continued listening do so because of richness and texture of the sound. I'm currently listening to the soundtrack to The Social Network by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Aside from being addictive it is surprisingly subtle. Those two can really write hooks and they aren't afraid to understate them. I never thought I would accuse Trent Reznor of understatement but there it is. The Hold Steady, on the other hand, reward listening because of the lyrics. Some people might think it silly (or adolescent) to "read" an album like a novel. In almost every case I agree. This is an exception.

The Hold Steady have 5 studio albums but, for me, only Separation Sunday and Boys and Girls in America are worth serious attention. Sunday  is more thoroughly developed but I can't help but love an album that starts with the lines, "There are nights I think Sal Paradise was right - boys and girls in America have such a sad time together. Sucking off each other at the demonstrations. Making sure their make-up's straight."

There is a deep religiosity to some of THS's lyrical content. Finn seems genuinely concerned with the possibility of salvation for people who live on the fringe. At the same time he maintains a distance from his own position - making wise cracks about recovery programs, community outreach, baptism (through nitrous and the Mississippi River), etc. This isn't the back handedness of someone afraid of accidentally revealing too much of themselves or the self-imposed irony of a lyricist concerned about committing a cardinal sin against "cool" - being earnest. Finn knows his position and the wise cracks and odd characters are embellishments of and elaborations on his argument.

There are dozens of lines I could pull from SS to demonstrate Finn's wit, perceptiveness, and sense of the uncanny. What I can't do is fix his singing voice. I've spent so much time listening to it that I'm not bothered anymore. Besides, my disposition being what it is, I could listen to a far worse voice for less rewarding lyrics. If you've never listened to THS, try to concentrate on the lines and not the fact the singer is tone deaf and has a three note range. I can't promise you will find it rewarding but Finn is, to me, one of the best writers in America. Not just song writers, any kind. If you imagine Orwell's essays sung by Yoko Ono you will have an extreme version of The Hold Steady's biggest asset and failing.

Elliott Smith

Tomorrow will mark the 10th anniversary of Elliott Smith's death by suicide. I doubt it will be an event that garners much attention. Most people, if they know who Elliott Smith is at all, know him as the guy who sang a song at the Oscar's in a white suit. I saw Good Will Hunting with the biggest music geek I've ever met and he was able to identify the songs as Smith's without us having to sit and wait for the music section of the end credits. The next day I went and bought all his CD's I could find - not many, I think just "Elliott Smith" and "Either/Or"; the soundtrack to Good Will Hunting wasn't released until after the theatrical run and no record store in London Ontario had his back catalogue.

I don't want to even try to write about Smith's music. I'm not a fan of attempts to describe music in words. I think album reviews should consist of stars (or some other measure) and not more than one sentence. My review of Miles Davis Kind of Blue would be "10/10 - Buy it, listen to it, become a better person." My review of Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It In People would be "8/10 - Would be a 9 without Pacific Theme."

Other than the fact his music was typically good, sometimes great, and occasionally (three or four songs) breath-taking, what fascinated me about him at the time was he was ugly. He had a beat up face with lines in the wrong places. By the late 90s an ugly singer was not something that happened. I don't know if he made videos, his wasn't a career built by MTV. He was ugly, spoke in a whisper, dressed badly, and made no attempt to be cool. Although 24 is kind of old to have heroes, Smith was definitely one of mine. I had bad clothes, a soft voice, and wasn't cool. Unlike Smith I am a very very handsome man but there's nothing I could do about that.

I guess I don't have anything intelligent to say about Smith, his music, or his suicide. The 10th anniversary of Kurt Kobain's death was covered by CNN. No one is going to "cover" Smith's. I was a fan. I am a fan. Tonight I'm going to turn the lights down and listen to XO with headphones on, like I did when I was 25.

On Meritocracy 2

Here is an article from the New York Times documenting the evidence rich people are less compassionate. The reasons are fairly straightforward.

I have often wondered why some countries or societies have so many more social restrictions, rules of etiquette, than others. In Europe and North America etiquette has been declining in importance for the last couple hundred years. But in China and Japan (in fact most Asian societies I know of) etiquette is still extremely important. The answer is pretty simple. Etiquette started declining in importance in the west as populations became more spread out and physical mobility increased. This is most true of places like England where social dominance had long belonged in London but economic dominance spread out as a result of the industrial revolution. You had to know the rules to get in with London society but the advantages of being in became less and less significant. In France, with Paris as its social hub, etiquette remains more significant because Paris is also the economic hub. If you are out in Paris, the potential limitations are extreme.

In China and Japan rules of etiquette are strictly maintained because of the density of inhabitation and the limitations on physical mobility. In China internal visas are required to move and in Japan (at least until recently) any move had to be registered with the government in one's home prefecture. You have to get along with your neighbours because they are always going to be your neighbours. And the more frequently you see them, the more interactions you have, the more stereotyped those interactions become as a way of ensuring the fundamental goal of politics (living together without chaos). That's why the American west is seen as rough and a certain lack of social graces among Westerners is still considered both permissible and authentic.

The rich have no neighbours. They have no restrictions on physical mobility. they are insulated from the results of their own behaviour by layers of legal and personal protection. They can be rude as fuck with no consequences. They are also free from all obligations toward others - they never see those hypothetical others. As a realtor who deals exclusively in ultra-luxury properties put it, "People worth $300M can't talk to just anyone."

On "Meritocracy"

This is an editorial from The Walrus by John MacFarlane. On the surface it seems like a complaint against the anti-intellectual bias in politics and, more generally, the acceptance (or celebration) of ignorance as authenticity. But it isn't. After I read it I checked MacFarlane's age to see if this was a sophisticated piece of conservative propaganda or something else. It turns out MacFarlane is old enough to see all the claims he makes in his piece as legitimate and, in some way, received wisdom the younger generations have somehow missed.

The core of the complaint is this:
   "When did out society turn against its best and brightest? When did we abandon the idea that among us there are people more qualified - by virtue of natural gifts, education, or experience - to lead? When did one man's opinion become as good as that of the next, no matter how unintelligent or uninformed? When did "meritocracy" become a dirty word?"

This seems like an apt complaint about the politics of the US and, to a certain extent, Canada. The politics that makes it law that intelligent design be taught alongside evolution in some states. That Representatives can stand on the floor of the House and claim using wind power as an energy source will "slow the wind" and damage the environment. Later in the article he singles out Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto, for special criticism as man "who wears his ignorance as a badge of honour". Mr. MacFarlane dreams of a better world, one in which our elected officials are elected because they are the most qualified to do the job. A world where those who achieve are respected by those who do not. He claims the reason we "feel like" we are living in the midst of a class war is the elites are perceived to be pursuing personal gain regardless of the costs or benefits for society - as if the accuracy of that "perception" was somehow irrelevant.

Mr. MacFarlane is evidently an educated man. He is an editor for a magazine aimed squarely at the educated middle-class - who have little patience for men like Rob Ford and probably feel they aren't being respected as much as they ought for their "natural gifts, education, or experience". What MacFarlane is either missing or (cynically) ignoring is the readers of his magazine, society's best and brightest, have no influence politically or economically and never have. He is misremembering if he believes there was a time when they did. Sure, they might play some small role at the local level but national politics has always been the domain of those elites "perceived to be working only for themselves".

MacFarlane's test for a kind of rational society is his grandfather, who respected those who had achieved more than he had. I have to assume this was sometime between 1910 and 1950. I also assume when he was thinking of those who had achieved more than his grandfather the scale of those achievements remained modest. His grandfather, a tool and die maker (same as my father) would certainly respect a judge or a professor. My father, around the same age as MacFarlane, certainly respects judges and professors for precisely the reasons MacFarlane uses to argue they deserve respect - their education and experience.

The idea people choose to elect ignorant candidates because of the combined effects of the narcissism of the 60s and the avarice of the 80s is absurd. People elect terrible candidates because the political process is so deeply flawed it might be beyond salvage. No amount of chastising voters is going to fix it. The fix is already in but it won't repair anything.

The idea that we "feel" like we are living in a class war is absurd in a very special way. We "feel" like it because we are living in a class war - the ultra-rich against everyone else. And we are losing badly. The idea society can be separated into two groups - the elites who deserve our respect and the aggrieved who are messing everything up for the rest of us by refusing to respect them - is too simplistic to bother ridiculing.

In the particular case of Rob Ford, there is a correlation between membership in the Ford Nation and income levels. Poorer people are much more likely to be members. Ford is a disaster as a mayor and an asshole (possibly a drug addict, probably a wife beater, and probably and alcoholic). But when the members of the Ford Nation hear the attacks against him, they tend to ignore them or not have their opinions changed. And why should they? They have been lied to by everyone in power about everything else -why should this be different? These are the victims of serial fuckings. Work hard and you'll prosper - lie. We are going to reduce taxes - lie. Your money is safe with us - lie. Home prices never go down - lie. You'll have money to support yourself when you retire - lie. Your kids will have a better life than you will - lie.

The way to get rid of Ford is to get rid of the Ford Nation. When the number of people who have been fucked over and lied to their whole lives by "the elites" who deserve their respect no longer constitutes a sufficiently large percentage of the population to win an election - that's when Ford and his odious ilk will disappear. MacFarlane ends his piece with the conclusion the Ford Nation deserves an apology but not for the serial fuckings - because the educated elite of this city (and by extension country) have not persuaded them to behave with sufficient deference.

I'm falling into the same trap as MacFarlane when I confuse or combine MacFarlane's elites (educated and experienced people who remain human) with the actual elites (the members of JP Morgan ordered to pay nearly $1B in fines relating to the 2007 crash for example). MacFarlane's elites haven't done anything to the members of the Ford Nation, at least nothing deserving an apology. MacFarlane's elites and the Ford Nation are one and the same in the eyes of the actual elites. So the crucial mistake MacFarlane makes is thinking he is somehow significantly different from the Ford Nation in his ability to influence society, politics, the economy. He has the same influence they do. The difference is the Ford Nation vote according to their station and MacFarlane votes according to his illusions.

The Walking Dead Returns

I'm trying to DL the first episode of season four of AMC's The Walking Dead. As expected it's going slow. Today is a holiday in Canada and combine the express bandwidth of holiday usage with the popularity of a show almost no one gets here as part of their tv package and you get a slow download. Still, it has given me some time to meditate on the finer points of the program. The show is nominally about Rick. At least it has been for the first three seasons. He was the POV for most of season one, the triangle between him, his wife, and his best friend took most of season two and season three was about the birth of his child, death of his wife, and the problems of acting as pater to an extended family (members of which are occasionally eaten by zombies). Still, aside from the inimitable Michonne, my favourite character is Glenn.

Aside from Sandra Oh on Grey's Anatomy I'm having difficulty thinking of another major character played by an asian actor in a role where their asian-ness is irrelevant. There are probably others but I can't think of them. Glenn's asian-ness is completely unimportant. Steven Yeun handles the character of a young, socially awkward teenager perfectly. When Andrea got separated from the group at the end of season 2 I thought, "Oh well, Andrea's dead." Who cares? When she returned with Michonne, Michonne was the reason I cared. Her whole drama with the Governor (a ridiculous villain unworthy of the show) was filler. But Glenn's drama with Maggie is interesting - and not because Maggie is a better character than Andrea. The seduction sequences were some of the best and most interesting scenes of the whole show. Glenn played cringe-worthy awkwardness perfectly.

The Walking Dead is not great at female characters. It's a hard thing, given the show's premise. When life becomes a protracted battle with zombies the men tend to take center stage. Even Hershel, who doesn't fight (and could have been a female character, matriarch of her family) is more interesting than any of the female characters have been. That's not a great example because Hershel is an interesting character and very well played.

Lori was annoying. Andrea was interesting but only after her sister got eaten. Carol is a minor character but very well handled and one of the people I'm most interested in. I hope they don't slot her into the spot as Daryl's love interest they've been preparing for her. She and Daryl are great additions, the kids from the other side of the tracks.

The one thing about the show I feel obliged to point out is the characters aren't very well layered. Rick is a small town sheriff. Daryl a red-neck. T-Dog was the black guy. Only Hershel, young Carl, Michonne, and Carol interest me in terms of how they will develop. The rest will just react to the events. But then, I thought that about Daryl's drama with his big brother and that turned out to be one of the high points in season three.

It will be interesting to see how the influx of characters in the last episode of last season will change the number of important characters. I suspect only one or two will gain significant places in the show. I'm going to check out how my DL's going.

On Advertising, 3

The algorithms that connect visits to various internet sites, personal information about internet purchases, and all other forms of data relevant to selling me products seem to have reached certain conclusions about me. They believe I love Ledbury, luxury men's watches, books about Rome and the Nazis, and the movies of Kar Wai Wong. They also believe I want the luxury clothes at bargain prices (I'm not going to link that because if you click it the site will send you emails everyday). This is interesting in that it is partially correct - they got Rome, Nazis, and Kar Wai Wong right. Presumably anyone in possession of these algorithms, or with sufficient knowledge of the principles that apply, could use that information to make deductions about me. It would be simpler to just read this but more labour intensive and probably less boring.

Let's say I really did love Ledbury and bought all my clothes through their service. How would that make more money for the company that kept the ads popping up on my computer, or made sure I got regular email updates more money that for Ledbury itself? This was the substance of my last post on this subject.

Naomi Klein (I just skewed my results by searching Amazon to check the spelling of her last name) wrote a great deal about the revolution in business philosophy in the last decades of the last century wherein companies underwent a paradigm shift. No longer would they sell actual things, now they would be the purveyors of lifestyle and identity. One of the earliest, and most successful, converts to this new paradigm was Apple. And they have been massively successful making Macs and iPhones the must-have accessories. They became objects that defined a person as design oriented and tech-savvy. They were components of the identity everyone was trained to want. Had someone explained this paradigm shift to me before it happened and asked me for companies which could successfully apply it Apple would have been one of the first I to come to mind. It has a very limited range of products, they are much more expensive than their competitors, they are also beautifully designed and maintain a consistent design aesthetic. This paradigm obviously doesn't work for giant steel foundries or oil companies (for different reasons).

This idea of selling lifestyle is a partial explanation for why a company like Burberry (founded by a drapers assistant to sell outdoor clothing) now sells watches. Or why someone might think it a good idea to purchase a fragrance from Ferrari - as though the ability to build beautiful and very fast cars had anything to do with perfumery.

I'm going to reference another William Gibson character, Cayce Pollard from Pattern Recognition, who has an allergy to branding. What makes Cayce interesting as a type is she is not alone. There are many people who want what she wants - to buy jeans from a company that makes jeans, t-shirts from a company that makes t-shirts, a jacket from Japanese Otaku who obsessively recreate what they consider the Platonic ideal of a men's jacket. I wish I could have my shoes made by a cobbler, my shirts and jackets by a tailer but that takes more money than I have. I have only ever driven Ford cars, in part because my father worked at Ford - so long ago he still calls it Ford's because at that time it was owned and operated by Mr. Ford - and partly because there is no Ford fragrance or watch or clothing line.

In my earlier post on advertising I discussed it mainly from the perspective of technologists and I think it is odd that technologists don't recognize the bigger picture re the influence of advertising. Thinking in terms of graphs, the most common shape in tech products and tech phenomenon is a slow increase, followed by an exponential leap upwards, finished with a levelling off (or a return to zero). When iPhones came out Apple's share of the cellular market shot up like a rocket, creating the familiar beginning of the shape, then it started hitting friction (from terrible reviews, product failures, market competition) and it levelled off and finally started dropping again. This happens, so I am told, with all things tech. A virus is released and it starts to contaminate computers, the contamination spread (increasing exponentially until it looks like it will crash the entire internet) and then it hits friction (fixes, warnings, cures) and then it drops dramatically (almost to nothing). Remember Y2K? Early warning, spreading alarm, global awareness and some panic, then nothing. Advertising by compiling personal information is already following the same figure.

When companies started compiling data for the purposes of mining (and it wasn't started by Facebook but by reward programs like AirMiles) the initial growth was slow, then the big players entered the picture (Amazon, Google, Facebook) and people started screaming about the internet controlling every aspect of our lives, and now friction is appearing. I am one tiny fraction of that friction and so, I suspect, are you. I do not want to live the Burberry lifestyle (cruising the heath in my luxury SUV for picnics in my over-priced outerwear). I do not want any lifestyle. Yes, I did just buy a new MacBook but mostly out of resistance to change (and my appreciation of their aesthetic) rather than as a lifestyle decision.

I recently bought a new tie. There's some exciting news! The point is, given the option between two ties that looked almost identical I chose to pay more for one made by a company that offers its employees benefits. That is their advertising - we don't exploit our employees as much as other tie companies. I wish I hadn't because I subsequently found a company based here in Toronto that makes ties by hand - just a couple of people with sewing machines. And I found out about that because someone told me, there was no advertising involved.

When I have the option I buy books from local stores with almost no internet presence. I only resort to Amazon or Alibris if I can't find the book in a real store. This is not a matter of trying to preserve local jobs - although that is a useful side benefit - it is friction against the internets mechanisms for selling me shit.

This friction against the application of information profiling in advertising is going to continue to build. It has to. All identity (and remember that is what companies are and have been selling for the last three decades) has, at its base, the personal. I am the person who buys this identity. It might be packaged and sold to me but, ultimately, it must be mine. And the more successful the strategy is the more it becomes self-defeating. I cannot inhabit the identity I purchase if too many people are already using it. It no longer serves to differentiate me from the person I was, from you, from everyone else. It no longer brings me closer to the person I saw in the ad. The identity I was sold has been watered down until it no longer constitutes an identity. We saw this with the final stages of hipsterism, although what almost every commentator about hipsters and hipsterism failed to recognize what that it was a self-conscious loss of self that made the prospect attractive. Hipsters weren't looking for an identity, they were luxuriating in the lack of one. I think they were the early warning signs that companies had better start concentrating on selling things again.  

On Migraine

I suffer from migraines. Before I found a useful prophylactic medication I had two or three attacks a week. Sometimes they were merely irritating (like a very bad hangover) but most were incapacitating - sharp pain from any light or sound, weakness, dizziness, vertigo, vomiting, etc. Strangely, and yet not strangely for me, the thing I disliked most about migraines was the way the word was used. I'm not referring to people who believe (falsely) every bad headache is a migraine - if you haven't had an EEG, MRI, and at least one consulting neurologist confirm the diagnosis I don't believe you when you tell me you get migraines too. Another test, one I have administered with sadistic pleasure as often as people will allow me, is to run your fingers along the supraorbital process (the top bone of your eye socket) until you feel the notch. You can see it clearly in this illustration:

  Once you have found the notch, or ideally both notches, press on them with a little more pressure than you would use to restart your computer. After about 10 seconds this will simulate the effects of a mild migraine. Make sure the person on whom you are applying this test (after a question like, "What do migraines feel like?" or "Aren't migraines regular headaches?" or "Do you want an Advil?") knows you will release the pressure as soon as they ask and the pain will vanish immediately because otherwise the person to whom you are administering the "test" will never trust you again. Back to the word and its usage.

I think migraine should be used like diabetes. The proper description of the condition would then be "You have migraine", like "You have diabetes". And one would suffer from a migraine attack. That would sufficiently dramatize the situation for people who don't have migraine.

When I am wrapped in blankets with a thick black T-shirt (or towel) tied over my eyes and ears the proper word for it has always seemed to me to be "migrainous". MY-gruhn-US. It's an ugly word for an ugly condition. Unlike most people with migraine I don't get them from eating certain foods (except red wine which I don't drink anyway). Some people even get them from not eating - a particularly cruel aspect since one of the first things a migraine attack does is turns off digestion. When you first get the aura you can try to fend off the attack by eating carbohydrates, which works if you catch it in time. Sometimes an aura can last for hours and, during that time I my stomach will begin to stick out like a gourd. I don't know why digestion stops but my personal theory is a body in the midst of a migraine attack believes itself poisoned - hence the vomiting. So people who get attacks from not eating can't fend them off with carbs.

Some people have attacks that last days at a time. I am not that unlucky. Others have attacks that last only a few hours. I'm not that lucky. I need to fall asleep and give my body time to completely reset itself. I sometimes imagine how wonderful it would feel for a migraine to break like a fever; there one minute and gone the next. This is actually possible even for people like me for whom it does not occur naturally. Unfortunately, it requires a trip to the emergency room. When you are in the midst of an attack, travel is not something you want to consider. Five or six apartments ago I lived just a few blocks from the least busy Emergency Room I have ever found in any hospital ever. They got to know me there and knew I had migraine. If I woke up with one, something that happens frequently since the primary cause in my case seems to be abrupt changes in barometric pressure, I would make my way to that ER and they would inject me with something - five minutes later I would feel great. Or tired, depending on the time. It eventually occurred to me to ask for a shot of the miracle drug to carry with me like someone with severe anaphylaxis carries a Epi pen. They told me they couldn't do that because the "miracle drug" was morphine.

Given the government we are currently stuck with there is no way people diagnosed with migraine are ever going to be issued special Morph pens to carry around with them. If I am honest I have to admit that isn't a great idea. I don't think I would be as careful with my morph pen as someone with a peanut allergy is with their epi pen. I knew kids who used their epi pens as study aids. A morph pen would be that much greater a temptation.

The only other palliative I know (and sometimes it does nothing) is to fill a suitable container with ice cubes, salt, and water then wait until the whole mix gets below zero degrees. Then you stick both feet into the container and keep them in the solution as long as you can. I have no idea why this works but it sometimes does. Other than that your only option is the so-called "pain gate", the fact your body will only feel pain from one serious injury at a time. If I am having a really bad attack I will use some instrument to crush the web between my thumb and index finger. It hurts like you wouldn't believe and supersedes the migraine pain. When I let the pressure off there is a brief moment when both pains disappear. Repeat as necessary. This works with any nerve ending or pressure point. You can find your own on Youtube - look in self-defense videos.    

Highways

I love highways (as we call them in Canada, in the States they're freeways) because I think they are beautiful. Sometimes for being so long and straight. Sometimes for the graceful arcs of onramps. If you search Flickr, you'll find hundreds of photos that show highway ramps - mostly at night because the colours make them so surreal. I found a very cool site made up of screen grabs from Google Earth. In the old iteration the author went by GlobeRover. Now the site's called Earthglance. I don't know the name of the person (or persons) who runs it but I copied some images. The site has all manner of fantastic things but for now I just want to show highways.

The brilliant Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky includes some photos of highways in his collection based on the theme of oil, oil products, and oil production. You kind of need to see the images at full size to get what he's doing - the images are huge, human scaled. I bought Burtynsky's books as a student even though they aren't cheap. I left one, on quarries, in the wrapping because it's such a gorgeous thing I don't want to unwrap it until I have a satisfactory place to put it. Here are some of his highway shots.

I'll end with a few I can't give proper credit for. I saw them on the internet sometime and DL'd them because they caught my eye. They have been screensavers and wallpapers over the years.

I also have a thing for power lines, particularly the ones hung from wood poles but I'll save that for another post. Sorry about not being able to credit the last set the way the photographers deserve.

Driving in the City

I am a conservative driver. Neil Stephenson wrote in Reamde Canadians dirty little secret is we drive like maniacs. I think he was basing this observation of Montrealers. Most Canadians drive safely and sanely. Torontonians are aggressive. More aggressive than I am. I like letting people into my lane when they find themselves stuck behind a parked delivery truck, taxi, or road construction. It makes me feel good. I like the little "thank you" waves I get through the back window.

When I lived outside the city I had to enter a completely different state of mind to drive in one. Normally, it was my responsibility not to hit anyone else. Inside the city it was their responsibility to get out of my way. Now I've lived here a while and have settled into a calmer routine. Today I got a call from the receptionist of a specialist I had been referred to by my regular doctor. Those of you who have recently tried to connect with a family physician in Toronto know how hard it is to find one - it took me almost two years. So the appointment with the specialist was scheduled for five months from now (and I was lucky to get that). But someone cancelled an appointment on short notice so the specialist could see me if I could get across town in half an hour. And by across town I mean north of the 401 and about ten blocks west.

I Googled the route and saw it took 32 minutes normally, 41 in current traffic. Google uses a formula that is usually pretty accurate but it's based on some approximation of the speed limit and in Toronto you can rarely get moving that fast. I once made an hour long trip (from Bloor and Yonge to Liberty Village) without getting out of second gear. In an aside, I laugh a people I see driving Ferraris and Lambos around town at rush hour. If my Ford Focus can't get out of second, what good is your million dollar hyper-car? I also find it hilarious that the Ferrari dealership is right next to Yorkville (a posh shopping area that used to be the centre of Toronto's counter-culture). So many people test driving a new 458 or 599 (cars designed to break 340 kph) can't reach speeds of 5 kph. I once raced a Gallardo through Yorkville - him driving a 500+ horsepower supercar, me walking - and it was no contest, I kicked his ass. Back to the story...

I decided to adopt the "get out of my way" mentality and get there in time for the appointment. I topped 70 kph on Yonge (not bad for early morning) and weaved back and forth between lanes in a way I never do. I changed lanes by sticking the front end of my car in any space it would fit - forcing other drivers to let me in. Then I cut some guy off and it was a little too close. It wasn't close to an accident, no one was in any danger. But I probably scared the guy, certainly pissed him off. So when we stopped at the next light beside each other I rolled down my window to apologize and he gave me the finger and yelled, "Go fuck yourself, you fucking c---s---er!" I retracted my apology but, judged in a non-biased way, he won that little verbal sparring match.

People get weird behind the wheel and "road rage" isn't much more than a name. It isn't a proper description and no where close to an explanation. I accidentally cut a guy off in traffic once (an honest mistake, this was me driving at my conservative, friendly best) and he stopped his car in the middle of the road, leapt out and started walking towards my car like he was going to drag me out of it and beat me to death. Fortunately, at the time I was working construction so I rolled down the window, said "I'm really sorry. I didn't see you." Then grabbed my 22 oz framing hammer and put it on the dashboard where he could see it. That resolved the situation.

If we hadn't been driving, if we had been riding bikes say (something I don't generally approve of), the situation would never have played out that way. It would have been a typically Canadian scene of apologies and expressions of dismay over personal culpability. But since we were driving cars he felt the urge (and somehow the right) to challenge me to a fight and I felt the appropriate response included an implicit threat with a hammer.

Many, if not most, Torontonians who drive despise taxi drivers. Most cyclists hate and fear them. They drive in a way that cannot even be characterized as aggressive. They drive like no one else is on the road. When I moved here I hated them. Now I kind of like them. They are the reductio ad absurdum of city driving. I think driving around a congested city would be both safer and more enjoyable if there were certain cars that didn't have to obey any traffic laws. I imagine a system where every car is painted with a special polymer that responds to electrical signals and each day there is a lottery for drivers. On the, extremely rare, days you win the lottery your car changes to a distinctive colour (one which all other cars a prohibited from using) and you can ignore every traffic law. You become like a cow on the streets of Delhi, free to wander at will. Wrong way down a one way street at 3 kph? Sure. Park by leaving your car in the middle of the outside lane while you eat lunch? Sure. 120 kph around and around a traffic circle? Why not? Whatever you want. And anyone hits you - that's their problem and their expense. Everyone would constantly be watching for the special cars breaking the rules. Everyone would have to constantly be prepared to get out of the way, to make way for others, to clear a path - something Toronto drivers won't even do for emergency vehicles. I've seen fire engines stuck in traffic more times than I can count. Torontonians seem to think ambulances have right of way but cop cars and fire trucks don't.

People drive like assholes because they feel what they are doing, where they are going, is more important that what other people are doing or where they are going. They also know they don't really have much to fear. I haven't seen anyone get stopped by the cops for a traffic violation since I moved here - parking tickets yes, moving violations, no. So maybe you get yelled at. Who cares? You yell back and try to go even faster. Adding an element of chaos would force people to care. Systems of rules are interesting things - traffic rules in particular. They are consensus agreements that allow tremendously complex systems to function. Think about how few rules there are involved in keeping traffic flowing. Literally thousands of vehicles make millions of journeys everyday in this city and there are very few accidents and even fewer injuries. And what makes the system work? Some lights, some signs, and some paint on the road. What makes the system even more interesting is almost no one actually obeys the rules. No one drives the speed limit on the highway. Here the limit on major highways in 100 kph but if you go less than 120 kph in the fast lane, you are going to seriously piss people off. 100 is for the inside lane, 120 the middle, and 120-140 the outside lane. In the city, people ignore certain signs (and I don't mean some people some times, I mean everybody all the time). The lines in the road are more like suggestions than actual separations (and how are they supposed to separate anything? It's just paint). The system only gets dangerous when not everyone is using the same set of rules, doesn't matter if it's the official set or some other one. Adding a chaotic element would make everyone constantly aware of that the system runs only by consensus, not by right and not by design. It works because we agree it works in a specific way. The increased variability in the system would force everyone else to be more aware of the fact of the system.

On Hope

In 2011 Wired ran an article on the psychology of lotteries. It is easy to understand why people buy lottery tickets, they wrote, because of the few minutes of hope make the expense seem worth it. Significantly, almost all lottery tickets are bought by poor people. Hope isn't what sells tickets: hopelessness does. People start buying scratch cards when they see no other possible way to improve their financial situation. Place poor people in a situation where they compare themselves to middle class people and they will purchase more tickets - that's what the article was about, the study from Carnegie Mellon demonstrating that.

So much of the internet runs on hope. I'm not just talking about the "Binary Options Trading" pop-ups, or the "Have Sex Tonight!!!" sidebar ads. Remember the moment in The Social Network where Zuckerberg puts Facebook online - the last change he makes is the addition of "Relationship Status" because people will use the site in the hopes on getting laid. LinkedIn has nothing to offer except hope of a better job. So many sites do nothing except offer the vague (and usually implicit) promise of a better something and it is hope that moves people to use them. Dating sites work how often? There is no mathematical formula for compatibility. I know almost nothing about computers but I do know that. You might as well be picking names out of a hat as use their "scientific" formula. If it works at all it's because people want it to so badly.

The internet has huge sections that are nothing but more advanced versions of the commercials that used to run at 3 am. Hair Club for Men. Get a degree in TV/VCR repair. I got my start at the Institute for... All of it bullshit and all driven by the dream of something better.

I wonder how much of this runs on hope and how much, like lotteries, on hopelessness. People with economic mobility have no need for binary option trading, of making $500 a day filling out surveys. People with social skills have no need for "Hook up with horny housewives!!!" Seeing the internet as a giant machine that feeds on despair is not the image it's promoters (and these days that's everyone) want in your head. I don't even want it in my head but lately that's how I've been seeing it.

On Apps and Other Distractions

It's depressing to know my complete inability to accomplish anything viz all the problems with my new computer is an age-related phenomenon (a nice way of saying "because I'm old"). I read somewhere that aging is fundamentally an increased resistance to change. That's me. I have spent the past five days trying to get my new computer to function exactly like my old one did, a perfect recapitulation. This is impossible since the (multiple) upgrades (?) in the OS have eliminated some of the features I used previously. Mostly they have been improved rather than removed but the question of whether these qualify as improvements seems ligitimate to me. Mostly they are just differences.

One of the improvements to my OS that I actually consider an improvement is the App Store. I have deliberately kept the number of apps I have DLd to a minimum - trying to learn and evaluate each one as I go. Most seem like great ideas but I don't use them because I forget I have them. Others, like 1Password, are great ideas that can get me in a shitstorm of trouble if I'm not careful. The one unambiguously great app I've started using is Alfred. The developers describe it as a butler for your computer. I don't know that I would call it that but it is simple, doesn't fuck shit up, and I use it frequently.

For example, I search the IMDB all the time. If I type "i" in the address bar on Chrome, it autoloads the imdb url. That's good but with Alfred I made "i" the key that would prompt for a search. So I hit the key combo to launch Alfred (alt+space), type "i", hit enter, type the search term and Alfred opens a new tab with the search results. You can get it to do that for any searchable site - from wikipedia to wookiepedia (the Star Wars wiki), and everything in between. It also has about a billion features I will never use but every couple of days I open it, read some more of the help manual, and figure a new feature out.

Because of Alfred it only took me 5 seconds to learn the name of the actor who plays Det. Kimball Cho is Tim Kang. Cho deserves his own entry because he is one of the best TV character of the last ten years, certainly the most under-rated. I could write a thesis for a pop culture degree on Cho. There are some minor or ensemble characters (a very few) I think are better than the shows they're in - Cho from The Mentalist, Masi Oka from Heroes, Yang from Grey's Anatomy. Actually, that last one is kind of a different category. Grey's Anatomy is a guilty pleasure of mine and one of the only reasons I'm willing to admit that is Sandra Oh.

For some reason Oh is often relegated to minor parts or under-used in major ones. Her IMDB listing includes parts like "Fourth Fired Employee". Her big break was 1994's Double Happiness but my personal fav is 2004's Sideways - Sandra Oh and Paul Giamatti. Completely different character in a relatively small movie but she's so good in it. And hot as hell. Giamatti is as great as he always is. Actually, I think I'm going to watch Sideways again, despite the odious presence of Thomas Hayden Church.  

On Morals and Ethics

I consider the difference between them to be this: ethics are how we live with each other, morals are how we live with ourselves. I think of myself as an ethical person. I observe the politenesses that was taught and generally try to make my interactions with others as pleasant for them as I can. I don't steal (except for illegal downloading but since copyrights are a form of legal crime I consider this a moral position rather than an ethical flaw). I don't cut into lines. I try not to interrupt. I am a boring person. Since I am also deeply interested in the phenomenon of cities, I spend a lot of time thinking about ethics as it applies to politics.

I also try to be a moral person. As you know if you read the preceding post I'm currently reading Joan Didion's essays. In a short one specifically about morals, she defines morality as something close to what I think of ethics. And by every one of her criteria I fail miserably. She identifies morals with what people used to call character - something her parents' generation had in spades. They were raised with the recognition most of life is some form of tribulation and you get on with it because that is your lot. And because there will presumably be some reward for all that work. Whether it is an earthly reward or the heavenly reward promised by so many Protestant sects on precisely the same terms (do everything you are supposed to and nothing you aren't and you won't go to hell) is something I can't tell.

I think Didion is wrong in this analysis. And yet it isn't a bad essay. It isn't even mediocre. It's very good but it is more about the difference between the generation before her and the one she is watching come into its own. And if you forget that she is being less than rigorous with her terms, the piece conjured an image of me I was not very pleased with. In an early essay about keeping a notebook, Didion remarks it is a good thing to have at least a nodding acquaintance with all the previous iterations of ourselves. Her essay on morals re-introduced me to several previous iterations of myself I wish had remained forgotten.

There is a kind of relationship I am assuming with Didion as I read her essays that I haven't formed with a writer in a long time. When I read Orwell it is as tho I am I receiving writ. Somethings I disagree with, many I wish I had written (and everyone had been forced to read), and some strike with the force of revelation. But it is always Orwell and his subject. As I read Didion I am somehow included. Didion and her subject and me. I don't mean I am interposing myself between her and her subjects or that I feel more free to criticize. Didion somehow, without ever explicitly saying so, invites her readers to participate. It would take me some serious effort to put it more clearly than that. Maybe it's her habit of including the contexts in which she is writing - the piece on morality was at least partly composed in a motel room in Death Valley. That isn't an irrelevant detail; the first stab at a definition involves events particular her circumstance. But it is also a kind of invitation. I'm sure it is usually taken as an invitation to deconstruct the works until nothing remains. I prefer to think of it as an invitation to reconstruct the process of writing the work - to wonder at the segments that didn't make the final edit.

Back to the title. I think Didion is wrong in equating morality and character. Perhaps this is because I live in an age where the politics of oppression and identity as so present. The willingness to just get on with the work in front of you is a fine notion if you can forget the work in front of you was probably put there by someone. As she uses the term I am a man of low character and that I cannot admit. So, judged purely by how closely the text fits the title, the essay is a failure. Of course if that was a useful test, almost everything I have ever written would be a failure.