The Finger of God

Christian Boltanski's new installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York consists of a lot of used clothes laid out like refugees sleeping in a shelter, plus a "mountain" of clothes from which a crane constantly picks clothes at random to lift and drop. A soundtrack plays human heartbeats. It is, the artist solemnly intones in this video, "about chance and destiny and the finger of god."

I will say this, that the effect of seeing this is probably greater than the effect of reading about it, which is my minimum standard for visual art. And it certainly is a creative way to use some of the mountains of clothes we throw away every year. Another than that, I don't know what to say, except that I am constantly puzzled by the things we pay a lot of attention to.

Lunch at the Fat Duck

Sometimes you just have to wonder. As I did after reading this account of a meal at a 3 star restaurant near London, the Fat Duck. The menu:

LIME GROVE
Nitro Poached Green Tea and Lime Mousse

RED CABBAGE GAZPACHO
Pommery Grain Mustard Ice Cream

JELLY OF QUAIL, CRAYFISH CREAM
Chicken Liver Parfait, Oak Moss and Truffle Toast

SNAIL PORRIDGE
Jabugo Ham, Shaved Fennel

ROAST FOIE GRAS
Rhubarb, Braised Konbu and Crab Biscuit

MOCK TURTLE SOUP (C. 1850)
“Mad Hatter Tea”

“SOUND OF THE SEA”

SALMON POACHED IN LIQUORICE
Artichokes, Vanilla, Mayonnaise, Golden Trout Roe and Manni Olive Oil

POWDERED ANJOU PIGEON (C. 1720)
Blood Pudding and Confit of Umbles

HOT & ICED TEA

TAFFETY TART (C. 1660)
Caramelized Apple, Fennel, Rose and Candied Lemon

THE “BFG”
Black Forest Gateau

WHISK(E)Y WINE GUMS

LIKE A KID IN A SWEET SHOP

Death

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers:

I no longer have much of a sense of myself as a thing. I think we are always "passing away." I'm really NOT the same person I was 20 years ago. My body certainly isn't what it was 20 years ago. That body is already dead and gone. I think to regret the final dying - well you might as well regret everything, regret all of life. People are more like events, not things. All events come to an end or dissipate one way or another.

The Christian notion of eternal life just doesn't make any sense to me. I can't conceive of how I could be "me" without the context of the world I live in, the relationships I have, and my time and place. That would be some other person. To be an ego without a world is to be nothing. I think when you have a better understanding that our existence as personalities in this world is already ephemeral, even while we are alive, it makes regret for our disappearance seem peculiar.

As Rilke says, we are "transpositions of air".

The Teenage Brain

Anthropologist Melvin Konner (author of one of my favorite books The Tangled Wing):

The news of the past decade or so is that the human brain continues its maturational march between the ages of 10 and 20. The frontal cortex and other areas needed for mature thought are not fully developed until at least the end of that period. Meanwhile, the average age at which children reach puberty (as defined by hormonal change) has dropped at least two or three years over the past two centuries. That is not evolution but revolution, and it is likely that the endocrine change now occurs earlier in relation to brain development as well as to chronological age. If so, we have an even starker problem than the slowness of brain growth: hormonal surges at ever-younger brain ages and ever-lower levels of inhibition. The implications for schooling, for the increasing sexualization of the young, and for the culpability of juvenile offenders are potentially transformative.

Teenagers are not adults. When we treat them like adults, as we often do when they commit crimes, we are simply denying reality.

Stroller Wars

In the Washington Post, a story about the conflicts generated by the increasing number of young children in what used to be child-free yuppie enclaves:

Politicians and planners have heralded the return of young families to such areas as Washington, Boston and New York as a sign of resurgence. But as the ranks of parents and their tykes have swelled, so, too, has resentment over having to accommodate them in public places. Skirmishes have erupted on buses, in parks, on playing fields and in bars. Often, the conflicts pit parents against childless adults who, after decades of middle-class flight, have gotten used to the sense that they have the city to themselves.

"I find parents to be tyrants," one woman remarked, after her dog freaked out a mother by paying her toddler too much attention. Strollers are the focus of a lot of angst. It is DC policy that strollers have to be folded up on buses, and a recent discussion of this on a local board led to all sorts of fireworks:

"Why do people with children always think that they should be catered to?" commented one poster. "Fold your damn giant stroller (which seem to be getting larger and larger these days) and shut up."

Reading about this stuff I can only imagine that the animosity is driven by feelings of uncertainly about our own decisions. People with children are troubled that they long for the freedom of the childless, and so resent them, whereas people without children are troubled that they long for family, and so resent parents.

Folks, the world is under no obligation to validate your choices. Live your own lives, and don't worry about what anyone else is doing.

What they Think of Me

In the grocery store checkout line yesterday:

Clara: Daddy, are we going to buy you?

Mary: We can't buy dad, he's free.

Centralization

Ross Douthat has a very interesting essay today about the ever-increasing degree of central control in our economy. Problems that seem to have been caused, at least in part, by the consolidation of power are solved by further consolidation:

From Washington to Athens, the economic crisis is producing consolidation rather than revolution, the entrenchment of authority rather than its diffusion, and the concentration of power in the hands of the same elite that presided over the disasters in the first place.

Consider the European situation. For a week after Greece’s fiscal meltdown began, all the talk was about the weakness of the European Union, the folly of its too-rapid expansion, and the failure of the Continent’s governing class to anticipate the crisis.

But then the E.U. acted, bailing out Greece to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, and dictating economic terms to Athens that resemble “the kind of thing a surrendering field marshal signs in a railway car in the forest at the end of a bloody war,” in the words of the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. If the bailout succeeds, the E.U.’s authority over its member states will be dramatically enhanced — and a crisis created by hasty, elite-driven integration will have led, inexorably, to further integration and a more powerful elite.

The latest Wall Street crisis was created by the intersection of the US housing market, long subsidized by the government, and a handful of merchant banks that had grown so big and so interconnected that the failure of any one might wreck the economy. The solution? Give more power to government officials who in most cases are the same people who ran the banks when they massively overextended themselves:

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

The massive size of our key institutions bothers a lot of people, from Tea Party conservatives to eco-leftists who long to live "off the grid."

But what is the alternative? I think about these matters all the time, and I could explain much better than the average Tea Partier how the system of globalized finance, crony capitalism, and big government acts to shore up elite interests. Unlike them, I can see that their "solutions" -- tax cuts, term limits, reducing regulation -- would only make our problems worse. Congressmen with no experienced are not more independent of the system; on the contrary, they lack the knowledge to stand up to bureaucrats and lobbyists. Cutting taxes only makes the rich richer, while simultaneously increasing government borrowing, which makes merchant bankers richer and more powerful still. Reducing regulation mostly helps those companies big and rich enough to seize the opportunities presented.

As our technology grows more sophisticated, as the economy gets steadily more global, the power of giant international companies and equally giant banks grows ever greater. When the internet was new, some people thought it would lead to a more decentralized economy, but obviously this hasn't happened. True, thousands of small businesses thrive by selling on Ebay and writing apps for iPhones, but they work on terms dictated by the giant firms that dominate those sectors of the economy. If a serious rival emerges from the horde of small fry, one of the big companies simply buys it; Apple, Microsoft and Google all keep tens of billions of dollars in cash on hand for just this purpose. And if we don't want to be the serfs of giant companies and banks, we need a government big and powerful enough to stand up to them. This was part of the logic of the European Union. European countries were simply not big enough markets to be able to influence the international economy on their own, so rather than sit back and accept standards for things like property rights law or cell phone signaling set in the US, Japan, or China, they banded together to get a voice.

What can we do?

• Insist, every chance we get, that our governments use their power on behalf of ordinary people rather than on behalf of big corporations or themselves. It is up to us to make our representatives really represent us, and vote out the ones who side with big companies or entrenched bureaucratic interests.
• Solve problems ourselves. Government regulations are passed in response to problems, many of which are created by our own foolishness. The more energy we use, the more we need regulations to control how it is produced and distributed. The more lawsuits we file, the bigger the court system has to be. The more control we demand over what our neighbors do, the more regulations there will be. The louder we yell for the government to do everything for us, the bigger it gets.
• Vote with your wallet. If you like locally owned businesses, patronize them; if you like organic food, buy it.
  
• And if all else fails, enjoy the modern world for the wonders it offers instead of obsessing about how much richer somebody else is than you.
  

Roses

Today. It was a perfect spring weekend here, but now Monday looms.

The Weird Desire for New Houses

Builders are putting up new houses in Las Vegas, where prices are down 60% from their peak in 2006, and thousands of foreclosed homes are languishing unsold. One developer told the New York Times,

“We’re building them because we’re selling them,” Mr. Anderson said. “Our customers wouldn’t care if there were 50 homes in an established neighborhood of 1980 or 1990 vintage, all foreclosed, empty and for sale at $10,000 less. They want new.”

Which I find completely baffling. Even in Las Vegas, houses are built to last 50 years and more. there just hasn't been that much in the way of technological or design advance in 20 years that would make new houses much better than older ones. Why the obsession with buying new?

Modernism and Me

I have a deep attraction to art I know I am going to hate. The other night I had finished reading all the interesting parts of the latest New Yorker and was too lazy to get up and find something else to read, so I continued into the other parts. One of these was a review by Alex Ross of some recent avant garde musical performances in New York. Ross made the music sound awful -- "a rigid riot of obsessive repetitions" was one of the more striking phrases. So of course I went to Youtube to see if I could find any recordings of this stuff. Ross was particularly impressed by an American composer named Missy Mazzoli, "a leader of New York's young moderns," and lo! Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to listen to the exquisite awfulness of her "Shy Girl Shouting" (above). It's the sort of thing that delights the grouchy pedant in me, full of itself and completely ludicrous. The work that Ross particularly praised is called "Worlds Within Us," and after some searching I turned up a recording of that on Mazzoli's web site. I found this rather pleasant and innocuous. I did not hear the "pain experience through the haze of a forgiving memory" that Ross heard, but certainly there wasn't anything to hate about it. It might make good background for a sophisticated film about adult romance.

After listening to half a dozen of Mazzoli's works, I would say that it all falls onto the continuum represented by the first two, from silly in an awful way to blandly pleasant. If you're in the mood for some weird and interesting music, I suggest you check out Buckethead Jordan instead. He may be a rock guitarist who wears (or used to wear) a KFC bucket on his head, but he stretches the boundaries of music in a way I find far more compelling and masterful than anything coming from the rarefied salons of modernist Manhattan. Soothsayer is one of his more pleasant, rock and roll sort of pieces; Baptism of Solitude is also rather pleasant, in a dreamier way; for something weird, try Beaten with Sledges or Killing Cone.

Some Malcolm Gladwell

In this very funny 12 minute podcast, Gladwell describes his first experiences as a newspaper reporter.

And in this 30-minute lecture, he explored the problems inherent in asking people what they like.

Prom Night

Robert is at the prom now. Around 5 I dropped him off at the house where he, his girlfriend and a few other friends were meeting to get ready. He wasn't dressed yet, so I thought I wouldn't get a picture, but around 6 he called and said he forgot his prom ticket. So I drove it over and took the chance to snap this.

In the meantime there was a red carpet scene across the street. At least 20 people were gathered around the eldest daughter of the household and her dashing date, taking an unending series of photos. I thought it astonishing that the young people stood still for this -- at 17 I certainly would not have -- and marveled once again at what I big deal this is.

Saturday in Catonsville

Woolly Mammoth pancake.

A walk in the woods.

Warhammer 40,000, three way battle.

Tag.

Pink

All taken today.

The Oldest Wisdom

O Gilgamesh, whither do you fare?
The life you seek, you will not find.
When the gods created man,
They apportioned death to mankind;
And retained life to themselves.

O Gilgamesh, fill you belly,
Make merry, day and night;
Make of each day a festival of joy,
Dance and play, day and night!
Let your raiment be kept clean,
Your head washed, body bathed.
Pay heed to the little one, holding onto your hand;
Let your wife delight your heart.
For in this is the portion of man.

--Gilgamesh

The "Safety Net"

Catherine Rampell has a piece in the NY Times about older workers whose skills are out of date and can't find any kind of job. She focuses on one woman with 20 years experience as an administrative assistant who has been looking for a new job for over a year:

Ms. Norton says she cannot find any government programs to help her strengthen the “thin bootstraps” she intends to pull herself up by. Because of the Wal-Mart job, she has been ineligible for unemployment benefits, and she says she made too much money to qualify for food stamps or Medicaid last year.

“If you’re not a minority, or not handicapped, or not a young parent, or not a veteran, or not in some other certain category, your hope of finding help out there is basically nil,” Ms. Norton says. “I know. I’ve looked.”

I know at least three people who have had similar experiences. In trouble for various reasons -- one had a brain tumor, one ran out on her abusive husband -- they tried to get government help. They found that because they had resources, like cars they owned or equity in their houses, or some income, they did not qualify for aid. A friend of one of these people said to me, "I always supported that stuff because I thought it would be there for me if I needed, it, and when I saw that [our friend] couldn't get help when she really needed it, that made me rethink."

It is, despite what we sometimes think, rather difficult to get "welfare" in America. You have to be really poor, or put a lot of effort into working the system -- my friend with the brain tumor was advised by a state employee to sell his truck and hide the money in his mattress -- or both.

I am not sure what to make of these stories. Perhaps the point of programs like food stamps is not to help people who are in trouble but are basically ok, but to help people who are fundamentally not ok. But I do think that most Americans really have no idea what sort of government benefits are available to poor people or who qualifies for them, and that strikes me as something of a problem in a democracy.

On the Canal

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in western Maryland, yesterday.

Panthera atrox

Panthera atrox, the "American lion," was one of the biggest cats ever. Some of the specimens from the La Brea Tar Pits are thought to have weighed more than 750 pounds. This big kitty has been placed on several branches of the carnivore family tree. The latest study, based on careful study of the skull, says the "lion" was a giant jaguar.

It strikes me as pretty bold to issue this kind of ruling now, because in a decade or less somebody will extract DNA from the bones and figure this out in a more definitive way.

Rain

Outside, rain and rumbling thunder, the perfect way for a hot spring day to end.

The Tea Party

Great little essay by Michael Kinsley about the Tea Party:

The Tea Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration of what ails America. Not because it is right-wing or because it is sometimes susceptible to crazed conspiracy theories, and not because of racism, but because of the movement’s self-indulgent premise that none of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault.

“Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?

This kind of talk is doubly self-indulgent. First, it’s just not true. Second, it’s obviously untrue. The government’s main function these days is writing checks to old people. These checks allow people to retire and pursue avocations such as going to Tea Party rallies. This basic fact about the government is no great secret. In fact, it’s a huge cliché, robably available more than once in an average day’s newspaper. But the Tea Party Patriots feel free to ignore it and continue serving up rhetoric about “the audaciousness and arrogance of our government,” and calling for the elimination of the Federal Reserve Board or drastic restraints on the power of the Internal Revenue Service.

“I like what they’re saying. It’s common sense,” a random man-in-the-crowd told a Los Angeles Times reporter at a big Tea Party rally. Then he added, “They’ve got to focus on issues like keeping jobs here and lowering the cost of prescription drugs.” These, of course, are projects that can be conducted only by Big Government. If the Tea Party Patriots ever developed a coherent platform or agenda, they would lose half their supporters.

I don't like a lot of things about the government. But the government is the way it is because the voters insist on it. Its problems are our problems. Besides "writing checks to old people," the main thing the government does is fight wars that the people support and maintain a vast defense establishment that people say they want it to maintain. If you don't want to reduce spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Defense, you are not serious about reducing spending, and you should stop talking about tax cuts.

It Would Be Easier if She Were Gay

Ruth Marcus on Elena Kagan:

She's not gay, okay?

Actually, the all-too-public discussion about the ought-to-be private topic of Elena Kagan's sexuality would be easier if the Supreme Court nominee were gay. . . .

There are gender-based undertones to the Kagan discussion, but it is more complicated than simple sexism: that we assume an unmarried woman in her 40s or 50s "must be" a lesbian. Truth is, there is much the same gossip about unmarried and never-married men in public life. Imagine a David Souter nomination in the era of unrestrained blogging. Speculation about the meaning of his bachelor status would have been rampant -- and online.

The part where gender enters the discussion involves the underlying reasons. I don't know any single men of a certain age who would have preferred to have gotten married. I know many single women who would have preferred that their lives had worked out differently.

Which leads into a discussion of whether it is harder for very smart, very ambitious women to find mates, and how much easier it is for a 50-year-old man to find a wife than for a 50-year-old woman to find a husband.

But, honestly, if she isn't a lesbian, why does she wear her hair like that?

The Spill and the Dead Zone

When a reporter complained about the absence of those classic oil spill photos of beslimed birds and dead fish, saying that maybe because there was a Democrat in the White House, one of Andrew Sullivan's readers pointed out:

Do you really think the media hasn't been busting their butts to get pictures of dead fish and other sea life covered in oil? The reason they can't is because those animals don't exist. The Gulf spill happened in the middle of the Gulf's New Jersey-sized dead zone. The primary cause is actually Mississippi River runoff (fertilizer products). The spill is a tragedy, but the truth is we already killed all the sea life. This will change if the spill spreads beyond the Gulf or comes onshore. But for now, the Gulf of Mexico is only marginally less hospitable to animal life than it was a month ago.

Garden and Gun

Yes, Garden And Gun, a magazine that bills itself "The Soul of the New South." Where the article that goes with the picture above begins, "On January 20, 2005, the date of George W. Bush’s second inaugural, I spent the day in our nation’s capital in the unlikely company of my friend the artist William Dunlap, who lives in nearby McLean, Virginia. . . " and real estate ads tout "The essence of plantation living."

I don't think they're marketing themselves to Democrats.

Wildflowers

Dames Rocket and Irises, western Maryland, today.

American Politics in a Nutshell

Evert Cilliers:

Angry left-wingers mutter to themselves: "Rich people are ripping me off."

Angry right-wingers mutter to themselves: "Poor people are ripping me off."

Food Allergies

Most people who think they have them don't.

I'm Not Sure I Want to Know

Why Moms Cheat on their Man the Day After Mothers Day.

It seems that ten times as many women signed up for AshleyMadison.com the day after Mother's Day as on a typical Monday.

Treasures

From a nineteenth-century trash midden in downtown Washington.

As I Was Saying

About grouchy conservatives and their money. This is from the platform just adopted by the Maine Republican Party:

Espouse and follow the principle: it is immoral to steal the property rightfully earned by one person, and give it to another who has no claim or right to its benefits.

Because, you know, lawyers and stockbrokers have a right to their incomes that school teachers and firemen don't. That's not what they mean? Then what do they mean? "Welfare"? Welfare, as in means-tested government benefits programs, is a small portion of the federal budget, and an even smaller portion of overall government spending. The notion that we could reduce taxes and balance the budget by eliminating "welfare" is a farce. And from the same document:

Defeat Cap and Trade, investigate collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth, and prosecute any illegal collusion.

It's a conspiracy! I do appreciate their honesty on this point:

Clarify that health care is not a right, it is a service.

It would be simple to control health care costs if we just barred our hospital doors to poor people and let them die in the streets. Absent that, some form of national cost-sharing is essential.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias notes,

They also demand that “Congress participates in Social Security under the same rules as the general public” which is already the case and also that “Congress participates in the same health care plan as the general public” which is a provision of the Affordable Care Act passed into law earlier this year.

Life and Death

In downtown Washington yesterday.