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Boxing Out Joseph Cornell

Sunday, February 15, 2009

A lot of prominent names appear in the Bill Grimes’s New York Times obituary of Leila Hadley, the author and socialite: Vanderbilt, Luce, Brando, and so on. One person whose name does not appear is the artist Joseph Cornell. Hadley appears to have been the closest thing Cornell ever had to a lover, and superficially, you can’t imagine a less likely couple: Hadley was a world traveler and sexually free, while Cornell almost never left the city limits of New York and seems to have died a virgin.

It would be a mistake to dismiss their intimate relationship with a shrug and the cliche that “opposites attract,”  because Hadley was in fact precisely the kind of woman that you would expect Cornell to fall for. While Cornell never travelled farther than Massachusetts (and not even that far in adulthood), he frequently conjured up European hotels — or the entire solar system — in the magical shadow boxes that he created in his basement in Queens. While Cornell never had a proper girlfriend, he was an obsessive observer of women, and often turned his boxes into little shrines to the women he admired from afar, such as Lauren Bacall. or 19th century ballerina Marie Taglioni.

Leila Hadley, sexually alluring and worldly, might have seemed to Cornell like all of his lifelong fantasies turned into flesh and blood. Hadley told Deborah Solomon, Cornell’s biographer, that he even spoke about marrying her and traveling together, although those musings could simply have been more fantasies spun by a fantasist, one who ultimately could not bring himself to consummate his relationship with Hadley.

Joseph Cornell is a lot more interesting (and historically important) than most of the people mentioned in the Times obituary, including her four husbands and various lovers. It’s sad, but not altogether surprising, that Hadley’s affair with Cornell didn’t even merit a small mention in her obit. For while she was a figure who looms very large in Cornell’s life story, his place in hers, amid the marriages and affairs, looks negligible — although it probably wasn’t, from her point of view — and you can understand why an Obit writer almost 40 years later would not deem Cornell worth mentioning at all.

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What passes for a “news analyst” at NPR

Thursday, February 12, 2009

I’ve mentioned before that I try to avoid NPR as much as possible. It’s mostly the tone that bothers me, rather than anything about the content or political slant. If you want to hear someone peddling conventional wisdom in a self-congratulatory tone of voice, then NPR is for you. (Yes, I know that this is unfair to many thoughtful and decent reporters and interviewers at NPR — please remember that I see NPR the same way I see my beloved New York Times: indispensable and exasperating in about equal measure). No one embodies the things that bother me about NPR more than hosts such as Robert Siegel, and political analysts such as Juan Williams and Cokie Roberts.

I’m not very familiar with Williams’s early career. If people tell me that his reporting for the Washington Post and his work on “Eyes on the Prize” and his Thurgood Marshall biography were good, then I won’t argue. That doesn’t excuse his being a complete hack now, and it doesn’t excuse NPR for treating people like him and Cokie Roberts as if they are insightful analysts of the political scene. As background, here is something Juan Williams said to Bill O’Reilly and Mary Katharine Ham on Fox News on January 26th which has caused a fuss among some NPR listeners:

Michelle Obama, you know, she’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going. If she starts talking, as Mary Katharine is suggesting, her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I’m the victim. If that stuff starts coming out, people will go bananas and she’ll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross.

I won’t waste time explaining why this is insulting and moronic. It’s hardly a shock that this is what passes for punditry on Bill O’Reilly’s show, or that Williams is willing to feed cable news viewers and producers the garbage that they subsist on. What I will waste time explaining, however, is how Williams’s explanation exposes him as a hack even more than his dumb comments on Fox News did. When NPR’s ombudsman, Alicia C. Shepard, questioned him about the remarks, Williams first dismissed the complaints as a “faux controversy.” After reviewing the video, he revised that, and explained that he could see how the “tone and tenor” of his comments might have distorted what he saw as “pure political analysis:”

I regret that in the fast-paced, argumentative format my tone and tenor seems to have led people to see me as attacking instead of explaining my informed point of view.

Ah, so when he compared Michelle Obama to Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress and shared his insights into what her “instinct” is, he was “explaining his informed point of view.” Apparently he knows Michelle Obama very well, to be able to explain what her instincts are with such confidence. How does he see into Michelle Obama’s psyche so perceptively? Well, let’s see what else he told the ombudsman:

When Williams was speaking of Mrs. Obama as a potential liability, he told me, he was referencing pieces in The Atlantic and Politico. A Politico article listed Mrs. Obama as one “Dem” her husband should watch out for. “She’s glamorous, she’s on message, she’s the nation’s favorite mom — and now she has nowhere to go but down,” said the article.

Never mind the fact that the Atlantic article that Williams cited in fact argued against the myth that Michelle Obama is a Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress whose “instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I’m the victim.” What’s even more damning about Williams’s explanation is his admission that what he calls “explaining my informed point of view” is in fact just a recitation of some shallow caricatures that have become conventional wisdom among the Washington journalists who write for places like Politico.

In her column, NPR’s ombudsman implies that if he had cited the Atlantic and Politico in his comments on Fox News, then they might have been less problematic. In fact, citing those sources would have just undermined the pretense that he is offering anything more than recycled smears. By mentioning the Atlantic and Politico articles in his own defense, Williams is basically saying, “I present myself to Fox News viewers and NPR listeners as an independent-minded, thoughtful political analyst, but in fact the punditry I share is just warmed-over conventional wisdom that I have picked up from other Washington pundits.”

I’d love to hear Williams being introduced on “Weekend Edition” as an “NPR regurgitator of Washington conventional wisdom,” instead of as an “NPR news analyst.” It might sound less impressive, but at least it would be accurate.

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Eye of the Beholder

Monday, February 9, 2009

I just noticed this plaque last week, after having walked past it dozens, if not hundreds, of times:

Eye of the Beholder

I took another photo from the same spot, looking in a different direction:

580

The plaque was placed where Interstate 580 crosses over Grand Avenue, creating a dark, imposing overpass that separates Lake Merritt and Lakeside Park from the 1926 Grand Lake Theater. It might be quaint that people were so jazzed about urban highways in the 60’s, were it not for the fact that these freeways drew and quartered the cores of many American cities, cleaving neighborhoods in two and allowing drivers to bypass Oakland on their way to and from San Francisco without ever having to see a city street, never mind interact with any of its citizens or businesses.

Filed in Automobiles, Oakland, Pedestrians, Urbanism | | Comments (9)

Fair Use

Monday, February 9, 2009

use

Okay, so it’s a bit rough around the edges. I’m no artist — or lawyer, for that matter.

(In case anyone is unfamiliar with the legal jousting between the AP and Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic Obama “HOPE” posters, you can get up to speed here.)

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Capturing Shadows

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Later this month, a project by Joe Penrod called Orange and Blue will be opening at Oakland’s Swarm Gallery along with works by Jared Clark and Jake Watling as part of the ENTER/EXIT exhibition. I’m not especially tuned into Oakland’s thriving arts community, but I have known Watling for several years (I may have occasion to write more about some of his nice Oakland-inspired work in the future), so I happened to be looking at info about this show in advance. Penrod is based in Olympia, Washington, and much of his work has been devoted to the quixotic pursuit of shadowcatching, using blue painter’s tape and photography. Here is one nice example (images reproduced with the gracious permission of the artist):

10 and 4 by Joe Penrod

10 and 4 by Joe Penrod

I assume that the title requires no explanation. Shadows have long had a somewhat uncertain ontological status, dating back to Plato’s cave allegory, and probably before. There’s no doubt that shadows are real — we can see them with our own eyes, after all — but good luck trying to touch one, or pack it up and take it home with you.

Penrod certainly isn’t the first artist to try to preserve shadows — one might argue that the history of photography has been one long inquiry into the preservation of shadows — but I love the playfulness of the bright blue tape, and the whimsy involved in trying to finish the taping and photographing before the shadow has moved. The movement of the shadows enables some of my favorite pieces, like this one on a Williamsburg street corner:

by Joe Penrod

by Joe Penrod

Sometimes, too, it’s not the shadow that moves. These images are great fun (trying to catch shadows could be an amusing game for small children), but then you realize that most of these tape outlines will hardly outlast the shadows they are capturing, whether because they will be worn away, or deteriorate in the weather, or be removed by diligent city workers. Thus the need to photograph the outlines after they are complete. Is the blue tape outline the artwork, or is the photograph of the outline the work of art?

Both, surely, but how long will a digital photograph last? Forever, we hope, but in the grand scheme of things, those digital files may be as fleeting as the blue tape, which is as fleeting as the shadows themselves.

Stop Shadow by Joe Penrod

Stop Shadow by Joe Penrod

I was particularly interested in these works because my friend Pablo Manga, an artist here in Oakland, also works with tape, but with dramatically different results. You might think that tape would be a limiting medium, but Pablo’s works achieve very different effects depending on the kind of tape and the colors he chooses. Even variations in the manufacturing quality of the tape can create some fascinating effects. And that’s all before any decisions about how to place the tape, which produce an entirely different set of possibilities.

I don’t want to deprive Penrod’s work of its charm by spewing a lot of commentary about it, so I will spare my readers any additional thoughts. The best response to art like this, in my opinion, is summed up by this woman at Pike’s Place in Seattle:

By Joe Penrod

By Joe Penrod

If you can make at least one person stop, smile, and point, then that’s an artistic success as far as I’m concerned. The Swarm Gallery exhibition, at 560 2nd Street near Jack London Square, will last from February 20th to March 29th. Among the many objects whose shadows Penrod has tried to snare are orange traffic cones, and his Swarm installation will involve traffic cones as well. You can also find more work on Penrod’s blog or his Flickr portfolio (there’s more than just the tape outlines, even though that’s all I’ve mentioned here.) Good stuff, I think, and I definitely plan to check it out in person when the show opens.

Filed in Art, Oakland | | Comments (8)

Wake Up and Smell the Music

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Music is central to every single civilization that we know of, with dozens of different uses: there’s religious music, martial music, work songs, play songs. Music is a very powerful force for bonding people together.
–Oliver Sacks

If you walk past a school near my house at the right time on the right day — today at about 4:30 pm, for example — then you will find a man standing on the schoolyard steps playing a small wooden flute. The reedy tones will reach you before you catch sight of the flautist, and the other sounds of the city — news choppers overhead monitoring freeway traffic, the engines of cars roaring down nearby Park Boulevard, dogs barking from behind fences or windows — will fade, if only a little, into the background. The man never has an audience except for the occasional passerby, and he does not seem to desire one; while he will silently acknowledge a wave if one is offered, he is playing for himself, perhaps liking the way the melodies sound in the open air, or appreciating the break from a hectic life at home.

There is music everywhere, for those who wish to hear it. It might be concert violinist Joshua Bell playing for spare change in the Washington D.C. Metro station, as he did in 2007 as part of an experiment for the Washington Post. It might be Wynton Marsalis outside your window playing “When the Saints Go Marching in” as he leads a jazz funeral down your street to the Cotton Club, as happened to me in 2002 after Lionel Hampton died. It might be an unknown busker trying to put together some money for lunch or train fare outside a BART station.

The window is open today
And the air pours in with piano notes
In its skirts, as though to say, “Look, John,
I’ve brought these and these”—that is,
A few Beethovens, some Brahmses,
A few choice Poulenc notes…
— John Ashbery

Often, it will just be a neighbor playing for the sake of playing. Many afternoons towards dusk, a man walks to the pergola at Lake Merritt and plays his saxophone for the setting sun and anyone else who cares to listen. When I lived farther from the lake, off 14th Avenue, a neighbor would sit on his fire escape on warm evenings and play the banjo, with one knee raised to cradle the instrument. In my old building in New York, a soprano on some higher floor would practice scales and arias, her notes tumbling down like falling leaves and slipping in my open windows uninvited.

The desire to create music, and the pleasure to be had from listening to it, may be unique to human beings. There are some people who are left entirely cold by music, including synaesthete Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote that music affected him “merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds” (in one of life’s ironies, his only child became an opera singer). Most people, however, respond to music in a visceral way, dancing along with beats, discovering that catchy melodies routinely make hostages of their brains, or paying more than a day’s wage to squeeze into a room with thousands of strangers to partake of a communal aural experience.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.
Hey, My. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you.
–Bob Dylan

You might think, given music’s nearly universal appeal, that we would stop short and take note when we stumble upon someone making music solely for his or her pleasure, and ours. We are very good at tuning things out, however, including tunes themselves, and all too often the music around us barely registers, if at all. So keep your ears open for songs wafting through the air as you go about your life, and when you hear them, go following them sometimes — even if there is someplace you’re going to.

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Now Daschle away, Daschle away, Daschle away all.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

So Tom Daschle can now return to earning a fortune as a lobbyist, and can use his close relationship with the President of the United States as a way of influencing public policy, while being subject to none of the scrutiny, oversight, conflict of interest rules, or other safeguards that are in place when one is a public official.

Sounds like a great victory for government transparency and accountability!

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A Portrait of the Blog as a Young Child: problems and solutions

Sunday, February 1, 2009

This blog is now a month old, and is still very much in its infancy. Like any infant, it is developing at a rapid pace, and its father (i.e., me) is still trying to figure out how to raise it. One problem I’ve encountered as I try to shape this little creature is the dilemma of how often to post, and how high to set the bar for whether a particular subject is blogworthy.

The flexibility inherent in the blog form, which allows bloggers to post as frequently or infrequently as they want, at whatever length they want, with as much or as little substance as they want, allows for a great sense of freedom and possibility. No copy editor will demand that 200 words be chopped from a post to fit the alloted space, and no email will arrive telling you that we are very sorry, but your piece is not quite right for our publication, and we wish you the best of luck finding a different outlet for it.

Such freedom and flexibility is, however, a curse as well as a blessing. A form of analysis paralysis can occur, in which the large number of options actually makes it harder to choose one. Studies suggest that when people are given a limited number of choices (for example, when shopping in a supermarket for laundry detergent or orange juice), then they have an easier time making a decision and they will be more likely to be satisfied with their decision afterwards. If they are given too many choices, then they have more trouble coming to a decision, and they are less likely to be happy with their decision afterwards. This, I believe, applies to a lot of things in life; for example, it may help explain why so many people in this land of opportunity have so much trouble settling on a career path and end up dissatisfied with whatever they end up settling on. (Or maybe I’m just projecting?)

The blog form demands that bloggers make a lot of choices. First of all, how often to publish? Some blogs are updated dozens of times a day, with link after link to funny videos, indignant rants, newsworthy articles, pretty pictures, etc. Other blogs are updated once a day or even once a week, with considered, essay-like posts about a specific topic, or personal memoir serialized in blog form, etc. Neither style is better than the other per se — it all depends on the preferences of the blogger, the preferences of the particular readers that he or she is writing for, and the preferences of potential readers that he or she hopes to attract.

How often to post isn’t the only dilemma, or even the hardest one. There are many other choices to be made: what topic or set of topics should I write about, and how limited in scope should I make the topic or topics? How trivial does a particular post have to be in order to fail the Elaine Benes “blogworthiness” test? Should I write short and sweet posts that communicate my points in distilled form, or should I elaborate my thoughts in short essays? If I see a clever or wise or outrageous video on YouTube, should I share it with my audience, or should I restrict myself to (mostly) original content and leave the YouTube linking to others?

To make things more complicated, different readers will have different needs. To return to the metaphor that began this post, some people — the infant’s grandparents, say — will eagerly welcome any new information about the baby. Other people — acquaintances and neighbors, say — may roll their eyes if they are asked to look at yet another set of pictures of the baby.

You can’t aim to please everyone, of course, and the best solution to these dilemmas is probably to forget about what your audience wants, and simply post what you want to post. If you lose some readers because they don’t like the subject or style or frequency of your posts, then so be it. If new readers come to your blog because the like the subject or style or frequency of your posts, then so be that too. That’s excellent advice, but all I can say is: easier said than done — I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t hope that people would read it, so I can’t help but think about whether a post I’m writing will excite the crowd or bore them to death (including metaposts such as this one).

To a great extent, the blog form allows these issues to resolve themselves. It might annoy an acquaintance to receive 10 emails a day with updates about the baby’s latest activities. It might annoy a neighbor to be accosted on the sidewalk every day and asked to look at a new photos of the baby. One wonderful thing about the internet is that is allows readers to define their own parameters for how often they want to look at a blog, how closely they want to peruse the posts, whether or not they want to click on the links that are offered, or play a YouTube video that is displayed. The burden of decision-making falls on readers as well as blogger, so the blogger can feel some of that weight lifted from his or her own shoulders and go about his or her blogging without worrying (at least not too much) about playing to the audience.

All of this is a meandering way of explaining that this blog is still very much a work in progress, and I am groping somewhat blindly for a style that works for me, and will, I hope, work for readers as well. All of this is also a long windup for saying that I have decided to address some of these issues by adding a section to the sidebar at the left of the blog, labeled “Marginalia.” It is a kind of compromise: If I want to write something, but worry that it is not blogworthy enough to turn into a full blog post, then I might write it there. Or if I read an article, or see a video, and think that some of my readers might get something out of it, then I might put a link to it there. If I’m out and about away from my computer, but have something to say, then I can might post something there from my mobile phone. “Marginalia” is just  a Twitter stream that I have created for this purpose, so if people who read this blog through a feedreader want to see what I post under “Marginalia,” they can follow my Twitter feed or just check back here occasionally — as I write this, there is only one thing there, but “Marginalia” will show the previous five or so items in my Twitter stream. (And the single Twitter item only seems to be showing up sporadically on the blog, so I may have some technical problems to work out before this works reliably.)

Now that I’ve gotten all that metablogging out of the way, it’s onward to month two, and I promise that this blog won’t become a blog about writing a blog, which would be too recursive even for me.

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Melting Pot Oakland

Friday, January 30, 2009

Melting Pot
A proudly inclusive grocery on East 12th Street in Oakland.

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Back to the Future of Online Newspapers

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Check out this 1981 report from a San Francisco TV station about reading newspapers on one’s home computer. I love the shot of the guy connecting his modem — probably 1200 baud at most — using his rotary dial phone. Ah, the good old days, when we worried about baud instead of broadband, and Digital VT100 terminals were the gold standard of network computing. Little did I know, as the 8 year old boy that I was in 1981, that I was witnessing a revolutionary change in our culture when I watched my father connect to “the network” (I don’t remember hearing the word “internet” for another decade, although it may have been in use) to check his email from home…

This recent article in Slate has more on newspapers’ early stabs at online editions.

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Criminal Injustice Systems at Home and Abroad

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

I finally got around to reading Samantha Power’s article on Gary Haugen in the January 19th New Yorker. Haugen is a Christian human rights lawyer whose organization represents impoverished and abused people in Cambodia, Kenya, and other countries.  Like most of Power’s work, the whole article is worth reading, but one set of statistics snared my attention:

Countries emerging from conflict often command headlines, congressional interest, and rule-of-law funding: Bosnia and Sierra Leone in the nineties, Iraq and Afghanistan today. Chronically flawed justice systems, like the one in Kenya, tend to get far less support. Haugen is incredulous: “Without investing in the rule of law for the poor, none of the other investments we make will be sustainable.”

In 2007, Transparency International published a report underscoring the extent of the problem. Seventy-nine per cent of people surveyed in Cameroon, and seventy-two per cent of Cambodians, reported paying a bribe to obtain basic services in the previous year. The study also confirmed Haugen’s view that the poor are more likely to pay bribes than the wealthy, often to avoid harassment. According to a report published by Afrobarometer, a public-opinion research group, only fifty-three per cent of people surveyed in subSaharan Africa expressed confidence that senior government officials would be brought to justice if they committed a serious crime. In Kenya, sixty-four per cent deemed most or all of the police corrupt. A World Bank study of twenty-three countries found that the poor saw police “not as a source of help and security, but rather of harm, risk, and impoverishment.”

Those numbers, 53 percent and 64 percent, are presumably supposed to sound startlingly high. Perhaps because community-police relations have been on my mind lately due to the fallout from the shooting of unarmed Oscar Grant by a BART police officer at the beginning of this month, I was curious about whether the statistics would in fact be much different in some communities in the United States. Might we see similarly high distrust of the criminal justice system and the police in North Philly or the South Bronx, in East Oakland or West Baltimore?

I did some googling to see if I would find any comparable studies from communities in the United States. (Continued)

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“No Crime Here at All”

Monday, January 26, 2009

An awful story this evening, related to my post about speeding cars and pedestrians on Park Boulevard the other day:

A pedestrian was struck and killed in a crosswalk at the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Santiago St. in San Francisco tonight.

The woman was walking westbound across Sunset when a man driving a Toyota Corolla south on Sunset struck her at about 6:15 p.m. The woman was taken to San Francisco General Hospital where she died. Her name was withheld, pending notification of her family.

The driver had no stoplight or stop sign and stopped after hitting the pedestrian, and police said the incident was just a tragic accident.

“It doesn’t look like he was speeding or under the influence or anything like that,” said Sgt. Renee Pagano. “There’s no crime here at all.”

“Just a tragic accident” Nice to know that a car can plow into a pedestrian in a crosswalk, and as long as the driver isn’t speeding or drunk, they are not breaking any laws according to the SFPD. (I actually knew that already, because these incidents happen all the time, always with the same result — you can even kill two young children on a sidewalk and as long as you didn’t intend to do it, you won’t be held responsible.)

My recommendation to people on foot or bicycle: Always assume that drivers won’t see you, and act accordingly.

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