Author: geoff

David Hockney portraits

Just returned from the Members’ Opening of the David Hockney Portraits exhibition at the Boston MFA. Although the works in the exhibition go all the way back to his teenage years, and represent all of his major periods and styles, I was startled by just how many of the pictures were less than a year old. (In fact Hockney did a set of six large portraits especially for this event.)
This is only the second Hockney show I’ve seen at the MFA: the first was a small collection of recent English landscapes about 10(?) years ago. This is very different: it’s a huge exhibition, with many previously undisplayed pictures from the artist’s own collection. If there is a weakness, it is perhaps that there is too much here: the exhibition might be better if more thematically focussed. But that’s a nit: it’s a wonderful show. The portraits are extremely revealing of Hockney, as an artist and as a person in relation to others. Highly recommended.

Random 10

There’s a bias in these lists towards stuff I haven’t played in recent weeks. For example, I just picked up the Arctic Monkeys’ excellent new album, and since that’s currently in heavy rotation, it won’t show up here for a while. With that said, here’s today’s random 10 from iTunes:

  • “No Angel” by Sunscreem
  • “Love Comes Quickly” by the Pet Shop Boys
  • “Mer Girl” by Madonna
  • “Beginning of a Great Adventure” by Lou Reed
  • “Take Me Home” by Groove Armada
  • “Tokins” by the Steve Miller Band
  • “Housekeeping” by No-Man
  • “The Van der Graaf Generation” by Men Without Hats
  • “Irene” by Patrick O’Hearn
  • “Flying Sorcery” by Al Stewart

Dennett and Wieseltier links

Majikthise has posted a couple of pieces here and here providing useful links to discussions of Dan Dennett’s book and Wieseltier’s execrable review. She quotes from an email from Dennett to a physicist who had written to him about the review:

Look at it this way: I am running an experiment. The question is: can thoughtful religious people read my book without losing it? Some can; some can’t. That’s something worth knowing. I’m sure there will be many more data points in the coming months. It will be interesting to see what the pattern is. Ugly? Yes, but experimenters often have to endure gross things in order to get the evidence they need.

UPDATE: In reading through some of the blogs comenting on the Wieseltier review, I came across this letter to the editor of the NYTBR by the philosopher Owen Flanagan. Beautifully concise and crystal clear.

"A offer I couldn't refuse…"

I’m heading over to England next Tuesday for a week. It’s mostly for family business, though I will be doing a few days work while I’m there. The reason is simple: United Airlines made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: round trip US-UK, no blackouts, ample capacity, Economy Plus seats, for just 35,000 frequent flier miles. OK, I have to pay $80 taxes and fees, and rent a car, but it’s still a great deal. Oxford (and London), here I come.
(Until just recently it seemed that whenever I tried to buy a ticket using frequent flier miles the system would always say “no seats available”, or “no Saver awards – full rate only”. It was bad for domestic flights; for international the chances were slim to none. Moreover there was no way to find out what seats were available: all you could do was guess a date, try it, and hope for the best. But in the last few months I’ve found that whatever I want seems to be available. And United has even started posting information about which routes and dates have good award ticket availability. What a concept!)

Reset to factory settings

I had a slightly disconcerting experience today. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been having some electrical work done, and this morning the guys came by to finish up the last installation and then map out the new circuit breaker configuration. As you might expect, the latter involved a lengthy period of flipping breakers on and off to verify which breaker controlled which appliances, lights, outlets, etc.
At the end of the process, I had to hurry in to work for a meeting, but before leaving I wanted to check that Internet connectivity was OK. I logged in to one of the Macs (the one connected by Ethernet to the Belkin WiFi access point), brought up My!Yahoo!Page!, declared success, and headed off to the office.
This evening my wife asked if everything had gone OK with the electricians: she was unable to get to the Internet from either her PC or her Mac. (Don’t ask….) Both of these systems use WiFi (802.11G)… so what was going on.?
I tried to log in to the Belkin AP from the Ethernet-connected Mac. It failed – “bad password”. After a couple of retries, I found was able to log in without a password. It soon became apparent that somehow (presumably due to all the power cycling) the device had been reset to factory settings. No passwords, default ESSID, no wireless security, no specific MAC restrictions, PST TZ, and wide open to all comers… but unusable by my wife’s systems, because each was configured to use only my ESSID. (There are about 5 neighbours’ wireless networks reachable from different parts of our house, some with no security.)
I re-entered all of the configuration information (yes, I had a back-up copy!) and we’re now back to normal operation. However I’m distinctly uncomfortable with the idea that power cycling the access point could leave my wireless network wide open. That’s not my idea of fail-safe.
(Perhaps it’s an “NSA feature”.)

Why does the NYT do this?

Over at brainstorms, oz and I are discussing the sophomoric review [login required] of Dennett’s new book in yesterday’s NYT by a pompous lit-crit idiot called Leon Wieseltier. As someone commented on an NYT forum, “I am dismayed to see that the NYTimes is continuing to ask literary critics to review philosophical books about science. It’s like asking a ballerina to review an auto show.”. But a ballerina is unlikely to be as graceless as Wieseltier….
UPDATE: Not everybody at the NYT is so dismissive of Dennett’s book. In this piece [login required], Edward Rothstein quotes from Dennett to introduce his thoughts on the concept of iconoclasm (“History Illuminates the Rage of Muslims”). It’s a nice little piece, although it looks as if it was edited down a bit clumsily.
On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan hails Wieseltier’s piece as a “superb dissection of scientism”. Since Dennett’s supposed “scientism” is a product of Wieseltier’s deranged mind, I have to assume that Sully hasn’t actually read the book. Surely he should know better than to rely on a review….

Thoughts on 23K miles

A correspondent reminded me that I hadn’t yet posted my final thoughts about my big trip, as I’d promised. So here goes.

  • First and foremost, everything went exactly according to plan: the travel; my meetings in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Prague; the TAC meeting in Louisville, and the colloquium at SeeBeyond’s facility in Monrovia. Thanks to lots of people for all their support, especially Susan, Pam, Pavel, Ruchi, Vijay, and Greg.
  • With respect to Sun’s global engineering facilities, it’s ever so easy for a senior person to fly in for a quick visit, give a talk, shake a few hands, and disappear on the next flight out. The first time you show up, people are understandably cautious: is it going to be worthwhile taking the time to work with this visitor, or is he or she just another tourist? (Cf. Dilbert’s “bungee boss”.) On your second visit, people tend to open up, and you can accomplish a lot more.
  • Oddity #1: I visited a reasonably large bookshop in Bangalore, and two things struck me. First, there were as many business books as works of fiction. Second, many kinds of fiction and non-fiction works were shelved together. For example, science-fiction and science were shelved as a single subject; likewise whodunits and true crime. (And based on the computer books and magazines, it would appear that there are no Mac users in India… 🙁 )
  • Oddity #2: To get to the United Airlines Red Carpet Club lounge at Frankfurt airport, you have to go through an extra security check. Apparently the regular airport security is viewed as insufficient.
  • The new airport terminal at Prague is probably the most elegant (and functional) that I’ve ever seen.
  • Los Angeles is easy to navigate around, as long as you get precise directions. I downloaded turn-by-turn directions from LAX to my hotel in Arcadia into my Treo, and everything worked out fine. However instead of getting return directions, I relied on reading the original directions in reverse. Bad idea: within a few miles I found myself inadvertantly exiting the freeway into a maze of residential streets. Fortunately I had time to recover, but the lesson was clear.
  • Seamless voice and data connectivity worldwide is a reality. It’s not cheap – my voice and data roaming charges in India, the Czech Republic, and Germany totalled $400 – but performance was flawless. However with airborne WiFi becoming a reality, I think I’m going to have to investigate Skype.

"Watching the English"

During my recent travels, I picked up a copy of Kate Fox’s Watching the English. I’ve just finished it, and I can heartily and enthusiastically recommend it. On second thoughts, since I’m English, I should probably moderate my language:

The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as “a bit of a nuisance”; a truly horrific experience is “well, not exactly what I would have chosen”; an outstanding performance or achievement is “not bad”; an act of abominable cruelty is “not very friendly”, and an unforgivably stupid misjudgement is “not very clever”

On this scale, Watching the English is not bad. Not bad at all. And by now you may have guessed that Kate Fox is an anthropologist, and her book is an attempt to understand what it means to be English; what’s different about the English.
I was thinking of trying to summarize Fox’s conclusions – her “definition of Englishness” – but on reflection the summary wouldn’t be very useful on its own. She covers so many areas of life: language, dress, food, drinking, the weather, queuing, cars, pets, houses, sex, sports, work, and rites of passage. Class is a factor of course, but humour emerges as much more important.
Coincidentally there was a piece in today’s Boston Globe entitled A struggle to redefine ‘Britishness’, which included the following paragraph:

Britons are famously ambivalent about patriotism, according to anthropologist Kate Fox, who wrote a book on English behavior and who says patriotism violates the values of moderation and modesty that are part of being British. ”The English have a horror of earnestness, especially the sort of heart-on-sleeve sentimentality and solemnity indulged in by other nations expressing patriotic pride,” she said, citing Americans as an example.

Exactly. I moved to the US in 1981, and I remember the first time I found myself at some event (probably at my children’s school) where everybody was expected to put their hand on their heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I remember thinking, “Come off it! Don’t take yourselves so seriously!”, but of course I said nothing. In the chapter on Rites of passage, Fox observes:

At funerals, we are deprived of our primary social coping mechanism – our usual levels of humour and laughter being deemed inappropriate on such an officially sad occasion. […] This is fascinating but painful to watch, like some cruel vivisectionist’s animal behaviour experiment: observing the English at funerals feels like watching turtles deprived of their shells.

And for me, standing stiffly while those Americans around me are pledging allegiance feels remarkably like attending a funeral. Sorry, it always has done.
Oh, well, mustn’t grumble. How about a nice cup of tea?