Category: Hmmm

Crumbs – I missed the grand eating of Biscuit City.

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.

Hmmm. Clearly I should have stayed in Sun Labs….

I’ve been working at home yesterday and today, because we’ve had our electrical contractors in to replace our circuit breaker system. (If you remember, we had a circuit failure back in December.) For most of both days the power was off, but I had a spare fully-charged battery for my laptop, and I could still get to my email using my Treo.
Yesterday the weather here was almost perfect – sunny, 60F, light breeze. Today was dramatically different. This morning, the temperature zoomed into the 50s, and a band of heavy showers whipped across the area. As the cold front crossed Boston, the winds picked up to 45MPH, gusting to 60MPH. I retrieved the dustbins which had blown down the street; a few minutes later one of the electricians reported that a large branch was down in the driveway, blocking their truck. (Fortunately it didn’t hit anything.) We dragged it out of the way.
The electricians have now completed the bulk of the work (there’s one small sub-project to finish next week), and the house is starting to warm up. I’m relieved that everything worked out: by Saturday night the temperature will probably be down to 12F, and I’d prefer not to be without heat….

The National Weather Service is reporting snow totals of 17.5 inches for Boston Logan and 17.0 inches for Needham. The only number they have for Brookline is 13.5 inches, but that was at 3PM, several hours before the storm ended. Since we’re half-way between Boston and Needham, 17 inches is a safe guess.
Of course this is nothing compared with NYC and Hartford, CT, but it’s still a sizeable snowfall.

A little more food p0rn….
This evening I decided to dine once again at the CD Club in the Diplomat Hotel. The waiter had a little trouble with my accent, and to accompany the “roast knee of lamb” he brought me a bottle of wine rather than a glass. Oh well… I decided not to send it back. It was a local non-vintage: a Frankovka red (labelled “modry sklep”, whatever that means). Very tasty. When the lamb arrived, it turned out to be what in America is called “braised lamb shank”, albeit a little drier than usual. Pleasant, but not distinguished. I finished it, and still had all this wine. What was I to do? The cheese plate beckoned.
An interlude: back in the 1990s I used to visit Grenoble regularly – perhaps 3 times a year – and I always stayed in the Park Hotel. They had a tiny restaurant that was notable for two things:

1. If you ordered a half bottle of wine (and they stocked some interesting vintages in half bottles), they would give you “the other half” as a gift when you left
2. they had the most extraordinary cheese board

Frequently I caught myself hurrying through dinner because I was impatient to inspect the cheeses!
Back to CD Club. The cheese plate arrived, and there were four extremely fine cheeses, none of which I could identify. There were two large wedges of a blue, some segments from a small chevre, a…
I grabbed a passing waiter (the same one that had mistaken my wine order) and asked him if he could identify the cheeses. He muttered something blasphemous like “Edam” and scurried off.
But wait: my favourite maitre d’ was suddenly to hand. I thrust a pen and paper towards him and asked him to write down the names of the cheeeses. He was delighted to oblige. The chevre style was Hermelin, the blue was Niva, the strong (?goat’s-milk) one with an orange rind was Tvarusek, and the semi-soft wedge was Blatackeslato (which is “very difficult for you to write” as he explained).
And with wonderf
UPDATED: For your enjoyment:

• This visual confection at the Peabody Essex Museum.
• Going to a sake tasting and encountering sparkling sake!

[Updated] This afternoon the temperature here in Brookline hit 61 degrees Fahrenheit. (Normal is about 36.) It’s now almost midnight, and we’re still up at 46. But it’s all downhill from here: 24 hours from now it’s expected to be around 14 7, with several inches of fresh snow, a wind chill of -4 -11, and NW winds gusting to 36 45 MPH. It’s been an odd winter so far….

In today’s Salon, Patrick”Ask the pilot” Smith had a blistering commentary on the media coverage of aviation:

“On Dec. 20 I awoke to a front-page story in the Boston Globe about a Midwest Airlines jetliner that had returned to Boston’s Logan Airport the previous evening after a minor problem. To my astonishment, I learned that the landing had garnered live coverage on both CNN and MSNBC.
The incident was described — in the Globe and many other places — as an ’emergency landing.’ It was not. The Midwest crew never declared an emergency and requested no special attention from airport authorities. Massport, the landlord for Logan, dispatched vehicles on its own behest, just in case. […]
From a pilot’s point of view, the Midwest ballyhoo was irritatingly similar to the one involving JetBlue three months prior. In both cases, chances of the aircraft failing to land safely were negligible. No matter, it is quickly becoming a phenomenon that any time an aircraft makes an unscheduled touchdown, regardless of how insignificant the trouble, it is carried live on network TV and splashed across the front page.
Last I checked, humanity has been flying for more than a century now, yet we seem to affect a Dark Ages mentality any time we get around airplanes. The how and why of this ignorance falls on several shoulders, but clearly the media, for its part, has lost all grip, spinning situations that present little threat of serious injury as real-time dramas of impending calamity.”

I think it’s quite clear where this “Dark Ages mentality” actually comes from. It’s from the confluence of two characteristics which permeate western society: an obsessive voyeurism, and a love-hate relationship with fear.
The voyeur aspect is easy to understand. Television has turned us all into obsessive voyeurs. It used to be about entertainment: about a relaxing and enjoyable distraction from everyday life. These days, we need to cut out the middle-man – the author, playwright, or actor – and experience Everything. Life. Reality. We can’t bear the thought of missing anything. It’s almost a competitive things: we judge ourselves on the speed of our lives, and the rapidity with which we can acquire information and sensations. We want to be the people telling the story, not hearing it. So we disintermediate the world and watch it.
And this is obviously related to our attitude to fear. FDR may have talked about the fear of “fear itself”, but today we seem to embrace fear, in a horrified fascination. No matter how distant or unlikely some incident might be, we import it into our lives. A child falls down a drain: all drains must be dangerous. A bomb goes off in a distant city, and every small town goes on alert. And if there’s not a real source of fear, we manufacture one, and call it a “reality” TV show.
When we obsess about fear, our judgement is distorted. We look for sources of reassurance. TV knows this, which is why broadcasters seek to create compelling opportunities for fearful voyeurism. It sells. Politicians know this too: witness the cynical manipulation of the “threat level” by Bush and Blair.
There have always been “I remember where I was” incidents. The Kennedy assassinations. Neil Armstrong’s giant step. Princess Di. 9/11. We are coming to anticipate them, to live our lives as rehearsals for those grand punctuations. And the logical conclusion of this is that we want to be there – or at least to be a voyeur.
I fear that it comes down to this. We have become convinced that we live in a horribly dangerous and unpredictable world. We cannot distance ourselves from it, we are convinced that it will touch us. We know that somewhere, some time, an unsuspecting group of people is going to die – suddenly, violently. Of course we don’t want it to happen, but we are convinced that it will. And when it happens, we want to watch it live, on TV.

As I was driving home this evening, I caught an interesting little story on NPR’s All Things Considered entitled Born in the ’50s: Beliefs, Now and Then

As Judge Samuel Alito testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Robert Siegel talks with Alito’s contemporaries — those who are 55 or so — to see how much they and their views have changed since they were 35.

And so they interviewed a number of people who, like Alito, were born in 1950, and asked them how their views had changed over the last 20 years. And I found this particularly interesting, because I too was born in 1950. So how have my views changed over the last 20 years?
In 1985, the most important things in my life were my children – then 11 and 8 – and my job; I’d just joined Sun Microsystems. I didn’t pay too much attention to US national affairs, because I hadn’t quite adjusted to the fact that we weren’t just going to be here “for a couple of years”. But I didn’t think much about England, either: I was appalled by Maggie Thatcher’s selfish ideology. I was a citizen of the world! Of course politics was important, but the critical issue was the life-or-death concern with nuclear confrontation. Those were the days of films like Threads and The Day After, and Reagan joking about nuking the Soviets. But I don’t remember people at work arguing about these matters: they were distant, and we were curiously impotent.
And nobody talked much about religion. For the most part, it was a respectful and tolerant period: the arguments in schools were about Title IX (equal funding for girls’ sports), not evolution. I was active on Usenet in the alt.atheism newsgroup, helping to author the FAQ and starting to read philosophy of religion texts. But it was only for my personal interest.
Today? I think my views have hardened over the years, not mellowed. I’m appalled by the excesses of intolerance and hypertolerance that have sprung up. We have seen the emergence of a dichotomy between fundamentalism and unprincipled relativism, both of which have no time for reason, debate, and balance. Whether it be Pat Robertson’s ayatollah-like pronouncements, or Tony Blair seeking to make it illegal to say things that might upset someone, the world seems to have gone mad. And I do blame religion for much of it, for elevating the myths of a bunch of Iron Age nomads above reasoned debate in the here-and-now.
But, friends tell me, this is unfair. There are many people who are both religious and tolerant, observant and scientific. And of course this is true. Yet I can’t help feeling that many of these people give aid and comfort to the bigots by refusing to live up to their principles. A topical example: Pat Robertson explaining Ariel Sharon’s illness as divine retribution. Why can those who argue with Robertson not take the next, logical step, and rip out of their Bibles those texts which support Robertson’s thesis of a bloodthirsty and vengeful deity? If they don’t believe in such a deity, why do they treat those gory texts as “holy”? Surely their ethical principles are more important than a piece of text that was arbitrarily included in a book by a bunch of old men in the fourth century? (And, yes, the same applies to the Koran, and every other “sacred” book.)
I know, I know: if you start doing that, the whole house of cards comes crumbling down. Rational thought has no place in this domain. Even Thomas Jefferson couldn’t pull it off.
This abuse of religious ideas permeates so much. We have an immoral war being fought with callous disregard for the lives of the innocent and the moral integrity of the USA and UK, with government-sanctioned torture, and it is all justified in Apocalyptic, almost Manichean language of freedom-lovers versus evil-doers.
I am much more cynical than I used to be, and less hopeful. I look at my grandson, Tommy, and I worry more about the world he will face than I did with my children. Do all grandparents feel that way? I hope I’m wrong. On the other hand, I’m learning so much these days – in computing, science, philosophy, travel. I’m still an engineer, but I spent more of my time thinking about how we practice engineering, as a collaborative, community effort. I expect to get back to product engineering in a year or two, but for now I’m learning and contributing in a different way. And that’s satisfying.
And curiously, I find myself more emphatically English than ever before. In part, it’s because America has become so alien. When George Bush Senior said “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God”, I thought he was just pandering to his base. I was wrong. But in part it’s because of the Internet, and global communications. I read British newspapers every day, I watch English football and cricket, and PBS and BBC America bring me the news and the kind of entertainment that I grew up with. I never watch US programs (except for House, and the star of that series is as English as they come). I work with people around the world; in this respect I am a citizen of the world. Once or twice a year I return to England, and get in the rental car, and drive to Oxford: onto the M25, and then up the M40. And as I drive over the Chiltern scarp at Stokenchurch, and see the landscape spread out before me, I know I’m home.