Woody Allen on my mind.

I've been watching Woody Allen films recently.  As with most things, it's not entirely clear why.  To the best of my knowledge, it all started when I saw a three minute clip from Hannah and Her Sisters on YouTube.  It was one of those accidental YouTube sightings, when you're actually looking for something else, and then out of the corner of your eye, you see a "Suggested Post".

I loved Hannah and Her Sisters.  It came from that halcyon time (whatever the hell that actually means) in Allen's movie making -- the decade and a half centered around the 1980s when the ink that formed in drops at the nib of his prolific pen was all pearls ... and movies upon movies, each of deceptive depth, bounced like too many little pink playground balls before our eyes.  In New York, these balls were called Spaldeens, though you would have spelled them correctly "Spaldings".  Wisdom cloaked in neurotic New Yorkese.

One of the great moments in Hannah is a meal around a large table in a New York apartment.  I can think of no other scene that conveys that New York better, by inhabiting so intimately the room in which the complexity of Manhattan life takes place.

Then there's a scene when Woody walks around the Upper West Side, including a portion on Broadway.  I cannot quite place the actual location though I know I know it well.  It's like trying to remember a dream.  The knowledge is there, deeply ingrained, but not responding.  Of course, Hannah was filmed almost 30 years ago. 

A street setting caught on film becomes a historical record of place.  But why can't I remember?

Our minds distill the past.  Then we construct narratives that link these memories together.  We are trying to explain ourselves to ourselves.  This is literally the story of our lives as told to us by us.  It helps us take meaning out of the mincemeat of experience.  But we only achieve this by blurring the rest.  Even when confronted with the actual photographic record of it, we see only our memory.

I mean, who really remembers when a gallon of gasoline cost $1.03, as it does at one gas station in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)?  Who remembers when you could see a whole row of pay telephones like in Manhattan (1979)?  Who else finds it odd to see interior shots of New York offices where the electric typewriter, not the computer, is the professional's writing tool, as in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)?

And btw, exactly where was Klein's Pharmacy on Broadway?

T.S. Eliot and snow.

When it snowed in Massachusetts the other day, I thought of T.S. Eliot. 

He had so many good lines of poetry.  Some so concise as to be bons mots, really.

For example, "Winter kept us warm" which is as true a statement about winter as there ever could be, especially when followed by: "covering Earth in forgetful snow".  How true.

But there are others …

"I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be."  The great indecider who could not even fill the starring role.

And of course, there's

"Do I dare to eat a peach?"

And this one, that gives me the pall of unease:

We shall not cease from exploring
And at the end of our exploration
We will return to where we started
And know the place for the first time.

It has a "Through the Looking Glass" quality to it, but its guilt comes by association. Robert McNamara, one of the most beguiling public figures of the last century, secretary of defense to presidents Kennedy and Johnson and a prime architect of the Vietnam War, declared his love for this quote as he reflected back on his life in his final days.

That McNamara would grab onto Eliot seems odd to me.  It runs two of my 20th century themes into each other, and they should not cross.  At least not in my mind.  I picture them each waiting in separate waiting rooms. Both there.  Both eager to see the doctor.  Both oblivious to the other waiting next door.

Eliot: Anglo-American.  Traditionalist.  Modernist.  Literary. 1920s.  Inheritor and observer of the disillusionment that followed the First World War.
McNamara: Technocrat.  Warmonger.  Wizkid.  New Frontiersman. 1960s.  Decision-maker and instigator of the disillusionment that followed the Vietnam War.

Regardless, their world is a bygone era now. I should let it go.  All of it.  And besides, the wench is dead.

Netiquette!

WBUR reporter Sacha Pfeiffer has a story on the radio this morning about "netiquette", the rules of DOs and DONTs in our online-saturated life.  (You can find it here.)

It is very funny, and painfully accurate about the torments of social media angst we've opened up for ourselves with emails, texts, Facebook, Twitter and on and on.  Example: Post on Facebook but not getting a lot of "likes", or Tweet, but not getting a lot of "retweets"?  What does this say about you?

And there was the question of condolences - should you ever use a text message to express condolences on the death of a colleague's loved one?  For a 50-something, this was a NO-NO: it was too impersonal and therefore not considerate.  For a 20-something, this was a YES-YES, it was intimate and did not require a response.

Finally, there came the question of the exclamation point "!".  You know, the hyper-activated response on a mundane subject matter that nevertheless gets many!!!!  A comedian interviewed said that when he got one of these emails, he immediately became super self-conscious about ending his sentences with a lowly period "."  It made him feel like he was conveying that he was an internet serial killer, or a Goth girl, sitting there sulking.

Great story.  Worth listening to.  And I mean it!!!!!

Here is the story, one more time: http://www.wbur.org/2013/02/07/digital-lives-iv

Green & Building: Do They Ever Really Go Together?

Cambridge's commercial real estate is exploding and almost entirely in Kendall Square.  Last year, according to the city's website, six new projects broke ground, totaling over 1.8 million square feet in new construction.  That is a staggering number in a city of 6 square miles and 105,000 inhabitants. 

How should environmentalists, particularly those focused on carbon reduction, view this construction?  Should they oppose it all because of its net impacts?  Should they support construction in Kendall Square because this new construction is geared toward innovation, and from this innovation may come answers to our oil dependency?  Is there ever a point at which we will say that economic activity must cease because of its impacts on our planet?

In a recent group email, I rambled in these pastures.  The organizing question of the exchange was -- should a local environmental organization take a position on the massive amounts of development happening in Cambridge.  My view is "yes", it should.  But there is no need to over-simplify an admittedly complex issue.

Here's what I wrote:

Here are some "green" questions that come to my mind --

• Should we support new development at all?  If yes, then how much?  At what point should we oppose it?
• Where should new development locate?
• What types of development do we prefer to see -- housing? commercial? Why?
• What conditions should we seek to put on new development -- required LEED construction, incentives to reduce auto travel to and from work such as reduced parking availability, subsidized T passes for tenants, etc.?
• Should we have an opinion about the appearance of buildings, or just about their net impact on the environment?

Because the new development is transforming the city in so many ways, here are some "other-than-green" questions that I can't avoid as I think about the development question --

• How do we incorporate 21st century buildings into what is in effect a 19th century city?
• As a community with a progressive value set, how should we respond to economic activity that represents the forefront of human scientific endeavor (the Human Genome Project as only one example), but requires big buildings to accomplish these goals? 
• Who are all these new people moving in -- they all seem to be half my age with twice my intelligence?
• Where are they going to live, and with all of their plentiful disposable income, what are they doing to housing prices?
• Does Cambridge need to house them all, or can Medford take some of them?  Would anybody want to live in Medford anyway if they had the option of living in Cambridge?
• How many coffee shops does a city really need, and does a cup of drip coffee really cost $4.00?
• Should I hate this development because it fattens the city's coffers, or should I love it?  Or can I have a third thought about it?

And, as another person has already pointed out -- is anybody doing any regional planning here? (I agree -- I think the answer to this is "no".)  Are we just left to fend for ourselves and try to do the best we can?

These are just some of the questions, but I will add this --

The mantra among urban planners these days is "Put density near transit" which can also be phrased "If you have a transit node, then density should go there".  This is especially true when there is a rail line.  It is a more efficient use of resources -- land, infrastructure, energy, and reduces per capita energy consumption significantly.  I agree with the sentiment.  I also do not agree with the contention that the Red Line is at capacity -- which is sometimes heard these days.  

Getting one's mind around the technology explosion underway, particularly in the life sciences, is difficult to do.  From an urban perspective however, the Red Line forms the spine of today's Massachusetts technology corridor -- from Alewife station in the north down to UMass Boston in the south with stops at Tufts (Davis Square), Harvard, MIT, Mass General, the state legislature (Park Street), and connections to the Seaport District, Logan Airport and Amtrak (NYC and Washington DC) at South Station.  There are few transit lines in the world that can boast this level of "connectivity".  A regional planner -- particularly one focused on economic development -- would notice this and work to augment it, not undermine it.  How we view it may be different, but regional planning cuts lots of ways.

I also know from studying innovations clusters that the activity happening in Kendall Square is fairly unique (read "exceptionally unique") in the United States, and indeed in the world.  Paris, France for example, is trying to replicate this phenomenon.  NYC is too.  San Francisco/Bay Area has it in some ways, but at much lower densities.  Google has solar panels shading their parking lots Mountain View, CA, but an employee has a 40 minute drive to any meeting in San Francisco.  At some level, it doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks of us, but it's worth noting.

The development in Kendall Square is being driven by forces that extend well beyond the boundaries of Cambridge.  Companies build buildings here because they want to hire the bright, energetic young minds who have loads of ideas, skills and ambitions.  These people may develop a revolutionary Alzheimer's drug, or a next cancer therapy.  And many of these young scientists are also entrepreneurs.  They may have arrived here because of MIT, but they stay here because Novartis or Microsoft offers them a job after they finish their PhD.  Or they decide to start their own company.  Companies -- particularly drug companies -- want to be near this talent pool, especially because world-class research hospitals are just across the river. 

On Hitchens on Orwell.

I'm reading Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell now.  As is often noted about Orwell -- in his short 46 years on this planet, he contributed the adjective "Orwellian" to the English language.  Not bad. 

On Hitchens, for me it's like and hate.  The like and the hate probably come from the same place.  Somewhere in his condescending Oxford drawl was a tone that said, I know more than you. I will show you how stupid you are. 

From a man who began his political journey with Leon Trotsky and ended it with George W. Bush, maybe Hitchens felt there was a lot of explaining to do about his long ideological road.  Or maybe he was just a blind arrogant fool with a canvas sack slung over his shoulder filled with words. Imagining himself to be some ancient mythical hunter, he grasped his quiver replete with the arrows of righteousness tightly. He was a verbal pugilist looking for fights. 

I shouldn't be so angry.  Hitchens got his in the end.  We all do.  A lifetime of smoking and drinking finally caught him, gave him throat cancer and didn't take it away. 

No rapier wit, nor parry nor thrust, fends off one's own mortality.  Even a know-it-all doesn't know.  None of us do. That's the honest response, but maybe it sounds too close to defeat.

I have no doubt that in his dreams Christopher wore the black tights, held the skull aloft in his hand and wondered out loud for the audience to hear.

In truth, in the graveyard scene, he was Yorick.

Making words work on a birthday.

"Make your words work."  This always seemed like good advice to me.  If they sit there and do nothing, it's like a child sitting inside on a Saturday in April.  They should stand up, be bold by being brave and not only carry themselves, but engage some other portion of the sentence too.  I imagine wrestlers locked in a competitive grip in some Ashcan School painting.  If each word does this, then the sentence sprouts three-dimensionally and not incrementally.  At the risk of being muscle-bound, it suffers not from lassitude.

Yesterday morning, I blogged about Mario Testino, who does nothing but glorify our own cheap desire to be someone other than who we are --  through images that consume us with our own envy, or through fashion's ability to turn the human form into an abstract idealization of itself.

But by midday, gracious fate had intervened with me and I sat in a church in Central Square and heard words that work.  Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, and Cambridge came together to celebrate.  One could not accuse Dr. King of letting his words sit in lassitude. 

Some people are undeniably a vessel through which history moves.  People of Time and Place, we might call them.  In his short 39 years, Dr. King was a profound expositor of the word.  He produced and produced and produced while also being a social actor of great personal courage, great strategic vision and mamoth importance. 

If one can remove the encrustations of the historic mantle he carries, Dr. King's words still work today, as alive in their meaning in 2013 as they were in 1968.  A sampling of what came from his mouth and his pen makes the point per se:  

“The day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die”


“Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”


“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.”


“If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.”


“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”


“We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.”

"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and postive action.”


“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”


“If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way”


“A right delayed is a right denied.”


“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. ... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”

“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” 

“Not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.”


“Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent”


“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”


“We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.”


“The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, but It Bends Toward Justice”

“Courage is an inner resolution to go forward despite obstacles;
Cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances.
Courage breeds creativity; Cowardice represses fear and is mastered by it.
Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?
Expediency ask the question, is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, is it popular?

But conscience ask the question, is it right? And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”


“What affects one in a major way, affects all in a minor way.”


“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”


“It does not matter how long you live, but how well you do it.”


“The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”


“One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized, cruelly mocked, but it an never be taken away unless it is surrendered.”


“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”


“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.”


“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”


“Quietly endure, silently suffer and patiently wait.”


“There is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.”


"We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. ”


“Hate destroys the hater...”


“We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words ‘Too Late’.”


“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tired into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.”


“Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” (A personal favorite)

"I" went to the museum and saw some photographs.

Something very obvious occured to me the other day. In writing, moving from "I" as the subject of a sentence to "He, She, or It" as the subject of a sentence is actually quite a leap.  Indeed, it might be said that writing begins with the advent of talking about what "She" did the other day, and why that's important.

I, needless to say, have not made that leap, and so I will tell what I did yesterday.  I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see photographs.  You see, this blog post is about pictures, not words.

Photography is a beguiling art form.  Technologically dependent and luck enhanced -- even I can snap of reasonable photo from time to time -- it nevertheless contains all the formal attributes of other visual media.  Lighting, color, and particularly framing of images strike this untrained eye as important.

Mario Testino, fashion photographer to the stars now showing at the MFA, has developed those skills well.  Yet, he's tricky.  His work is popular culture undoubtedly.  He photographs famous people. Often they are in a state of undress.  His images are destined for magazines.  It is the culture of celebrity and the culture of skin and the culture of fashion.  It is also the culture of selling all of these things.  It's grand in scope but tastes like sugar -- sweet quick energy but not nourishing.

Should this be in a museum?  Is this more than just a ploy to get people through the front door?  Is this art?  Some say no. To me, there is still much there to see.  A well composed portrait of Madonna (singer, not mother of Christ) is still a portrait.  Why not?  Plenty of its 18th century equivalents hang in the National Portrait Gallery in London subject to the ogling gaze of non-comprehending tourists from around the globe.  Testino can make the claim that his portrait mimics an aspect of art more closely, namely that his is culturally self-referential in ways that that a 300-year old oil and canvas image of a duke is not.

This question lurks throughout the show. "Popular" culture and "high" culture intersect more and more.  To its advocates, this is a growing and welcomed democratic trend.  To its detractors, it cheapens us culturally by confusing the two.  Perhaps, this is a longer run battle.  The photo of actress Siena Miller, fully dressed amongst larger than life plaster representations of naked nymphs in a Roman museum expresses this point.  In the image, the modern woman is veritable modesty among the heroic nudity of our Western past.  Men have been depicting women (and men) in various states of undress for thousands of years and knowing it as art.  Those ancient versions may have been the titillating popular culture of their time, meant not so much to edify as to arouse.

Is Testino posing these larger questions?  His intent is harder to deduce.  He seems as much in thrall with his own images as he presumably wants his audience to be.  But fashion, the human body and the desire to see are not new to the camera or to museums.  It's just that at the MFA they come crashing together in bright big bold plasticy colors, the visual equivalent of having a Pepsi to quench your thirst.

Golf ball diving. Not a timid man's game.

Wes Stanfield is his name, and retrieving used golf balls from water hazards on golf courses is his game.  In the latest issue of Golf Magazine, reporter Josh Sens tells the story of this man, his job, and the economy built up around his very unique line of work.

According to Sens, Stanfield is "the lifeblood of the used golf ball industry."  Used golf ball industry?  Really?

It turns out that with enough golfers and a high enough demand for less expensive balls, there is indeed an industry to collect and refurbish golf balls that find their way into the ponds and water traps on golf courses around the land.

What makes Wes Stanfield so interesting is that he's making his money by working the Florida courses, going into water hazards to fish out balls that may have found their way into the muck under "chemical-laced waters, laden with bacteria that cause lockjaw, ... home to snapping turtles, poisonous snakes and an alligator big enough to drag a man into his death roll".

Finding and refurbishing golf balls can earn someone $100,000 a year.  Of the approximately 100 million golf balls retrieved every year (three times that number are never found), about 8 million make their way to Stanfield, either through purchases he makes from California middle-men, but more often than not through his own finds.  With profit margins at only a couple of cents per ball, the way to make money is on volume.  On a busy day, Stanfield processes 30,000 balls.

For used golf balls, the industry gold standard is a Titletist Pro V1, which Sens calls "the base currency on which prices get set".  At a high end course, Stanfield will expect to find more of them in the mix.  On a course destined for use by retirees, fewer.  Meanwhile, with the recession's impact still being felt, fewer rounds of golf have been played overall, which means fewer bad shots into the lake, fewer balls to be recovered.

But that only speaks to the financial incentives.  In an industry in which four golf ball divers have died in the last four years, through bad judgment, faulty equipment or just bad luck, the idea that you might run into an alligator while trying to avoid the fishing line and downed tree limbs underwater is hard to imagine.  But Stanfield has done just that.  While diving a few years ago, a gator latched onto him intent on bringing him to the bottom of the pond before making a meal out of him.  With a gouge to the eyes, and a knock on the snout, Stanfield freed himself, found a trapper, and decided to keep the gator's head as a shellacked souvenir.

Josh Sens' piece "What Lies Beneath" is in the February 2013 issue of Golf Magazine.

And here's an interesting look at the life, and second life, of a golf ball:

1. A Pro V1 ball gets purchased new from a retailer in Southern California: $4.00
2. Sliced into a pond at Palm Springs
3. Recovered by a diver who pays the course $0.10 to keep the ball
4. Sold to a used ball dealer for $0.17
5. Purchased by a golf ball refinisher for $0.40
6. Repackaged and resold at a retail shop as "recycled and recoated" for: $2.00