Architectural Absurdity, or The Unbearable Lightness of Beams

Earlier this month, New York Times Art & Design critic Carol Vogel celebrated Frank Gehry's design for the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi art museum. "Stunning," wrote Ms. Vogel, "a graceful tumble of giant plaster building blocks and translucent blue cones…"

The accompanying artist's rendering not only belied Ms. Vogel's gushing assessment, they made a mockery of the very concept of architecture. Yes, Mr. Gehry has been innovative, even radical, with his  non-linear, non-right-angled designs: Seattle's Experience Music Museum, the Bilbao Guggenheim, and the Spruce Street tower in NYC, to mention but a few. But there comes a point where the envelope can be pushed no farther, where it tears apart from the pressure to outdo the designer's last radical design. The same way art critics seem utterly arbitrary when they turn mushy over works that many of us find meaningless if not plain silly, architecture critics seem to be tripping over one another to rate increasingly bizarre structures as bold statements of architectural vision.

A mere glance at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi's design reveals not a "graceful tumble" but a garbage can's pile of Chinese take-out cartons surrounding what looks like an overturned wicker basket and topped with what looks remarkably like a gigantic ear of corn. A strong enough wind looks like it might scatter this pile of shapes into street litter. There's nothing graceful in this mess, nothing one perceives as visually captivating or aesthetically soothing. Abu Dhabi Guggenheim demonstrates little more than design histrionics, a self-centered attempt to see how far the limits can be pushed before someone calls them on it. One can almost imagine Mr. Gehry sitting in his office, feet up on the desk, laughing at the gullibility of his audience.

Modern materials science continues to open marvelous new doors for structural design, and there's nothing inherently wrong with cutting-edge architectural design. Witness Santiago Calatrava's inspired design for the WTC Transportation Hub, Norman Foster's London Egg, or Tarald Lundevall's Oslo Opera House, each shown below.

  

But there are still limits, and Mr. Gehry's Guggenheim appears substantially to have exceeded them. Then again, given some of the other structures visible in Abu Dhabi, perhaps their tolerance for street litter is just greater than mine.

I swear….

In their relentless effort to infantilize and coarsen American culture, corporate marketers and Madison Avenue agencies have found yet another approach that no doubt garners sophomoric, Beavis-and-Butthead-like chortles from its couch-hugging audiences: the use of "near curse words." Reminiscent of those halcyon middle school years when every near-sound-alike and alternate-meaning word (e.g., abut,  abreast, erection, chit, asinine, edict, etc.) generated eye rolls and barely stifled guffaws from thirteen-year-old boys, the advertising world has reverted its catch-phrases to the level of snickering, pre-adolescent maturity.

So in recents months, Booking.com's marginal tagline, "Booking.dot yeah!" with its faint allusion (in sound and in the actors' behavior) to "Fucking, yeah!" has been joined by Verizon and Draftkings.com. Verizon's latest run of FIOS advertisements has been liberally studded with the ridiculously transparent phrase, "Half-fast," spoken with enough pacing by Mom, Dad, Sis, and little brother to make the whole family look like full asses.

Not to be outdone, the fantasy sports website Draftkings has come up with its own promise that lucky players can win a "shipload of money." More like a shit-load of hypocrisy, but certainly a phrase well-suited to the delayed emotional maturity of its fantasy-sports-playing user base.

It's apparently not enough that American television comedy has largely devolved to bathroom humor, sexual innuendo, and punch lines written by sixth-graders. That race to the bottom, with its nonstop appeal to the pre-adolescent intellect, has now invaded the commercial advertising arena as well. It's comforting to know that the unforgettable tag lines of the past--GE's "We bring good things to light," Gillette's "The best a man can get," Mazda's "Zoom zoom," Allstate's "You're in good hands," Coke's "It's the real thing," Wendy's "Where's the beef?", and Kellogg's (Tony Tiger's) "They're great!"--are being succeeded by "Fucking yeah!", "Half-assed," and "Shit-loads of money?"

Literary Fiction Authors Worth Checking Out

As I browsed through this week's "Sunday Book Review" section of the New York Times, I was struck by how long it seemed to have been since I've come across a work of serious literary fiction from an author about whose work I could truly get excited. Not just for a single book, but for an entire oeuvre, a body of work that I simply wanted to consume backwards in time and -- if not already deceased -- as far forward as that individual's literary production would continue.

Yes, I know today we have a few young lions, literary "all-stars" like Jonathan Franzen, Zaide Smith, Junot Diaz over whom the media seems always to gush when it's not busy trying to crown even newer ones (ex.: Rachel Kushner, whose The Flamethrowers proved only that flashy prose does not compensate for lack of plot and insufferable characters). Then, of course, there are a few long-timers who receive deserved adulation and have garnered by literary attention but never my total devotion: Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Philip Roth, Mo Yan, V.S. Naipul, Doris Lessing, and Chang Rae Lee, to name a few.

Finally, there are the authors whose fiction I consume with total relish, reading backward in time to their earliest works and, where relevant, eagerly waiting to get my hands on their newest releases (or translations, in some cases). Herewith, I offer to seekers like myself an alphabetized list of my favorite literary fiction writers, individuals whose entire body of work are worth checking out.

Italo Calvino

Robertson Davies

Shusako Endo 

William Faulkner

Kazuo Ishiguro

Ismael Kadare

Mario Vargas Llosa

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

Haruki Murakami

Cormac McCarthy

Jose Saramago

Graham Swift

Su Tong

There are, of course, other authors whose work(s) I have admired, but not quite enough to enter my personal "pantheon." Those writers would include Yan Geling, George Saunders, Ha Jin, Michael Ondaatje, Lawrence Thornton, Yu Hua, Ian McEwen, Barry Unsworth, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I also recommend one final author, a writer of mystery stories with an unusual cultural bent: Qiu Xiaolong.

I hope a few readers will find suggestions here for new literary directions and derive as much enjoyment in some of them as I have.

How Republicans Destroy Democracy in Texas (and Everywhere Else in America)

Politics has always been a dirty game, but it used to be that most of the dirt was kept in smoke-filled back rooms. These days, no purely political act, no matter how outrageous or anti-democratic, is beyond the limits for Republicans. They simply have no shame; for them (ever since our favorite Texan pest-eradicator, Tom DeLay), politics has become war, with the aim not simply to get elected but to destroy the other party and every initiative it has ever implemented.

A recent excerpt from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" offered an eye-opening view of an abuse of power by Texas Republicans that illustrates their party's local and national efforts to disenfranchise as many voters as possible, create districts designed entirely not to represent the voters of a particular city or region, and simultaneously weaken the opposite party's ability to respond to their outlandish policies and programs. Thus, Texas is becoming a state where only a Tea Party, fundamentalist Christian would want to live, and the courts have been powerless to stop a level of electoral abuse that can only be described as "banana (R)epublican" in nature.

You may recall the infamous Texas redistricting episode in 2002, when a Republican-controlled state legislature hijacked the process, ignoring the redistricting plan established by a federal court in 2000 and causing the entire Democratic representation in the legislature to flee to Oklahoma. But for Texas Republicans, that wasn't enough -- they've been busy ever since trying to implement every conceivable law they could think of that would discourage or otherwise make it difficult for Democratic-leaning groups (students, minorities, etc.) to vote. Democracy, that bastion of American exceptionalism, the Holy Grail of Republican belief so revered that we spent trillions of dollars and thousands of young people's lives to ram down the throats of Iranians -- in Texas, it's only democracy if it leans bright Red.

So all that seems anti-American and anti-democratic enough, so much so that I long ago took a vow never again to visit the state of Texas, not even to book a flight through it (same for OK, NE, KY, LA, MS, and, of course, AZ). But I had no true appreciation of Texas Republicans' blatant disregard for democracy -- and the concept of "representation of the people" until I saw this map of their redistricting of Austin, the only liberal-leaning city in the state:

The city of Austin is in the center -- draw a small circle to represent it. In this ingeniously deceptive plan, small bits of the city have been carved off, Hannibal-Lechter-like, from the city center and married with huge swaths of suburban and rural Texas, running in some instances for dozens of miles outside the city, in order to "divide and conquer" Austin's Democratic-leaning citizens. By mating those urban segments with enough Red, rural voters over a wide enough area, those Blue voices are effectively negated. Only one district, District 9, is more or less contained within the city proper. (To see this even more clearly, watch this "Daily Show" excerpt at around the 2:50 mark for a map that makes the outrage much clearer.)

The result? Not surprisingly, a Blue city has six Congressional representatives, and five of them are Republican. And not moderate, Rockefeller-type Republicans, either. Rabid, foam-frothing, Bible-belting, science-denying, Tea Party types. A bit of gerrymandering and: Voila! Huge chunks of Democratic-leaning voters in Austin, not disenfranchised but also clearly not represented.

Thanks, Texas, for proving once again that you really do belong in Mexico, where this sort of political power abuse is considered normal.

For Education in the State of New York, Orwell Had It Soooooo Right

"Freedom is slavery."
"War is peace."
"Ignorance is strength."

Just a few of the many memorable quotes from 1984, Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, one that looks more and more like it could as well be re-titled, 2014. For example, change the word "books" in the following quote to "cable news channels" or "websites," and you have a perfect depiction of 2014: "The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already." Or this: "Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else." The last sounds like a Tea Party Republican motto, or perhaps that of the evolution-denying creationist crowd.

Anyway, to the point at hand: the New York State Board of Regents, in its infinite but Orwellian wisdom, has apparently decided that the State's high school students no longer need to pass both a Global History and an American Studies exam to receive a diploma -- only one will now suffice -- and they are pronouncing this change a raising of New York's academic standards. That's right, learning and demonstrating knowledge of "less" will soon officially be "more" in New York State. And this elevation process doesn't stop with merely eliminating half the formerly required knowledge base -- oh, no. Students who opt for the Global History exam will only be tested on events taking place in or after the year 1750. Who needs to understand our modern-day connections to the ancient Romans or Greeks; the Incan, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations; the Egyptians and Phoenicians; the Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties of China; the great tribal civilizations of central Africa, etc., etc., etc.?

Where but in the post-millennial world of "education reform" (the currently most sadly abused phrase in the American lexicon) could such nonsense be seriously presented as beneficial to the next generation of history-ignorant students. After all, there's always Wikipedia. So what more needs to be said? Res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself (nobody studies Latin any more, naturally).

Then again, perhaps we should allow one more speaker to weigh in. Mr. Orwell, another sampling from 1984, if you please:

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."

Think about it. Or not.

Your TV Weatherman Is NOT a Climate Scientist

Do you believe the climate is changing? Are you concerned about the extent and speed of the change? Do you believe human activity is contributing to, and perhaps exacerbating, that change? Do you believe something should be done, or do you believe that this is just Nature's periodic way of "cleansing" the planet?

Regardless how you answered the above, here's one more question: Do you take your information about climate change from an 80-year-old guy with a journalism degree who has spent an entire lifetime as an offbeat-styled television weatherman? Apparently Fox News does.

In just one more example of Fox's non-stop degrading of journalism to the level of television sit-com, the sons and daughters of Murdoch invited career weatherman (and founder of The Weather Channel) John Coleman to denounce man-made global warning as "an incredible, bad, bad science," claiming that the media has been telling people that "we're all going to die of a heat wave" and asserting that the populations of "happy" polar bears has actually increased. Notwithstanding that the last comments alone demonstrate Mr. Coleman's profound exaggeration of the media and lack of understanding of the localized impacts of climate change, the former happy weatherman stands for Fox News as their unimpeachable expert for climate-change denial.

For nearly the last decade, Coleman has railed against climate change science from his San Diego home, calling global warming "the greatest scam in history" and suggesting that the "scam" is linked to some dark, nefarious plot to destroy the United States and institute a world government.

Forty years ago, marginal characters like Mr. Coleman -- conspiracy nuts with no relevant professional qualifications but lots of unfounded, screwball notions -- would never have been given the type of public platform granted them by (most often) Fox News. Public discourse is cheapened, celebrity is given precedence over scientific fact, the citizenry is badly served if not wholly misled, and solvable problems become increasingly unsolvable in a polarized environment that pits the informed and credentialed against loudmouths sustained only by belief and opinion.

This is not news, it's not journalism, and it's not informative. It's entertainment, it's misinforming the public (including, and especially, children), and it's contributing to America's increasing inability to solve problems of any kind.

Be Afraid of Ebola, America. Be Very Afraid.

Two stories with science/journalism twists caught my eye in the last couple days: this one concerning ebola, the next one (in the next post) concerning global warming.

The first story began with the self-reporting complaints of her forced-quarantine treatment by Kaci Hickox. The ostensibly respectable News4NY report on the night of October 26 claimed that Ms. Hickox -- a nurse quarantined in New Jersey after her arrival at Newark International Airport from Sierra Leone where she had been a Doctors without Borders volunteer fighting the ebola outbreak -- had experienced a fever of 101 degrees and had been sent to Newark's University Hospital for ebola testing, only to have her fever recede, allowing her to be sent back to her quarantine location. The report was accompanied by aerial film footage that presumably showed Ms. Hickox's flashing ambulance being escorted by a corps of equally flashing police vehicles to a hospital that was doubtlessly placed on a panicked high alert over the prospective arrival of an ebola carrier.

News4NY's story conveyed the message that ebola might well have arrived in the NY metropolitan area, lending credibility to the Cuomo-Christie unveiling of a 21-day, forced quarantine plan for all doctors and nurses returning to JFK or Newark Airports from the ebola-affected countries of Africa. More fear-mongering for the public who had already been overfed a diet of ebola terror for the past several weeks.

One problem: almost everything reported by News4NY was wrong. Worse, they missed the truly troubling part of the story. Kaci Hickox had a normal body temperature the entire time (see her own account), as measured by a standard oral thermometer. An "official" (not a doctor or nurse?) who subsequently took Kaci's temperature with a forehead scanner got a reading of 101 and decided the patient had a fever that could signal ebola infection. Ms. Hickox protested, saying that the long trip and her unexpected quarantine treatment at Newark Airport had left her flushed, showing a temperature by forehead scan that was not her true body temperature. The "official" apparently refused any further measurement and instead sounded what turned out (predictably) to be a false alarm. University Hospital took her temperature, told her she was simply flushed, and sent her back to the airport.

The journalistic failure here was inexcusable, as has been the Chris Christie response. However, the really scary part of this story concerns the nurse. The public is repeatedly reassured that these "ebola response teams" are highly trained and well-prepared to handle incoming cases, actual or potential. Yet this unnamed, highly trained, well-prepared "official" could not, or would not, differentiate between a oral thermometer reading and a forehead scan, setting off unnecessary and inappropriate alarms from the airport personnel to the police officer escorts to the emergency receiving doctors and nurses at University Hospital. If this is preparation, the standard falls far below acceptable.

By the way, kudos to Kaci Hickox for calling out Chris Christie and everyone else who have been on the wrong side of this affair. Once again, we find politicians (Cuomo and Christie) who believe their views trump the best available scientific and community health care professional advice.

A Disappointed (Cranky, You Say?) Old Man Comments on News and Other Affairs

When I first established this blog several years ago, I had in mind to write about selected news items and the absurdities of modern American life from the viewpoint of someone born in a different era (the early 1950s), and most certainly in a different America.

Life was simple in those days, if only because choices were fewer. Most families were lucky if they could tune in to four television channels. "Ma Bell" (AT&T) was the sole telephone provider. Without computers and the Internet, kids played with Spalding and Wilson sports equipment, rode Schwinn bicycles, played tag or hide & seek, or simply relied on their imaginations. Policemen, teachers, priests, and adults generally were treated with respect; children were actually expected to say "Please" and Thank you." I spent my entire early childhood growing up in suburbs, playing outdoors with my neighborhood friends well outside the purview of our parents (even in the local wooded areas and undeveloped fields -- unthinkable now to parents who have been conditioned believe that horror lies around every corner.

Yet it's also true that life in the 1950s was not nirvana, but when in human history has that ever been the case? Yes, women had far fewer of the equal rights they deserved, and minorities -- especially African-Americans, had even fewer. Not to mention gay men and women; they had yet to even make it to the closet from which they later emerged. McCarthyism was rampant, innocent people were blacklisted, and J. Edgar Hoover was spying illegally on American citizens. The skies over Pittsburgh and Gary, Indiana were as polluted as Chinese cities are today, the waters of the Cuyahoga and several other American rivers could actually catch fire, and oil and water were accepted as illimitable natural resources. Sexual mores were downright Puritanical, popular music was mired in sweet melodies and antiseptic lyrics, and women were said to attend college with the objective of obtaining an Mrs. degree.

Times have most certainly changed, and life (and recognition of basic human and civil rights) has improved for many. Nevertheless, the trajectory of American history's arrow is decidedly mixed and trending downward, the result of many factors: the catch-up game being played out in Europe and other parts of the developed (and developing) world; steady loosening of standards of behavior; increasingly militant theocracy among some Christian groups; loss of respect for institutions; computer and communications technology; 24/7, hyper-sensationalizing media; a major political party no longer interested in governing except on their own terms, willing to harm the citizenry's welfare rather than accept any form of compromise; the inexplicable elevation of faith and opinion over science and analysis; a society in which the first step on the achievement ladder is to grab the Warholian fifteen minutes of fame, deserved or not; cheapening of the word "hero"; and elevation of the notion among individuals that their personal opinions and beliefs are paramount, more valid and important than those of the group. To name a few of the factors.

So here I am, recently turned 63, speaking in this post to no one and everyone simultaneously, and hoping that the disappointed, frustrated, infuriated, and even cranky musings of a reasonably well-read and well-educated "young elder" might offer some wide-ranging perspective on the absurdities of current affairs and twentieth-first-century life.