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Spotted someone reading this the other day. 

I admit it, I love books about the battle for the City’s soul, and I love seeing other people read them.

On one side, you have the lofty visions of big business, politicos and city planners who think about space in terms of potential revenue, ‘packing people in’ and revitalization.  On the other side, you have ordinary people who want to cultivate community, walk their dogs and push their strollers, and make art.  Where, they ask, will the community go when you build that super highway or that stadium?  Where, ask the developers, will the City get its revenue while you sit in your community garden and sip your latte?  It all brings up an interesting question:  Was New York City ever meant to be enjoyed as a community?  We know well that it thrives as a place for spectators (a recent ad for police recruits tells prospective applicants that the job comes with “a front row seat to the greatest show on Earth”).  But when people start to talk about “settling down” and “cultivating community” developers just hear the part about slower revenue.  It can frighten them.

‘Heartbreak House’ by George Bernard Shaw

What an appropriate thing to read in this sweltering heat, a day before Queen Elizabeth II is scheduled to visit your city to talk about peace!  This play examines the archetypes of British society’s upper class on the eve of World War I and a performance would probably resonate with so many of us right now as we hear continuously about the wars we fight overseas and the economic havoc all around us.   I recently overheard a friend talk about how the best art is always made during the most trying times.  I suppose that we also reach for literature that can make some sense of what is happening now and help us see it as more romantic or noble.  Shaw undoubtedly had no intention of portraying his characters as noble, however.  And I’m pretty sure the New York audience that saw the play’s first performances were all too happy to see the British upper-class undercut with this biting satire.

Note the date notation. That’s because I’m staying in London for a couple of weeks. Of course I’ve been taking the tube all over the place, and the bus as well. The people of London probably don’t realize how good they have they’re public transport (cushioned seats! schedules! announcements!).

Anyway, it was appropriate that the other day while riding the Northern line to Angel, I found myself staring across the aisle at the cover of ‘An Uncommon Reader’ by Alan Bennett.

The ‘Reader’ of the title is none other than Her Majesty the Queen, having newly discovered the pastime of reading for pleasure after feeling duty-bound to make use of the mobile library parked outside the palace gates.

Bennett is a surviving member of the British comedy troupe, ‘Beyond the Fringe’ in which he performed with the more notorious (in the U.S.) duo of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. His stories and plays are rich, allegorical explorations into the nature of art, culture and sexuality.

While I’ve been more engrossed in the work of his former colleague, Peter Cook, Bennett seems to have been an early infuence on the wry, acid wit that so influenced contemporary British humor.

Cover image from the Future Shock Wikipedia page.

Whenever I speak to people about the enormous technological changes that are continually taking place in the world of work, publishing, reading, and creating, the title ‘Future Shock’ is always on the tip of my tongue, especially when the person I’m in conversation with talks about being overwhelmed by the speed of the change taking place.  ‘Future Shock’ is one of those books that, to some, is almost cliché , while others are completely unaware of.   Doubt, frustration, and anomie are just a few of the problems Toffler predicts will plague society as we move forward into a world in which technological advancement will take precedence over actual human capacity and need.

Now that this age is supposedly upon us, we see generation after generation adapting quite well to the pace of change, and – many older Americans might argue – far too well and to the point that past knowledge is regarded as irrelevant simply for being, well, old.

Furthermore, as I continue to follow developments in the world of consumer gadgets alongside actual scientific achievement, I wonder if another component of Future Shock is, in fact, ‘Future Schlock’, or the marketing of gadgets that have extremely limited use and availability which hook consumers with the idea that they are investing in an advanced technological future when they decide to purchase the latest piece of mass produced consumer hardware.

I was recently asked for my opinion about e-readers and their impact on reading and sharing.  Would the inability to to peek at what our fellow subway riders were reading have some impact on our ability to engage with others about books?  Not sure. Probably not.  In some way, we will always want to share what we are reading with our friends to demonstrate our knowledge and generate discussion and we are creating new ways to do that even as the immediacy of good ol’ book cover seems to be receding.   What if readers decided to create their own book covers in response to their favorite titles, especially the ones that aren’t getting enough sales in the traditional market?  Would publishers respond by using this home-grown artwork in a bid to boost sales?

But this discussion generates a kind of techno-lust in some and techno-phobia in others that I find quite beside the point.  With the advent of e-readers, we’ve added yet another production cycle to the publication of process at a time when we should be seeking less waste and less process, not more.   Whatever form readers choose to take their books, magazines and newspapers, they are consumed with a plethora of devices (and I would include the traditional book here as a ‘device’ – why not?) that create the illusion of actual choice, when, in reality, it does very little to change or advance the way we read, talk about and engage in our literature.

 
THIS + ART = GOOD TIMES!!!

Imagine going to the Guggenheim and being able to do this on a spiral trampoline!

[via] Gizmodo.

WNYC’s Matthew Schuerman produced a wonderful report, broadcast today, on the East Side Access Project to create a more direct route for some LIRR customers to get into and out of Manhattan via Long Island City. 

I, along with thousands of other Astoria commuters, have a unique view into part of the project by way of the elevated ‘N’ line as it passes over the massive hole in the ground that the construction crew has burrowed for the past two years. The project is supposed to be complete by 2015.  In the report, Shuerman asked the project manager, Andy Thompson, for a rough estimate of how many feet per day they manage to tunnel.  Thompson’s response is telling, “It’s more like days per feet.”

[Link] WNYC – An Audio Postcard from Beneath the East Side

This past Thursday, all across the land of Facebook, blogs, and magazines, readers mourned the loss of one of literature’s most beloved and enigmatic figures, J.D. Salinger. He was, it is said, a unique figure among contemporary American authors in the way he shunned fame and media exposure after ‘Catcher in the Rye’ became an instant American classic (though doing so virtually assured that he was more sought-after for the rest of his adult life).

When I was a bit younger than Holden Caulfield, I read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in school. We were all too young and anti-school to appreciate Holden as the progenitor to the ubiquitous confused, precocious figures from the movies of John Hughes whom we loved and identified with. Really, if it had not been for Linda Crowley, our foxy English teacher, most of the boys might not have bothered to finish the novel. This doesn’t apply to me, sadly, I was such a suck-up that I even finished ‘David Copperfield’ for John Loughry, a teacher who terrified students with his permanent scowl (we were only to find out later that this was an act of pure deadpan Dickensian tribute. He’d been spied in a faculty meeting, laughing his ass off. Bravo, Mr. Loughry).

By the 1980s, we – and by ‘we’ I mean we of Gen X – were gorging ourselves on a full diet of Holden Caulfields thanks mainly to the success of John Hughes’ films. Creators of film and television had, by that time developed an acute understanding of their primary audience, the 18-34 year old American male. It was the knowledge that their audiences were afraid of growing up, and wanted – like Ferris Bueller, the shinier, happier 80s version of Holden – just one more day of being a kid before facing the rest of their lives.

I was reminded by a colleague of another novel in which ‘Catcher in the Rye’ makes an appearance. By 2003, Holden Caulfield had become such an icon that Frank Portman in King Dork, managed to both revere and revile Salinger’s classic as the standard high school English text. ‘Catcher’ becomes a key device in the plot of the King Dork, and is literally re-contextualized before readers’ eyes. Portman’s message is pretty clear, it is a book in desperate need of context adjustment, it ain’t the 1950s anymore, we don’t have to forget the past, but let’s make our own memories. It isn’t that the book itself should be banned just, perhaps the Baby Boomer teacher who treats it with the aimless reverence of a cat hoarder.

In the reviews and obituaries of Salinger, I see little attempt to define ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. That may be because readers are fairly divided on that point. There will always be those teenagers who, upon reading the book for the first time, see it as a rail against authority, age, and experience as producers of ‘phoniness’. But Holden is, as all great literary figures, multi-dimensional. His perfection is rooted in the fact that, though he essentially wants to keep himself and others from falling off the precipice into adulthood, it is a sisyphean task that the novel plays out each time we read it. And each time, as we grow older, we come to a new understanding about who he is and where he may have gone once Holden himself came to realize this.

These days, listeners of popular music tend to think of music-making in terms of songwriting – the construction of short poems set to music, that reflect a certain universal emotion (Love, Joy or Sadness), or perhaps to tackle a big issue of the day such as war, poverty, or politics.  As much as it is there to be simply to be enjoyed, music, to listeners of the early 21st Century, has also become something used to demonstrate to others something about who we are and where we fall on the cultural map.   Soundtracks and playlists dominate our conception of how we listen to and “use” music today.  (Fitting that social media as we know it actually started as way for people to share new music with one another, MySpace, was a place for bands to create free web space and become part of a listener’s list of new music.)  The Playlist has lately been raised to the level of cultural icon.  The DJ, once just a guy paid to spin records, is now a musical sorcerer who manages, through a unique sequence of pop songs, to weave a story-line or landscape for party-goers on the dance floor.

The more we listen and think about music in this way, the more we tend to want to make it for  ourselves.   Computer software companies have found a large profit in offering musicians of all stripes a way to record music at home rather than have to use a professional studio.¹

But as we think more deeply about the presence of music in our surroundings, a different conception occasionally comes to mind, that of a connection with the cosmos through the of a different kind of music, one that occurs outside of our selection and iPod. Occasionally, we can allow the existence of incidental sounds in a stage, film or telelvision production, but we increasingly fail to perceive these sonic occurrences as any sort of music at all.  They are ‘just noise’, the sonic version of detritus washed up on the beach.

Several months ago, Susan Boyle stood in front of a panel of judges on the UK television program, Britain’s Got Talent, before an audience and celebrity judges who, looking at her rather frumpy face and equally disheveled attire, instantly decided that she was there to provide some comic relief.  There’s hardly a soul anywhere today who does not know what occurred next:  the moment her mouth opened it was clear that she was going to be a sensation, at least for a time, and the judges and the audience sat stunned at the powerful singing voice that belted out “I Dreamed A Dream”.   The message was clear, whether it was staged or genuine.  Sound, good sound, has the power to transform any effect fom visual stimulus, transforming Susan Boyle from an ordinary, perhaps irritating presence, to someone that belongs on stage.

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Just how dramatic this  transformation is can be glimpsed in a book like this one, which seeks to unite some of the technical facts about sound and frequencies, with the more esoteric ideas of the past, rooted in religion, ancient philosophy and mysticism.   It does so in a way that doesn’t seek to teach us too much about the details, but helps us recognize presence of details nonetheless.  It is often difficult to put the arts in a proper historical context without first seeking to strip away all of our present-day received ideas about what qualities we most enjoyable.   As making music to make money becomes a nearly obsolete concept, this insight should be welcome to musicians and listeners alike.  Art and music, like language probably had very different contexts surrounding them in other periods of history.  Some elements of a period can be recalled easily,  pieced together from our general knowledge of history or the lucky acquisition of the right manuscripts, while others must remain a mystery until historians stumble upon the perfect missing detail.

As small and pithy as The Elements of Music is, it manages to convey some big ideas.  For one, it demonstrates how music and all art may have served practical purposes very different from those of today.  The book and its companions published under the Wooden Books imprint by Walker & Company  manage to pack in enough information without over-explaning.  They are a bit like greeting cards, with more philosophy and interesting facts.  The key is that the books use visually arresting graphics (woodcuts, intaglio, and line-drawn cartoons printed in black and white).  The effect is something that a bit less practical and more philosophical than the Dummies series.  Instead of getting us up to speed on any given topic, books in the Wooden Books series give us something to sink our teeth into (and it makes a nice gift).

She told me about how they punish middle school kids.  I had the strange feeling that I’d heard all of this before.  It was a variation on Simpson-variety writing a phrase on the blackboard 150 times.  Give them a writing assignment.  Use writing as a way to punish and a way to teach.  Of course, what it teaches is that writing is a punishment and a chore and signal that grown ups are unhappy with something you’ve done. 

So write something, get your paper marked with red ink, says the teacher.  Don’t expect me to have to wade through the content of your unhappy thoughts.  (And, jeez, you make everything sound so dull.)  But as the teacher, I won’t criticize, and I can’t encourage or I’d have to encourage all of you.  So just write because it is your punishment and someday, you will never have to write again.

Everyone should check out the next tour of the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel introduced each tour by the man who discovered it, Bob Diamond.  Bob recounts some of the history of the Brooklyn by explaining the tunnel’s function at that time it was built in 1844. We get a great picture of the landscape of Brooklyn at the time. We also get a glimpse of the way people conducted business, the enforcement of the law, and the social makeup of Brooklyn.  The real star, as Bob makes clear, is the countless hours of research he conducted to piece together what life around the tunnel both at the time it was active and even after it had been hidden away.  The structure became a fairly common source of folklore, especially if it was discussed in a newspaper article, and it was frequently viewed as a place where dark things happened – where shadowy criminals had their base of operations, and where foreign spies plotted against the citizens moving above them.  Our guide managed to effortlessly weave this story, essentially the biography of a tunnel, and it is one of the most fascinating tales you ‘ll ever hear.

Bob tells this story so effortlessly that one feels they are being taken along as he does his research,  gets discouraged by countless ‘experts’ at City agencies and the surrounding universities, and eventually finds the tunnel just as the Brooklyn Union Gas company guys are about to go home.

It is especially fun to listen for embellishments liberally sprinkled into some of his material – not deliberate misinformation, but just a few exaggerations to keep the lazy listeners on their toes.

The next tour is on Sunday, November 15.  Make a reservation here.