The Brunch Table

I happened across two procedurally-generated social gaffes today.

Justina and I took advantage of the holiday to go through our video collection and get rid of all the old VHS tapes that we’d never watch again. VHS really has a horrible bulk-to-quality ratio! However, I did unearth a few gems that I thought I’d lost.

First up, Tayna tretey planety, a Russian animated sci-fi movie from the early 80’s. It has a wonderfully psychedelic synth soundtrack, and the visual style is foreign, somewhat weary and depressed. My copy is dubbed in French since it was taped off of Radio-Canada in the late 80s, but there are apparently several budget English-dubbed DVD releases of varying quality.

Next, Earth*Star Voyager. This was shown as a two-part Disney Sunday movie in the late 80’s, though it was apparently shot as a pilot for a full series that never happened. In the end, it’s pretty laughable (in the late 21st century of this film, they still use the dorky 80’s computer font on all their signage and UIs), but in that era the sci-fi pickings were pretty slim, so I have some fond childhood memories of this. Seems I’m not alone–it’s at least popular enough to warrant torrents of fan-made DVD versions (since Disney will likely never bother to release this on video).

Speaking of Disney, I’ve recently come across some great Ward Kimball animations from Disney’s earlier TV shows:

This segment from Mars & Beyond is mostly an excuse to create wonderfully whimsical creature animations.

Magic Highway USA has been making the blog rounds lately, and it’s easy to see why. It alternates between sensible and prescient predictions (in-dash GPS) and loopy petrocolonial fever dreams (electric hovercars driving by the sphinx in air-conditioned glass highway tubes!), set to a swinging jazz soundtrack. If you like the style, Paleo-Future has rounded up a great set of publicity stills from the collection of Kevin Kidney.

So it looks like the New York Times has embraced the idea that the World Bank/IMF causes severe economic damage to poor countries. These institutions offer loans in exchange for the broad adoption of Reagan-style laissez-faire policies, which have a lousy overall track record when it comes to creating wealth. As a result, borrower countries typically end up in worse financial shape than when they started.

This was considered an unacceptably radical position just a few years ago, when Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz advanced it in his great book Globalization and Its Discontents. (There’s even a photo of burning fire on the cover.)

Stiglitz’s argument is simple: countries borrowing money are not that different from people borrowing money–in each case, there’s “good debt” and “bad debt.” Poor countries are poor because their economies can’t generate enough wealth for enough people. And the quickest cure for that is usually infrastructure, defined as whatever increases the overall wealth-generating capacity of the economy. Tap water, roads, reliable electricity, and vaccinations are common examples: that’s good debt. Problem is, infrastructure investment is precisely what laissez-faire ideology forbids. Therefore, whatever a country ends up spending a World Bank/IMF loan on, it’s unlikely to increase the country’s ability to create wealth, which means it’s going to be very difficult to pay back the loan: that’s bad debt.

Keynesian economics, first adopted by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and now used by most of the world’s rich countries (the U.S. prominently excepted), argues the exact opposite. Build the infrastructure first, Keynesian doctrine says, even if you have to go into debt, and wealth creation will follow. Now, Keynesianism was orthodoxy in the U.S. from 1932 up till the Reagan era. Even Nixon, Depression kid that he was, stuck to the basic principles–to an extent that’s hard to believe today.

It didn’t quite sink in for me until I saw a UPA Cold War propaganda short at this year’s Ottawa Festival, trumpeting the capitalist virtues of advertising–and realising that the Voice-of-God narrator was talking about Keynesian capitalism. I can’t find a link–shame, the UPA educational shorts are graphic-design marvels–but i took notes:

“In a feudal society, income distribution is a pyramid.” [Xylophone scale.]

“In an industrial society, income distribution is a diamond.” [Balloon-stretch sound.]

That’s a graphical representation of the Keynesian middle class, pumping their increased disposable income into the economy.

“The New Deal gave every two American consumers the buying power of three.” [Timpani drum.]

Surreal.

No one knows for sure who he was, that Middle Eastern man in an American flag shirt and a cowboy hat who was supposed to sing the national anthem at a rodeo Friday night in the Salem Civic Center…

In the course of trying to prove that the rodeo scene in Borat takes place in Virginia, not Texas, I found this–an apparently authentic report on “Boraq’s” appearance by the Roanoke Times. You’ve got to respect the integrity of the folks who left this up on the website long after the truth came out.

Speaking of which, when I was in Vancouver the other day I happened to walk by the original steam clock precisely at noon:

Circa 1977, go figure.

I just finished reading Michael Chabon’s exquisite The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a detective story set in the present day of a parallel universe where Franklin Roosevelt allowed the Jewish refugees of World War II to settle in Alaska. The Holocaust was therefore brought to a premature end, with two major consequences for this alternate history. First, speakers of Yiddish still vastly outnumber speakers of Hebrew. And second, without the Displaced Persons (that real-life remnant of Holocaust survivors and Soviet-trained guerillas who formed Israel’s patchwork revolutionary army), there is no Israel. Beyond the story itself, well-drawn and clever, I detected a wonderful hidden motive: to put together a world where Yiddish survived the 20th century as a living language, with its own words for cell phones and SUVs.

Having finished the book, no longer scared of running into spoilers (it is a murder mystery, after all), I promptly found this essay by Chabon, which neatly confirmed my theory. He came up with the idea for this book, it seems, discovering a Yiddish phrasebook for travellers–and realizing that such a thing no longer had a reason to exist.

Fascinating NYT article on a small Syrian Jewish congregation in Brooklyn that, beginning in 1935, decided on the strictest interpretation possible of the Orthodox intermarriage ban. They’ll permanently exclude not only the offending member, their new spouse, and their children, but all of their future descendants.

In the short term, this attempt at social engineering has been indisputably successful; the congregation is thriving and growing. But, taking a broader perspective, this Wired article suggests the long-term futility of such efforts–telling the story of the profound confusion that erupted when, in 2004, the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma attempted to genetically screen their members for “authentic” Native descent.

But if the young discipline of DNA testing has taught us anything, it’s that the very notion of race is fading, at least from a genetic perspective. The world is populated by mongrels and half-breeds. Even those who base their self-worth on being of “pure” racial stock probably aren’t. Every family tree has a thousand branches.

That’s certainly true of the Orthodox-minded Jewish folks I know personally, many of whom are forced to conceal an ancestry even more muddled than mine from their co-religionists. I hope that at least a few of them can come round by the time I produce some Muggle children.

An article on digital library projects in the latest New Yorker has a helpful explanation of the orphan works problem:

A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,” possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind.

Finding a legal resolution to the orphan issue is even more urgent in new media, where there are only decades, rather than centuries, to intervene before a work decays past any hope of restoration. An experimental program to grant individual licenses for the use of orphan works was launched last year in Canada, and may provide an example of how this can be made a standard feature of copyright law worldwide.

Precious.

Marlies found the most remarkable item on YouTube today. At first I thought it was another fan translation…but it turned out to be something much more ambitious:

(direct link)

So in the one linguistics class I took in college, I learned that changes in the way we use language can be “prescriptive” (spreading from authorities out to the general public) or “descriptive” (vice-versa, when some creeping nonstandard thing that ordinary people do eventually becomes the right way to do it).

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen some prescriptive attempts at introducing gender-neutral pronouns, most commonly some variation on “he-or-she.” But as Wikipedia relates, these constructions haven’t fared too well:

…these well-intended suggestions have been largely ignored by the general English-speaking public, and the project to supplement the English pronoun system has proved to be an ongoing exercise in futility. Pronouns are one of the most basic components of a language, and most speakers appear to have little interest in adopting invented ones.

However, despite the lack of an official solution, the desire to ditch the old usage endured. Soon enough, an elegant descriptive alternative began to spread through the language–perhaps some future scholar can work out exactly when it started. It’s not enshrined in any style guide I know, and it’s still considered nonstandard in print, but I’ve heard it in ordinary speech all my life. And today, I noticed this:

As Facebook goes, so goes the English-speaking world, I’ll wager.

(Klootzak = jerk, asshole; lit. scrotum)

…photos coming soon.

Here’s one of my favorites:

It’s not very well advertised at all, but Apple has a three-month worldwide warranty on any repair performed at an Apple-certified repair shop. This is completely separate from Applecare–it applies to any Mac you bring in, no matter how old. If the same problem recurs within three months, you can show your original receipt at a new repair shop, even in another country, and get it fixed for free. (Apple has a global repair database for verifying these things, apparently.) Any damage done to your Mac by the repair shop is also covered.

This would have been good to know back in April, when I first took my busted Powerbook to a friendly but incompetent (that’s what Napoleon says we should assume, right?) shop in The Hague. I’ve since learned that Apple’s policy has some interesting positive side effects:

• First, if you live in a place with more than one Apple repair joint, and you’re not getting good service at one shop, you can get a competitor to re-do the job for free.

• Second, if you do give up and take the computer somewhere else (in my case, to the very nice MacHouse in Amsterdam), you get better treatment–after all, the new shop now has a chance to poach someone else’s customer.

• Third, and best of all, since Apple will cover the cost of the do-over, the new shop doesn’t have the same incentive to cheat on repairs.

For me, the third time was the charm–a visit to the Toronto Apple Store revealed that the original shop in The Hague had damaged my Powerbook’s LCD panel while replacing its inverter board (handily turning a $200 repair into a $900 repair–you decide, incompetence or malice?).

It’s a shame Apple keeps this policy so quiet, presumably to cut down on the number of claims. I’m a confirmed agnostic, and there’s a lot I don’t like about their desktop products. But when it comes to precious, breakable laptops, the repair coverage is great stuff.

Nobody around these parts could tell me why the U.S. and Canada share the same country code. I mean, today, the actual phone systems certainly aren’t integrated–foreign companies are locked out of Canada, while there are no such restrictions in the U.S.; long-distance and cellphone billing work pretty differently too. So why do we both have that +1? Because of these guys:

The one on the left is Alexander Graham Bell, and on the right is his dad Melville. The Bell family emigrated from Scotland to Canada, and Melville stayed behind when A.G. moved to the U.S. When AT&T was founded, Melville ran its Canadian branch, Bell Canada, which remained part of AT&T until its antitrust breakup in 1956.

From an A.V. Club interview this week:

“I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town. I was thinking about that this morning, and I thought that the thing about growing up in the South in the 1950s and early ’60s was that it produced memories that look like the 1930s and 1940s…I think that contributed a lot to my worldview, and the way I look at things as a writer. I could simultaneously see this ancient Cormac McCarthy kind of reality in this Southern mountain world, plus Sputnik and Twilight Zone on television. The gap between where I lived and the media universe was much wider than it possibly could be, now that everybody’s online.”

Marlies found this:

(Nijntje is a Dutch cartoon character who predates Hello Kitty by about 20 years. Her name means “Little Rabbit,” and is pronounced “Nine-cha”.)

Here’s a collection of shorts by Maya Deren, an influential ’40s filmmaker. She took the kind of narrative techniques that were just getting to a mature state in the commercial features of the day and applied them to her art films. Emotionally-affecting conventions that movie audiences had become sophisticated enough to expect–like “limited third-person perspective,” where the camera is restricted only to items of interest to one character–were still a startling novelty in the art world.

(Tangent: limited third-person perspective is so ubiquitous in films today that it’s better to illustrate it with an example of its absence. Part of The Phantom Menace’s lack of emotional affect is rooted in its mysterious reliance on “omniscient,” and not limited, third-person perspective, where the camera takes the viewpoint of an outside observer.

When Natalie Portman enters the Galactic Senate, most living filmmakers would, somehow or other, contrive to show us her face together with a view of the chamber from where she’s standing. We see a thing, we see an actress looking at the thing, and we read her for clues as to how we should respond to the thing emotionally. Instead of this, we get a wide shot of the chamber alone, like something out of Metropolis. Omniscient third-person perspective was a common tactic in the silent era, and it’s a key reason why modern lay audiences watching a silent film sometimes have trouble caring too much about what’s going to happen next. )

It’s perhaps a bit more difficult to appreciate Deren’s originality these days, when there’s a broad public understanding that Eisenstein’s rules aren’t for “the movies” alone, but can be deployed to whatever weird ends you like. (To get a better idea of her impact, consider that she influenced Kenneth Anger, generally credited as the inventor of the music video.) “Meshes of the Afternoon” is her most famous film, but I’ve always liked “At Land” best. Oh, and according to Wikipedia, the rumor that she died in a voodoo ritual gone horribly wrong is not true.

Better late than never–remember that Washington Post experiment where they sent world-famous violinist Joshua Bell out busking?

“No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.”

It’s occurred to me that, while the Post was hung up on cultural reasons for his audience’s disinterest, there may have been something else entirely at work. A piece of music is built out of a series of phrases, and the relationship between whole phrases makes up a major part of how we experience it. Ever been to a concert, in any genre, where the performers showed technical skill, but somehow failed to make a lasting impression? The missing “spark” is hiding in the way the phrasing is structured.

Of course, the question of exactly what kind of structure we enjoy tosses us back into the realm of personal taste. In the case of Bell’s subway experiment, though, we add an interesting objective restriction: if we decide whether we like a piece of music or not based on the structure of the phrasing, then for a piece of music to grab our attention as we pass we must be able to hear a sufficiently-large sample of that phrasing. If you watch the videos included with the Post article, you can see that a single line from, say, Bell’s Bach selection just takes too long to reach a resolution. By the time he’s done, his prospective patron has already left the station.

Here is a selection from the Post’s recording of Bell’s performance:
(direct link)

This line resolves in two phrases and lasts a little over ten seconds. For comparison, here’s a selection from a Peruvian pan-flute band that a friend of mine recorded in the Paris Metro:
(direct link)

It reaches a resolution in one phrase of five seconds. (If you want more context, or just like Peruvian pan flutes, here’s a longer excerpt.)

It may seem like a very fine distinction, but just think–all else being equal, the second example fully doubles your chances of delivering a satisfying payoff while your target’s still in listening range. The experimenters, I think, just didn’t understand their audience.

“Edna Souza is from Brazil. She’s been shining shoes at L’Enfant Plaza for six years, and she’s had her fill of street musicians there…On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long…’He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn’t call the police.’”

It’s significant that, out of all the Post’s interviewees, Souza’s the only person not mentioned as having some background in classical music who has something nice to say about Bell. And, the whole time, she was stationary.

“I Wanna Be Famous” with Portuguese subtitles:

(direct link)