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A little while ago, I wrote here that when news broke that Target's database of credit card numbers had been hacked, 40 million cards were compromised. It was also claimed that no PIN numbers were stolen. Neither of those claims turned out to be true. PIN numbers were indeed stolen—which means if you shopped at Target (ever?) your credit or debit card is certainly compromised—and the number has been revised upwards to 110 million customers. That means my previous total of all the big US credit card thefts in recent years also has to be revised upwards—it is now in the neighborhood of 400 million. That's more than the US population.
Credit card security seems to be a joke. In another earlier post, I wondered if the NSA isn't also tracking all of our online financial transactions. What do you think? Of course they are! It's very likely that they too have all of our credit card, social security and PIN numbers. Sorry if I sound like a paranoid conspiracy monger, but these seem to be pretty much the facts. If Google and Target have this stuff, then the NSA has even more of it.
One has to wonder what kind of future—or present—the Internet and the Cloud have for any sort of businesses when almost nothing is secure.
I do recommend in my post that US credit card companies immediately adopt the European style cards with chips* in them, and abandon the magnetic strip. It might be only a stopgap measure, but it's a relatively easy one to take.
*CORRECTION: chips aren't the fix, so where does that leave us? Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing notified me: "Basically, chip-and-PIN was known to be broken (that is, easily forged by crooks) at least a year before it was implemented in the EU. The banks went ahead with their plan even after respected cryptographers pointed out definitively that it wouldn't work, because they'd already committed to it, and had already told governments, the press and their customers that it would be secure. They'd have looked like assholes if they'd given up."
We biked to a spot just downriver from the Jax Brewery where we could access the levee and see the city fireworks. We arrived a few minutes before midnight and found places to sit on the rocks that face the riverbanks. A tugboat was anchored almost in front of us, nearly mid-river, and it held a barge in place—that’s where the fireworks were launched. A more perfect viewing spot would be hard to imagine—maybe the drizzle was keeping the crowds away.
Before the New Orleans fireworks were set off, we could see the riverside fireworks from the neighboring towns, up and down and across the river: Gretna, Algiers, Uptown and Carrollton.
Afterwards we biked into the Quarter, to experience it at its absolute worst—or best, depending on your opinion of humanity. The streets were filled with pedestrians, many of them holding drinks, many of them dressed up, wearing plaid suits, masks, plunging cleavage, beads, silly hats. One man led his own second-line parade using a motorized wheelchair covered in blinking lights and blasting music.
You’re allowed to vomit in public in New Orleans and carry an open drink, but not pee in public.
Food
Our neighbor here has a chicken coop in their backyard. The birds wander into our yard from time to time. A rooster crows every morning. There is a satsuma orange tree in the yard. As the man who told us about St. Roch related, his family observed Lent very strictly when he was young. No mid-day meals and no meat the whole time. He imagined that for some that would seem a privation, but for New Orlineans, they’d happily subsist on fish, shrimp, crabs, crawfish and oysters.
What is nice here is that a food place can be considered great and be either a funky joint or a fancy place that demands that men wear suits. Fancy places have no perogative on quality and reputation. The humblest joint can have a citywide reputation for its specialty dish. The restaurant scene has, I read, rebounded and is growing since Katrina. Maybe the gentrification and white-ification of parts of NOLA account for that trend, as many of the new places seem to be along the Magazine Street strip, and they’re more uptown. There are some great Vietnamese places around as well, and folks seems to be developing a taste for pho.
Our group stayed local—we mainly hit the local spots here in Bywater:
Elizabeth’s—wonderful southern breakfasts. I had catfish and grits for breakfast one morning.
The Joint—BBQ. The pulled pork was highly recomended, but I also bought some ribs for our New Year’s Eve dinner and those were pretty good too. The sides are interesting: collard greens were on the menu one day and were nice and smokey, and another day I got some grits with leeks, maybe some cheese was in there too.
Bacchanal—is an interesting concept. Basically, it’s a wine and gourmet cheese shop downstairs—the idea being you buy a bottle (which are marked up a little but not too much) and drink it with your food, cheese or snacks upstairs or outdoors in back. I had a sandwich that was tasty. You can get wine to go—it’s then $5 off the marked price.
Satsuma—healthy food! In New Orleans! It’s not all deep fried here. Sandwiches, salads and fresh squeezed juices. This place could be in Greenpoint—in fact, I overheard a young woman at a neighboring table saying she wanted to move there.
Oxalis—haven’t tried it; it’s new and looks very tasteful in its decor. A just-opened bar/restaurant with an emphasis on bourbon, and tapas-like plates for food.
Booty’s—street food from around the world presented in a casual gourmet atmosphere. Very popular.
Frady’s (photo below)—sort of deli-counter vibe: breakfast stuff, sandwiches, and…home renovation supplies. I had a pretty good oyster po’ boy here….I also bought some duct tape. There are no seats inside.
LeeAnn Rossi, who is from nearby Shreveport, was here recently and has created a much more comprehensive interactive map to many of the more must-try establishments. Click on any of the red placemarkers below for more info on an establishment.
1.01.14: New Year’s Day
Dumping on Mother Earth
I biked to the Contemporary Arts Center in the Warehouse District and, while there are some nice installations and pieces scattered about on the ground floor (look at this giant hairball by Castillo!)
…the top two exhibition floors were where I lingered. They were both devoted to a series of large-scale photos around a water theme by Canadian Edward Burtynsky.
Burtynsky’s photos (not just this series) tend to be large-scale, mostly of landscapes (not individual people) and often focus on the effects man is having on the natural world. Those latter photos often show us the terrible things we’re doing to our planet in ways that we might otherwise not be able to see—as Burtynsky often goes for the high angle or the aerial view. Often, the immediate reaction one has when encountering one of these is, “What is that?” as the stuff he is attracted to often looks fairly abstract when viewed from above. These are farms in Spain:
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The pictures have a deep focus and are high resolution (they’re taken with a Hasselblad, 2 ¼ square inch format)…I often found myself walking right up to the prints to see small details: tiny details were revealed as houses, animals or even people. That’s a road along the bottom of this photo of pivot irrigation; in the lower right is a house.
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There seems to be a conscious effort to reference modern abstract art—the irrigated fields above remind me of an early Frank Stella or some aspects of the painting of Robert Delaunay. But it could be the other way around—the moderns could have been unconsciously lifting their shapes and designs from natural phenoma. I believe one doesn’t have to be consciously aware of such borrowing; an artist might even deny it.
Below is a picture of a step well, of which there are quite a few in Rajasthan, the mostly desert province of India. Some were built over 1000 years ago, but most existing ones were built in the past 800 years. During monsoon season, they fill with water and become a source of fresh water for the nearby villages. As the dry season lingers, the water level drops, hence the steps that allow one to reach deeper and deeper into these wells as the year passes. Most of them are not in use now. During the British Raj in India (1858-1947), British authorities weren’t satisifed with the level of hygiene of the step wells, and ordered the installation of pipes and pumps to replace them. Amazing looking, eh? Like something out of Myst (I date myself) or some dystopian sci-fi movie.
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A nice part of this show was the audio guide. You dialed a phone number and then if a particular photo had a number alongside it, you could punch in the number and hear Burtynsky talking about what you’re seeing—how it came to be, what effect it has and maybe how he took the picture. Given that these pictures are extraordinary looking but don’t reveal what or why in most cases, the extra info deepens the experience. The fact that the photos and the commentary are as much about these extraordinary places as being about his photography and artistry gives him more to talk about as well. I can see why he didn’t want to have big wall panels with all that info though—you would then tend to read first and look at the pictures later. As it is, you have a minute to marvel at the sheer weirdness of whatever it is, and then the mystery gets revealed. That said I’m going to spill some spoilers here.
Below is the Colorado River Delta. This river has been used so much for irrigation and other human-oriented factors that it never quite reaches the sea (Baja is where it would normally dump out). Instead, it creates a delta of fractals that never reaches its goal. What was a river is now a sort of extremely elongated lake that runs downhill.
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Last meal in New Orleans
My daughter and I went to sample one of the more upscale restaurants—Pêche, in the Warehouse District. Great local oysters and fresh fish. Upscale is relative here; the prices were edging close to what one might pay in NY, but there was none of the pretense.
The Cyclical Calendar
Sadly, I’m going to miss some of the upcoming parades. The first on the parade calendar celebrates Twelfth night (AKA Epiphany, 12 days after Christmas), which is considered the beginnning of Mardi Gras season—so one celebration (Christmas and New Year’s) segues more or less into the next. Celebrations and pageantry are an older way of marking out the passage of time during a year. They’re linked to solstices, planting, rainy seasons and harvests and all of that and the resulting sense of one segment of ritualized time passing into the next one internalizes the feeling that one lives in a never-ending circular continuum—very different than the linear and more mechanical time sense that has been foisted upon us in the name of organization and efficiency.
Who’s to say time isn’t circular? And who’s to say it always moves along at the same speed? Neuroscientists have recently shown that we perceive time speeding up and slowing down. Objectively one might say, “Oh that elastic effect is just a by-product of how our senses and brain work; real time—atomic clock measured time—is a constant.” But it’s not. Einstein showed that as one zooms way out, time is in fact elastic, so our rubbery perceptions (and maybe those of the participants in parades, processions and pageants) are actually a more accurate reflection of the universe.
The run-up to Mardi Gras parades begin on Jan 6th, and continue sporatically until they reach a climax months later on Fat Tuesday, the day before Lent starts. I can’t begin to deal here with Carnival and the various krewes, but I have to note that The Wild Tchoupitoulas record, a record of this imaginary Indian tribe’s Mardi Gras songs and chants backed by both the Neville’s and The Meters, has just recently been designated a national cultural treasure. About time. Mardi Gras Indians are an incredible and surreal phenomena and this recording is one of the best NOLA records ever. Produced by Allen Toussaint, it was not a big seller, but like many modest-selling records, it had a huge impact.
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On Jan 6th, there’s even a parade in honor of Joan of Arc led by the Krewe de Jeanne d’Arc.
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In this procession through the Quarter, there will be folks dressed as knights, peasants, kings, queens, lambs, heretics, angels and three women who represent Joan of Arc at different stages of her life. The krewe throw prayer cards, dolls, beads, and 16 hard-to-get swords that represent Joan’s age when she began to battle for France. Sounds like a LARPers delight.
We biked home in the dark along the levee that borders the Quarter, then, following the river, along Chartres into Bywater. As we neared Elizabeth’s restaurant we could see that the road was blocked by a large truck and a man was hosing down the street. As we biked by we could see and smell what it was he was hosing off—human shit. Not just a turd, but a whole pile (I’d smelled it here and there in the last day or so in various places.) Well, yeah, New Orleans sure is funky, just don’t get any on ya.
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Recommended reading and resources
The Year Before the Flood, Ned Sublette. A friend who hails from Lubbock and lived in NOLA the year before Katrina hit. His book delves into all aspects of NOLA culture and politics—it’s a gorgeous portrait of the city before the storm hit. (Sublette has also written THE book on Cuban music and a book on how NOLA came to be what it is.)
Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker. This collection of essays and maps is another way of trying to understand some of what New Orleans is about and how it got that way. The maps reveal the city in ways that text cannot.
WWOZ—pretty much all NOLA music all the time. Sometimes they take a musical detour, but usually for a good reason that eventually leads back to the main road. If every city had a station like this, the world would be a better and happier place to live in. The late great Ernie K-Doe used to have a show on WWOZ; I used to tape it on cassettes in the 80s. He played great music and was a true phenomenon—often comparing himself with James Brown on air (K-Doe had a big hit with the song “Mother-In-Law,” but James Brown he was not) and he would challenge Brown and others to battles that would never materialize.
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K-Doe on K-Doe:
“On the second month, the twenty-second day, nineteen and thirty-six, eight-fifteen in the morning time, Charity Hospital went to rumblin’ and a-grumblin’! The building started to bendin’, the walls started shakin’, and the doctors said, ‘What’s wrong? What’s happening?’ The people told them doctors, ‘A boy-child is being born on the third floor, at this particular time!’ And I believe about that time the doctor had done finished what he had to do, and the nurses had done washed this beautiful body of mines down and brought it to my mother, and I believe my mother looked up at my father and said, ‘Huh! What we gonna name the boy this morning?’ And my father looked down at my mother and said, ‘Hush! You can’t name him nothin’ but one thing, that’s Ernie K-Doe Jr., and he’s gonna be a bad motor scooter!’”
WWOZ has an app!- I have the android version.
Watched “A Streetcar Named Desire” while we were in NOLA. Some very theatrical shit there. I guess the streetcars used to run as far as Bywater back in the day, as that’s where Desire street is. Maybe this play was shocking back in the day, but now one is hardly shocked that Blanche might have used men to pay her depts and bolster her needy sense of self. The “filmed-play” style of the movie is a bit alienating as well…the acting is very theatrical, as is the dialogue.
A friend recommends City Of Night, a novel by John Rechy about his own life as a hustler. Part of it takes place in New Orleans. It was referenced by The Doors and Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho). Also recommended was A Hall Of Mirrors, Robert Stone’s first novel. Set in the early 60s, it carries over some influence and stream of consciousness style from his time spent with the Beats, but this apparently is much darker.
When The Levees Broke—Spike Lee’s 4-part doc on Katrina. Amazing. There’s a follow-up series I haven’t seen yet.
Treme—An HBO series that follows a range of New Orleans characters—lots of music scenes.
I’m Carolyn Parker—A Jonathan Demme doc about a woman in the Holy Cross neighborhood rebuilding her home post Katrina.
Down By Law—Jim Jarmusch’s film. Some lovely New Orleans background shot by Robbie Müller. A LOT of films are shooting here now.
Thanks to Tom Beller who sent us copies of a picture book…Other books are Spirit of New Orleans by Bruce Keyes, Look and Leave by Jane Fulton Alt, Eyes of Eagles: New Orleans’ Black Mardi Gras Indians pix by Christopher Porche West and In The Spirit, the wonderful photos of Michael Smith. There are so many books about this city.
There’s even a book on Bounce, by Matt Miller.
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What Divides Us
New Orleans is wonderful; the folks are generally generous, talkative and enjoy life. Black folks and white folks mix and come in contact with one another more than in many other US cities. But it’s also the victim of a lot of bad policies, corruption and sad decisions—the damage done by Katrina was not an accident, as has been explained in detail elsewhere (the Spike Lee doc When The Levees Broke is amazing) and all kinds of tragic policies have been heaped upon this city like so many knife wounds. It’s almost as if the city is being punished for being as generous, sensuous and fun-loving as it is.
As a cyclist, let me start with the highways: huge scars that cut across the city, dividing and separating neighborhoods:
They’re beautiful and awe-inspiring, no doubt, but the effect they take on the social, economic and cultural life of this city has to have been devastating. Almost as much as the freeways through Overtown in Miami.
In New Orleans, as in many other cities, the freeways not only provide quick virtual access (virtual because they don’t actually touch the cities) to the city from outside, but are used by city residents to get from one part of the city to another (something that could be equally accomplished by a network of mass transit—lots of trolley lines that used to exist were eliminated here). The freeways here are mostly elevated. As they are above the flood waters, they became a weird refuge and prison for folks during Katrina. Being elevated, for the most part, they theoretically shouldn’t impede the network of surface streets as much as the typical ground level or sunken freeways do, as in NY and LA. But as I biked around, it seemed like that wasn’t really true. Many streets dead-ended around the freeway zones and one had to detour quite a ways to get across to another neighborhood. And, as can be seen in this picture, they create dead zones. No one except the homeless live under these things; no business goes on under them either. It’s a massive usurping of what must be, or could be, valuable urban real estate:
The freeways were only the most recent of many “cuts.” New Orleans has a network of rail lines dividing it too. Some run atop the levees along the river, going East and West, no more disruptive than the levees themselves. They allow the port to function, facilitating distribution of the goods coming into and out of this port. Other rail lines cross the city’s interior, and those divide neighborhoods the same way that the highways do—on the surface one always has to search for a way across.
Canals criss-cross the city as well. Pretty much all of the flooding happened due to the failure of the barriers between the large canals that were supposed to protect the surrounding communities (more on that later.) This one below runs parallel to some train tracks. It’s obvious that other than the bridge I’m standing on, there’s no way to get from one side to the other. The two neighborhoods on either side are completely severed. If you wanted to get hardware, groceries or hang at a bar on the other side, well, forget it. Maybe these small canals like the one below and the rail lines were deemed essential to the city’s economic health, I don’t know—I’m simply commenting on the knock-on effects they have.
There is reconstruction going on all over. In a lot of the neighborhoods that were heavily flooded there are crews working on fixing up houses and painting them. Alongside these homes being renovated are plenty more that are boarded up or obviously vacant. The reconstruction is heartening, but seeing signs for house leveling is heartbreaking.
12.29.13: Deep Roots of the Flood
It was a sunny day today. We rode around the Holy Cross neighborhood and the Lower 9th on the other side of the Industrial Canal from where we’re staying in Bywater. Holy Cross, closer to the river, didn’t get hit severely. It’s an area of mish-mash housing styles—regular suburban-type homes and a few older ones still standing.There are two frilly “steamboat” houses that were built a century ago. They are tiled up to the second floor—inside and out—so even though the floodwaters reached about five feet high here in some areas here, these two houses sustained little damage. The ground floors could be more or less hosed out and they were ready to live in (except for the heating and water and such, but the structures were intact).
On the levee, we saw a man by the river handing a semi-automatic pistol to his son, who must have been around 8 years old.
The lower 9th is another story—still. At least half the houses are gone, and weeds and reeds have grown up where there used to be houses, in the spaces between the homes that remain. It looks a bit like central Detroit. All of the landscape below was once houses:
There are signs for lot-clearing services; it’s all a bit sad and surreal. Outsiders have famously initiated some new construction, such as the houses by Make It Right designed by a collection of well-known architects.
...and these ones in Holy Cross, organized by Global Green, an org started by Gorbachev to encourage sustainable practices:
At the northern end of the 9th ward, we stumbled on an overlook that gave a view of a former cypress forest/swamp just north of the lower 9th. This is what an old growth cypress forest looks like:
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There used to be lots of these cypress forests in the Mississippi Delta, but with the introduction of canals for oil pipelines and shipping they’re mostly gone. Now this overlook looks out on a vast lake with a few stumps poking up:
It seems in the 60s, they opened a new canal for shipping that made a straight line from the Gulf to New Orleans. It’s called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR-GO), also known as the “hurricane highway”— due to this straight line, storm surges and Gulf waters aren’t slowed down by the meanders that the river takes between here and the Gulf. MR-GO allowed salt water from the Gulf into all the surrounding areas and killed all the existing vegetation...not just in that bit we viewed, but all around. This vegetation and the watery meanders all served as natural barriers for the surges that periodic storms brought. The consequences of eliminating those barriers are self-evident.
Here's an article that gives some background and explains what might be done to reverse this trend.
Robert Taylor, a 65-year-old black man in a gimme cap, who is the caretaker of the overlook mentioned in the above article, came up to us and explained the situation. I have to mention that for us outsiders, having a stranger come up and start talking is unusual—we might normally suspect he might be asking for something or have some ulterior motive. Here that isn’t always true—more often than not, folks just want to talk. And it’s worth listening. He's old enough to remember the cypress forest and to have seen it vanish. He points out that with the forests gone, the levees and barriers here take the full brunt of the surges, and they can't withstand them….nor will they ever possibly be able to. The Army Corps of Engineers, who built the obviously faulty flood protection system, managed to have a law passed (many decades ago after an earlier flood) that absolves them of any responsibility for future failures of the stuff they build. How that one got passed, I don’t know—but obviously it means their work can be half-assed and no one can be held accountable. Amazing.
It’s lovely the way folks here just spill out their stories that meander like the river. His brother, a guy missing all his front teeth, came up too, then he wandered off. Robert pointed at him, by the railroad track a ways off, and said he was looking for raccoons. They're good to eat, he says. Then the conversation turned to other edible local wildlife. Robert won’t eat possum—he has seen them coming out of a cow carcass they were eating—but there is a kind of wild pig nearby that is delicious he says. Interbred wild boar and domestic pigs, so, larger than a boar but just as crazy. He suggests that you go for the smaller ones (you can get them if you hide in a tree) and avoid the big ones, as they are too heavy to tote back.
The flood into communities and the damage was entirely man-made. For a quick recap, here is a wonderful interactive play by play of how the levees broke and which areas were flooded published by the Times-Picayune, the local paper.
It’s easy to see from this infographic that the Mississippi levee remained entirely intact—it was the man-made walls and barriers of the canals that gave way. Not that higher or stronger walls are going to solve the problem, or so it seems to me. The ground is often higher along the riverbank too. It appears that, as Taylor points out above, decades of mismanagement and poor decisions (at least poor for the poor and middle class in those neighborhoods; OK for the oil companies) made the disaster inevitable…something waiting to happen.
The city is coming back in a fashion—slightly more gentrified and whiter than it was before. Some folks were attracted here after the flood by the easygoing lifestyle and cheap (or even non-existent) rents.
Though, coming from NYC, gentrification is relative; it’s not like there are massive glass-walled condos going up everywhere here like there are in Manhattan and Brooklyn. There are younger (mostly white) folks fixing up old houses that they can get for cheap and one sees slicker restaurants popping up and the inevitable yoga joints, but most neighborhoods are still way more integrated than elsewhere.
Fox News take note—Santa is Black:
My daughter and some of her friends rented a whole house in the Bywater neighborhood here through AirBnB—it’s a shotgun house with peeling paint and three bedrooms with a FEMA inspection sign spray-painted on the front:
What do the symbols mean? The top is the date of inspection (8th of Sept); The right is a hazard assessment—NE means no entry; the bottom 0 means no people inside (alive or dead); and the code on the left (hidden by an old flyer to crew on a schooner) is the designation of which FEMA group that came by.
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Many houses here have FEMA symbols still visible on them. Bywater didn’t get seriously flooded (there was only a few feet of water in this area—bad is relative) although it’s almost just across the Industrial Canal from the Lower Ninth/Holy Cross, which everyone knows was devastated, and just south of Gentilly and other neighborhoods that were also devastated. Surprisingly, given the unfairness and the wealth gap in this town, some neighborhoods that aren’t particularly fancy were spared. The neighborhoods with mansions were, of course, almost untouched; no surprise there—upscale neighborhoods were originally built on slightly higher ground, as the high ground was settled first and floods are nothing new here.
There are home renovations going on everywhere around town. Some big signs for “house leveling” services are posted, which is just a sad thing to read on a billboard.
Other signs offer house raising services: folks who want to keep their old homes, but want to avoid the risk next time around, are raising their houses about six feet off the ground on cinder blocks. The Florida Ave. neighborhood north of Bywater has a lot of these. Some of them look a little precarious.
The owners of the house we’re in have bikes, which we are allowed to use. It’s a common way of getting around this flat city, where not absolutely everyone has a car. Naturally, I’m out and about every day, except today, as it’s raining.
We needed one more bike and walking around earlier I saw a sign for “Bywater Bikes” on a fence by a boarded up house. I call the number and the guy is just rousing himself (it’s around 11 am) so I meet him later and rent a bike, so each of us can have one. This guy has tons of bikes piled in the space between his house and his neighbor’s—all covered with tarps. I pick one with a basket (for groceries) and a suspension (the streets here are filled with cracks and potholes). His house is a typical shotgun, and all the windows are completely boarded up. As people do here he began to chat: he used to live in NY, worked with Ru Paul and hung at the Pyramid Club…then he moved to Santa Fe. He also has a catering company that specializes in chocolate. And he has written a script about his life. That wonderful and crazy concatenation of places, behavior and activities above sort of struck me as a metaphor for this town, and a wonderful welcome too. To top it off, he dropped off a delicious banana walnut cake at our house later in the evening. Was that because it was me? Maybe, but I’ve experienced a lot of random acts of kindness here from folks who had no idea who I am (one man was convinced I was Peter Gabriel, I told him no, I’m not, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.)
A local corner store has delicious fried oyster po’ boys, a smattering of canned goods and some house renovation supplies: construction gloves, hard hats, tools and duct tape. You sell what people need in the neighborhood.
We bike over to the Mardi Gras Zone and stock up on provisions—it’s a supermarket that specializes in canned and frozen goods. Up front there is a pizza oven, with a few seats and there are balconies that have Mardi Gras and other festive supplies for sale (boas, beads and masks). Here is a leaf “top” for one of the luau outfits:
There are maybe hundreds of different kinds of beads, some masks, a vast selection of boas and on the opposite balcony some auto-maintenance items and an upright piano with two chairs in front of it. Whole Foods, tasteful and stocked by algorithms, this is not—though the food selection is actually pretty good. Here is their boa selection—doesn’t every grocery store have a boa selection?
Ani DiFranco is behind me in the checkout line with her daughter. We played a show together in Buffalo, where she used to be based. She’s lived here for a number of years now. She recently was attacked online for booking a kind of retreat/workshop next summer at a former plantation that is now an Inn of some sort. Given her track record it’s weird to see her attacked like that, but the incident does raise some good questions: when does what went on in a building and its nefarious history not matter any more? Does it ever not matter any more? Is there a way out of this cycle? With honor and integrity?
As someone wrote, it’s not like someone is hosting a rave at Auschwitz or they’re planning on dressing in Antebellum outfits and doing a LARP at a former plantation. As someone else pointed out, the whole White world was tainted by slavery: Harvard and Yale profited by it, just as many universities profited from the Vietnam war defense spending. You scratch the surface of any Gatsby and there’s probably a thug with some very dirty laundry underneath. Pelourinho square in Salvador, Bahia, was a slave market—now it’s the home of the drum and vocal group Olodum and the Sons of Gandhi, an afro-Brazilian fraternal organization. The place now celebrates the things it used to repress. So where does one draw the line?
One possibility is to eliminate the buildings where horrible things happened, but isn’t that to risk erasing the history from our memory? Repurposing but not forgetting might be the way to go.
We all prepare a home-cooked dinner and then some of our group head out to a local bar and then move on to midnight mass at Jackson Square in the French Quarter. It seems our group is not the only one to have that itinerary—there are quite a few people in the church who clearly have had a few before reaffirming their spiritual roots. There is some inappropriately loud hymn singing, and one young woman sways back and forth a little too much and has to be taken out—by her parents. A middle aged man in a suit gets down in the aisle to pray, but then can’t get up. He lays down there for a bit until someone eventually helps him up.
12.26.13
We head over to a nearby corner bar called Vaughan’s, where trumpet player Kermit Ruffins* holds court with his band on Thursday nights—something he has done for years. It’s the only night the neighborhood will allow the bar to have live music, so Kermit has pretty much a monopoly on the live music in this part of Bywater (except for the jazz combos at Bacchanal wine bar and restaurant around the corner), which it turns out is a pretty good thing. He plays NOLA funk accompanied by a small brass section, guitar, bass, drums and organ…the area in front of the band fills with dancers and everyone else moves as best they can.
*CORRECTION: Michael Bourgeois writes: "It’s true that Kermit Ruffins had a long-standing gig at Vaughan’s, but he’s recently opened his own club, Kermit’s Treme Speakeasy Restaurant and Bar on Basin Street, and has been playing there lately. The Thursday night session at Vaughan’s is currently being covered by Corey Henry, formerly of Rebirth Brass Band and Galactic."
Local music writer Jay Mazza has written a whole book called Not Just Another Thursday Night, about the Kermit residency at Vaughan’s—he has attended 350 of Kermit’s shows there—which says something about how good it feels, how long and regularly Kermit has gigged there and how dedicated (or obsessive) this writer is.
In the back room they’re passing out free beans and rice, which helps keep folks both sober and able to consume more alcohol. I remember this tradition from an earlier trip to New Orleans. Back then I went to a bar called Dorothy’s Medallion to hear a great blues and ballad singer named Johnny Adams. There was bottle service and go-go girls in sort of caged platforms. It was chilly, as it can be in NOLA this time of year (it’s a damp cold; it never snows), so the go-go girls were wearing athletic socks as they lackadaisically undulated. We listened to Adams croon and then left before the place closed, as it was in the wee hours of the morning. We heard an announcement that before closing, rainbow grits would be served, which I guess would sober some folks up just enough to get them home (thanks to Mark Bingham, who showed us around on that trip and later opened Piety Street Studios.)
“Eracism” bumper sticker on a car parked near Vaughan’s.
We can’t stay until Kermit’s set is done, as we have tickets to see Big Freedia at a place called Republic in the Warehouse District. We bike over and join the line to get in. It’s an evening of bounce DJs, bounce artists and dancers—so there will be a fair amount of twerking (yes, some segment of the black community of NOLA has embraced Miley Cyrus, despite her daddy being a bit of a cracker.) Some of us had seen Big Freedia in NY at Brooklyn Bowl a year or so ago, so we were expecting a fun show.
There were a few opening acts to get through, actually more than we anticipated. Some of them were wonderful, capturing the local bounce genesis maybe more than the now slightly slicker Freedia would do. Nothing wrong with getting more professional—a well constructed and visual show is a wonderful thing—but the opening acts were pleasantly inclusive. The first act was a large dude in a red T-shirt accompanied much of the time by three dancers who sometimes soloed and sometimes, though not often, did some moves in sync. It almost seemed like an amateur show, with dancers coming on stage semi-randomly and the dude filling with shout outs in between bouts of ass wiggling. When a bit of butt frenzy would end, the dancer would often unceremoniously stand up, pull their shorts down to cover their butt and then casually amble off stage. There was no “big ending” as one is supposed to have in show biziness, no button as on Broadway, just a minute of agitated wiggling and humping and then a sort of fizzling out.
Fairly often a dancer would stand on his or her head and sort of wiggle their legs in the air. Often, as a result of being upside down, cell phones fell out of pockets and then slid across the stage as a dancer launched into this move. The gadgets were left lying there and then retrieved when the wiggling was over. The upside down thing wasn’t really what you’d call a dance move and wasn’t a frenzy like twerking—it was just a person upside down wiggling their legs. The girls often wore big Nike shoes whose oddly patterned soles were visually front and center when the legs went up.
I love the “everyone is sexy and talented” aspect of the bounce style—the girls who get up and dance on stage are sometimes plus sizes and some are skinny (which must be an achievement in NOLA). The male dancers seemed to be quite fit, though the male singers tended to be extra large. Everyone had a chance to wiggle their butt or stand on their head, everyone was a star, and everyone was a sexy thing, for a moment at least.
I rode home around 1 am, and though the others stayed on, even they didn’t manage to stay long enough to catch Big Freedia…as there were maybe two or three more acts to go before Miss Thing came on.
12.27.13: When The Saint Comes Marching In: St Roch and ex-votos
We went for a long bike ride that took us first to the St Roch Cemetery, which is only open on Fridays. Like all other NOLA cemeteries, the graves are above ground, as the water table is so high here.
That said, ALL the folks buried in one sepulchre aren’t crammed into these little “houses.” As new residents move in, the existing residents—or what’s left of them—are shoved to a place that effectively dumps them into the Earth.
This cemetery is known for its shrine to St Roch and an anteroom connected to the altar filled with ex-votos. St Roch, pronounced, here at least, “St Rock” (I’m surprised there aren’t more offerings from metal bands) is the saint of many causes and illnesses: cholera, epidemics, knee problems, plague, and skin diseases. He is the Patron Saint of: bachelors, diseased cattle, dogs, falsely accused people, invalids, Istanbul, surgeons, tile-makers,gravediggers, second-hand dealers, pilgrims and apothecaries. And the saint of dogs. Some of these connections are obvious, but some are a little surprising. What’s the connection with tile-makers, for example?
He was born in 1295 to a noble family in France, in Montpellier and had a strict religious upbringing. His parents died when he was 20 and then he immediately gave away all the family’s stuff and heading for Italy, to help victims of the plague. He could have stayed at home and been governor of Montpellier, as he was ordained to do so, but something drove him to administer to the sick. He did have a birthmark on his chest in the shape of a red cross—which is maybe meant to explain his calling.
In Italy, he affected many cures that were often described as miraculous. Some were achieved by merely drawing a cross on the victim’s forehead…but eventually he himself got sick.
It was then requested that he leave the town he was in, so he went off to die in the forest. He made himself a hut of leaves and was prepared to end his days, but miraculously (this was apparently near Rome) a clean, freshwater spring appeared by his hut that provided him with drinking water…and a dog, belonging to the Count whose land it was, began to bring him bread and lick his wounds. St Roch is usually pictured alongside a dog with a chunk of bread in its mouth:
The licking action of the dog helped heal the saints’ wounds and soon he was discovered by the Count, who became a supporter. His healing was not quite a miracle—people did occasionally recover from the plague—but the fresh water spring and the dog aspects were pretty extraordinary. In most other statues and paintings, he is also depicted hiking up his skirt to reveal one naked leg with a big gash in it: a scar/wound leftover from his infection. In this more modest version he points to the gash, which is visible as a groove on the exterior of his garment (I sort of like this idea of a garment “telling you” what lies beneath.)
Roch returned to Montpellier, which unfortunately was in the middle of a war. The future saint was captured and jailed as his mendicant outfit was viewed as a disguise. Ever humble, he didn’t reveal who he was, even though it was his own uncle who was in charge of the town. Eventually though, someone saw the red cross birthmark and he was revealed to be the miracle pestilence reliever, but too late—he had weakened in jail and soon passed away (subsequent information says this didn’t happen in Montpellier but in a neighboring town.) After his passing, God sent an angel with a table (a table?) to put under the saints’ head which had inscribed on it ”that God had granted to him his prayer, that is to wit, that who that calleth meekly to S. Rocke he shall not be hurt with any hurt of pestilence.”
He soon became a favorite subject of renaissance painters. Here’s one by Tintoretto of St Roch in a hospital performing healing miracles (that’s him with the glow around his head):
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So, naturally, an anteroom next to the altar is filled with ex-votos (paintings or objects left to commemorate the fulfillment of a vow in thanks, gratitude and as an expression of devotion.) In this case the ex-votos take the form of models of organs or limbs that were healed, crutches and polio braces no longer needed, and on one wall, a leftover face-covering from a former burn victim.
The floor is covered with bricks that express thanks.
On the opposite wall are more organs (including a brain with brown paint flaking off) and a pink heart with, significantly, a dusty top half.
That dust demarcation line across the heart is where the water rose to during Katrina. It’s about nose level. So basically this whole cemetery, with its tombs above ground, was under water. Say no more, one shudders to think.
In Mexico, ex-votos often take the form of paintings that depict an injury or illness that one has survived, or just as often a car crash.
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In a church in Sweden, they sometimes take the form of model ships—left in a church as a way of giving thanks for having survived rough seas or a storm.
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Part 2 to come shortly.
A few days ago Target revealed that they’d been hacked—beginning before Thanksgiving and ending December 15th. 40 million credit and debit cards were compromised: names, numbers and expiration dates. The name of the store now seems prescient.
Earlier incidences of large-scale data theft have happened repeatedly. In 2007, the company (TJX) that processes purchases at TJ Maxx, Homegoods and other discount retail chains lost the data on 90 million cards. Another heist was revealed this July when criminal charges were revealed against a group that cracked a similar company that processes the cards sales for J.C. Penny, 7-Eleven, NASDAQ, Dow Jones, JetBlue TJX Cos., BJ's Wholesale Club, OfficeMax, BostonMarket, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority and the Dave & Busters restaurant chain, the Maine-based supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers and Heartland Payment Systems Inc., a New Jersey-based processor of credit and debit cards
160 million cards were involved in that heist. These hacks were pulled off by a group of thieves led by Albert “Soupnazi” Gonzalez—a guy who was a paid U.S. government informant, paid 75k a year, but I guess he couldn’t help himself. (A great story, told in full here.)
That same group also hit:
Carrefour S.A.: 2007, 2 million card numbers
Commidea Ltd.: 2008, 30 million card numbers
Euronet: 2010, 2 million card numbers
Visa, Inc.: 2011, 800,000 card numbers
Discover Financial Services: 500,000 Diners card numbers
Last year, thieves hacked into the Global Payments system (a company that processes credit card purchases for a large group of stores) and got 1.5 million credit card files. Adobe recently sent out a warning that their credit card files had been compromised. How many were those? 150 million is one estimate, but the company admits to 38 million. Ever buy Creative Suite or download a PDF reader? Diapers.com and Soap.com were hacked, as well.
What is one supposed to do? Yeah, I know—check for unauthorized purchases and shred documents—but realistically? Stop using credit cards? AND debit cards.
The Adobe break-in news was revealed by Brian Krebs, the same guy that revealed the Target breach. He blogs on security issues. It’s a pretty amazing site and he has some proposed remedies for some of these emerging trends—like the problem involving government and corporations giving big bucks to malware creators and other folks who will reveal hidden breaches (for a price) and then these states and businesses stockpile that zero-day info, but don’t always fix the holes as they want to store them like missiles in silos to use as weapons. As a possible partial solution, Krebs wonders if software developers should be made more responsible for the products they sell. At present they aren’t responsible for ANY of the consequences of their buggy work.
If we add those numbers of compromised cards up—and for sure there are more than what I’ve mentioned, but for sure there might also be some overlap too—we’re in the neighborhood of 300 million U.S. credit cards. The U.S. population is 317 million! Is there something I am missing? Has the entire country been hacked? Or at least some major percentage of the country? Granted, some of us have more than one card, but still—we’re getting there. The Department of Justice says that 10% of folks in the U.S. have been victims of credit card theft. Really, that’s all? Given the above number I sort of don’t believe them. You can still have your physical card for it to be “stolen.” 10%? 300 million is just 10%? Really?
I also ask myself if 300 million people have been affected why isn’t everyone up in arms about this? One would expect out of those 300 million a lot of folks would wake up to see their bank accounts drained or maybe some sudden charges like purchases of luxury goods in Kiev. Is that not happening? If it is I’m not aware of it. A wild guess, but maybe the hackers don’t distribute the data, but sell the card data back to the banks, companies and services they stole it from? Sort of a ransom that no one needs to know about. The thieves would make millions—guaranteed, no worries about selling the card info. to dodgy folks on the dark market—and the companies would stay in business and everything goes on as normal. Just a theory.
The other possibility I wonder about is if the thieves might have found a way to skim just the tiniest bit from all those accounts—maybe $10 a day, something many people wouldn’t notice. Multiply that by the number of cards and it’s a huge haul. The catch is that this light charging of accounts would have to not show up as a purchase in St. Petersburg or something like that.
Much cybercrime, of the non-NSA and corporate variety, emanates from Russia or the former Soviet Bloc: Ukraine, etc. Russia turns a blind eye to the activities of these folks operating within their sphere of influence, as long as they don’t hack the Russian government, Russian corporations or citizens. I foresee the major split in East/West relations getting even wider than it already is.
Misha Glenny wrote some wonderful books on this subject. (McMafia, Dark Market) He got to know a lot of the cybercriminals in the East and elsewhere, and his books read like thrillers, as he meets the hackers who, begin to fall from power due to ongoing investigations and stings. But others rise to replace them—it’s just too easy and irresistible.
What can be done?
Some cybersafety measures are a little drastic. Some countries are severing themselves from the global Internet completely. Iran, for one, a victim of cyberattacks emanating from the U.S. and Israel, sees this severance as a way of not becoming infected and being hacked. The entire country will be restricted to access via a huge intranet network that would not be connected to the global Internet. North Korea has an intranet called Kwangmyong (which means “bright”) and China has a large network of “netizens”—which include Weibo and Baidu, their own versions of Twitter and Google. It may keep their data safe, but it is obviously also a way of making sure their citizens only see what they’re allowed to see. Security = control—and this power inevitably leads to abuse.
Besides, many of these break-ins were done locally—by parking a vehicle with an antenna in the parking lot of a big box store, for example. So even if one has severed oneself from the global network, thieves operating locally could still break in.
Here’s an easy first step: Get rid of the easily-skimmable magnetic stripes on our cards. Replace them with the chips that are now common in Europe. Turns out the chip version is more secure, so why haven’t we all moved to that technology in the U.S.? Because of the expense of upgrading all payment processing machines? Talk about misguided logic!
Basically this reinforces my thought that the Internet is simply not secure, cannot be made secure, wasn’t designed to be secure and so the whole idea of global finances running on the internet might therefore be a misguided idea. Maybe I’m totally wrong, and good cryptography is what we need to implement, but reading the news about these guys—as well as the NSA—makes me think there’s always a back door or a way to break a wall. Maybe the internet is good as a place to flow ideas, but not to store data that needs to be secure or to keep social, political, military or personal stuff that might be damaging.
What does that mean for music as an online business—not so good, eh?
To be continued…
A few years ago, when I was on tour performing the collaborative record I did with Brian Eno, one of the dancer/musicians with me passed on a request from a guy named Jherek Bischoff. Jherek was asking if I'd write words and sing on an orchestral track he had done. These kinds of requests come in from time to time, and mostly they don't go anywhere, but one listen to Jherek's track and I said yes. There were strings, glockenspiel and ukelele—those seemed to be the main instruments in that arrangement. It was unlike anything I'd heard: odd and gorgeous.
The song ended up being called “Eyes,” and Jherek released a whole album of these collaborations with various singers (Caetano Veloso even sang one), and then came the daunting task of actually performing the material. In the meantime he went on tour with Amanda Palmer.
We eventually did a show as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival that Judd Greenstein organizes at Merkin Hall, and then again a different version as part of music festival in Tasmania—for which we added some other tunes and backed Neil Gaiman, as well.
Now, Jherek has a show at St Ann’s joined by the small orchestra, Contemporaneous, and we'll not only reprise some of those arrangements, but we'll do some new ones, too. The other singers and collaborators are Nika Danilova (of Zola Jesus), Sondre Lerche, Greg Saunier (of Deerhoof) and Mirah Zeitlyn, so it promises to be pretty special.
These days, it’s common to hear talk of the demise of recorded music as a source of income for musicians and the concurrent re-emergence of live performance as the primary way that we will hear and experience music (and by which musicians will make a living). It seems this is not a new idea.
I recently received a CD of recordings by Lucy Ann Polk singing with the Les Brown Orchestra. These live recordings were done in a radio studio and were made to be broadcast to US marines in the early 50s.
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The un-credited liner notes tell a surprising story.
It seems that before 1940, most big bands got hired by radio stations to play live for each station’s broadcasts. There was a giant recording studio upstairs at Radio City Music Hall (note the name) where large bands and orchestras would play live and their sets would be broadcast around the NY area. This was a lucrative and continuing source of income for bands that had many mouths to feed (Les Brown’s band on these recordings had 18 members). A band could tour and play for radio stations in many cities, as each station’s broadcast only covered a specific region. With the improvement of recording technology, the growing power of the record companies and records replacing live performances, this way of life was perceived to be threatened. The radio stations were considering playing exclusively records instead of hiring live bands. Income from recordings at that time, for the musicians, was close to zero—so a fight was immanent.
James Petrillo, the new leader of the American Federation of Musicians (the musicians’ union), decided this was a battle that had to be won. He demanded, on behalf of musicians, serious compensation from the big record companies; he wanted them to pay royalties on recordings, which they didn’t do before that! The labels didn’t agree, and getting nowhere, Petrillo called for a strike. A musicians’ strike! Before the strike began, the labels hastily arranged to make recordings of all the biggest bands, to stockpile them. But even those eventually ran out. The strike began in 1942 and lasted for two years, when the record companies eventually caved in. During the strike, bands could still perform live, and play live on the radio, but no union musician in the US could record. Even President Roosevelt got involved, writing a letter to Petrillo to try to resolve the strike…but the union held firm, and now we get some royalties from recordings.
Technology may be disruptive, and the owners of that technology may lack scruples, but it is possible to get a fair deal…with some pressure and by pulling efforts together.
Significantly, singers were exempt from this strike, and could record with minimal accompaniment, backed by a piano or harmony singers. Though the strike was successful, there were unintended consequences for both these singers and the big bands. The public, who used to hear the big bands regularly—bands with rotating singers for hire—got used to hearing more singers and began to gravitate to them by name. The bands (there were hundreds of these large groups) began to fall out of favor. The post-strike recordings now had the vocalist getting the main credit with the orchestra or band listed under them. One record company re-issued an old Sinatra recording and put his name above the band, whereas previously it was in tiny type at the bottom. The record sold incredibly well. That’s the way it has been ever since: the singer gets more credit that anyone else...and the public knows vocalists, but rarely who played on their sessions.
By the end of the 40s, most of the big bands had gone out of business except for the most famous ones—Les Brown among them. Doris Day was an early singer with his band, and Lucy Ann Polk took over after her. Here you can see the Brown band in their trademark plaid suits backing Ms. Polk:
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The rise of bebop was also undocumented because of the strike. The early bebop experiments happened during the strike, and no one recorded them.
So now, for better of worse, we singers get top billing. “The cunt in the front,” as some musicians refer to us. Bands from then on got much smaller (jazz combos, rock and roll) and singers would get signed to labels without their band, as Frank Sinatra eventually did. It is the singers and writers who get the lion’s share of recording royalties now, with some of it divided up among band members, in some cases—though often the musicians who play get paid for the session and that’s the end of it. Having just spent a LOT of money on musicians for the recordings Annie Clark and I did for our record a couple of years ago, I’m not sure I’d be willing to pass on some of our royalties in addition to that—royalties that increasingly dwindle as record sales drop. Were I to offer the players a cut of the profits, they’d probably opt for the flat payment upfront if they did any research.
It would seem the new recording technology combined with the greed of the record labels (in not offering royalties) had profound and long-term effects. Some of us would say the establishing of royalties was a good thing, but the loss of employment for so many musicians wasn’t so great. Could the same thing happen today? Could musicians or other creative folks strike in order to get a fairer deal from the digital and media companies that are making loads of money from the content created by them? It doesn’t seem conceivable now, but back then, folks didn’t believe Petrillo would actually pull it off either.
I went out to Corona Plaza in Queens this morning to be supportive of the neighborhood DOT’s neighborhood plaza partnership initiative that is expanding to the outer boroughs. There are a number of these pop-up plazas in Manhattan, the largest and maybe most contentious being Times Square. To some, returning Times Square to a public space for pedestrians simply makes it more of a mall than it already is; to others it provides a focus and a place that is common and available to all, not corporate or privately owned. It’s always packed with people—mostly tourists I think—who spend money at the surrounding stores. Businesses that might have complained about the lack of parking right in front of their shops have come to realize that a plaza attracts far more people than one or two parking spaces.
In less central locations these things are indisputably a good addition to our city. In barrios in Bogotá and Caracas, the introduction of these little plazas has had the knock-on effect of lowering crime in the surrounding neighborhoods, increasing revenue for local businesses and providing a democratic space for everyone. A sense of community identity and pride emerges. Tackling any of those issues piecemeal is both more expensive and less organic (and less likely to stick). Having a public space—a commons—is a way of accomplishing a lot with a little. There are nearly 60 of these in the works around NYC.
How do they work? The DOT pays for the infrastructure changes (the barriers, plants and seating) but waits for a neighborhood to request a plaza—they don’t just move in without being asked. But there’s a catch: to get a plaza there has to be guaranteed upkeep. Trash pick-up, plant maintenance and all that. Times Square businesses have ready cash and existing improvement associations that could easily manage and fund some of that maintenance. The bodegas and cafés in Corona aren’t quite as flush, so it took three years for the maintenance funding for this one to get sorted out. A bank contributed a lot, as did some other city-wide organizations. The DOT has helped organize a program in which much of the maintenance is done by homeless folks trying to get basic jobs or people in halfway programs trying to get their lives back together.
La Cumbiamba, a cumbia band, was playing; there were donuts and coffee (served out of a rice cooker!), a pop-up library and some speeches, of course.
This is now primarily a Dominican and Columbian area (hence the cumbia band), with a smattering of other ethnicities sprinkled around (I passed some mom-and-pop Italian and Mexican restaurants as well). I was told that this area and Jackson Heights are the most diverse communities in the city, in the country…and maybe in the whole world! That’s quite a claim, but it might be true.
On a recommendation, I pedaled a few blocks to Tortilleria Nixtamal, which is said to be the best in the city. I had some pozole (hominy soup with chicken, lime, chopped radishes and seasonings) and nopale (cactus) tacos. Really good!
There were three flat screen TVs on, but with the sound off, thank God. One screen (the one above with the discount percentages and the hostess), is totally inside a booth, so if you and your friends sit there you’ll have your own giant screen. The painting on the upper right depicts the Legend of the Volcanoes, a sort of Romeo and Juliet story in which a woman, mistakenly believing that her young hero has died, kills herself. He returns, and distraught, takes her to the mountaintop in hopes that the snow will revive her. These lovers are the twin volcanoes that surround Mexico City, and the smoke—still coming from one volcano—is our hero’s campfire.
I had time before my Midtown Manhattan meeting, so I moved on to the Louis Armstrong House Museum, which is four blocks in the opposite direction of the 7 train station. Armstrong moved to Corona fairly early in his career and never left—a local celebrity. When he arrived, the area had just expanded (it was mostly pear orchards until the elevated subway went in) and was at that time primarily settled by German and other European immigrants. There is still a German church on one corner. Wave upon wave of immigrants came—after WWII it was largely Afro-American. Other jazz greats had joined Armstrong in the neighborhood: Dizzy Gillespie’s back windows can be seen from the Armstrong backyard (there’s a permanent bar set up in the backyard!) Now, as I wrote above, the area is mainly Latin, but inevitably this area will change again.
I entered through the gift shop and saw a small tour group leaving after having just viewed the introductory video. I stepped aside to let them pass, and there was Tony Bennett! Touring the Louis Armstrong house! Wait, he’s never been here before?
After they moved into the house proper I said to the guy at the gift store counter, “Wow, that was amazing” and to a young British couple who had also viewed the video, “Did you know who that was?”
As well as CDs and books, the gift shop also sells….laxative tea! (Read the label below!)
Armstrong used to record him and his wife around the house, and the recordings of mundane, raunchy and casual conversations get played back in their appropriate rooms. Here is the kitchen:
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As one visitor wrote, “Where else can you listen to an audio recording of a jazz virtuoso solicit blowjobs from his wife? ('Time to percolate the trumpet!')”
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A while back I got asked to present Annie Clark with a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. I immediately said yes. The ceremony was Tuesday night in D.C., at the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery. The courtyard is a pretty amazing space, designed by Sir Norman Foster, a lot like the interior treatment of the British Library that he also did. Not sure which came first. Maybe acoustically it's a bit echoey—though Annie's solo performance sounded fine.
The museum itself is a palace...I suspect it was originally built for some other purpose, but now it houses a mixture of work by US artists, only some of which are portraits.
A couple of years ago, Annie and I were invited to DC by NPR. During that trip, I insisted she see The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, a wonderful artwork/installation and major piece of “outsider” art that was discovered in a GARAGE here in DC. It now has a section of their large folk art gallery all its own.
It was made over the course of many years by James Hampton. There's a whole theology that he invented that is partially expressed in this work, made largely of tin foil—a holy material if ever there was one.
Some enlightened person in the federal art bureaucracy realized that US art isn't all that abstract stuff from the 50s and 60s that was endorsed as a weapon in the cultural front of the Cold War. Here is an incredible, spiritual shrine made by a black man, not part of any church or institution. America at its best, in my opinion.
Of course, there are portraits in one wing of the museum, too. A new one of Colin Powell is prominently displayed: he who is quoted post-My Lai Massacre saying that relations with the Vietnamese are excellent and later helped lead us to invade Iraq with lies about yellowcake uranium. Hero or lying war criminal—you decide.
Most other portraits are historical and make a weird contrast with The Throne of the Third Heaven and the Finsters in the other wing.
Enough griping. The awards are something to celebrate, and not just because my friend and collaborator Annie Clark got one. The other recipients were:
- Adam Steltzner, who looks more like a rock star than we do and designed the Mars Curiosity rover. The New Yorker did a big piece on him and his "sky crane," by which the rover was safely placed on the surface of Mars.
- Caroline Hoxby, who developed a cheap information packet that helps low-income families get their smart kids into top colleges
- Caroline Winterer, a historian who used computer analysis to trace letters from a pre-presidential Benjamin Franklin, and discovered the links that led him to the intellectual elite of the Enlightenment era.
- John Rogers, a materials scientist who invented “transient” circuits that could dissolve readily into the human body.
- Dave Eggers and Mimi Lok, who run a McSweeney's spin-off called Voice of Witness that publishes a series of books where folks tell their own stories of human rights violations, immigration hassles and other things that are not supposed to happen.
- Doug Aitken, who did a cool projection art thing on the circular exterior of the Hirshhorn Museum last year.
- Michael Skinner, who has proposed that we inherit things that we have been environmentally exposed to and pass them on to our children and their children. Not genetically, but through epigenetic exposure to toxins.
- and Saumil Bandyopadhyay, an 18-year-old who developed a super cheap infrared detector.
Quite the eclectic bunch, eh? At the cocktail reception, an astrophysicist, Mario Livio, came up and said hi to me. He's a music fan and was presenting the award to Adam Steltzner. I mentioned that I'd just read a beautifully written review in the NYRB of a book on mathematics on the train trip down. Here is an excerpt from the review:
Mathematical beauty, like the beauty of, say, a late Beethoven quartet, arises from a combination of strangeness and inevitability. Simply defined abstractions disclose hidden quirks and complexities. Seemingly unrelated structures turn out to have mysterious correspondences. Uncanny patterns emerge, and they remain uncanny even after being underwritten by the rigor of logic.
The book is called Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality and it's about a young Russian prodigy and how he sees math as a way of expressing the beauty in the world. A bit like music, I thought to myself.
Mario replied, "Oh yeah, I blurbed that book."
It was that kind of evening. Annie and I thought ourselves very lucky to be in such company. It was a little like a day of TED talks all compressed into one evening, but with wine and food added. A bit much to take it all in, but worth trying. Who's idea was this?It's way cooler than most awards things that seem to all have some promo agenda. By the time I was to introduce Annie (the last award as she'd be performing right after), I realized that everyone probably had had enough talks, as wonderful as they were. So I abandoned my notes, ignored the teleprompter and winged it. I talked about what I said above: what a wonderful world was represented here where the arts can mix with science and with social activism. I also said some nice things about Annie, but there was no need to explain what she does, as she was going to demonstrate that herself.
This was only the second year of these awards—I hope they can continue in this spirit. Winners from the previous year were present too, so there was a feeling of continuity. It's going to get crowded if they stick with that policy, as many of us will jump at the chance to hear and mingle with such an exciting group.
What’s coming next from the NSA?
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Here are some of the names of the NSA surveillance programs:
Dishfire
Prism
Snack
Polar Breeze
TAO
Tracfin
Transgression
Whitetamale
EgotisticalGiraffe
Moneyrocket
Yachtshop
Steelflauta
Stormbrew
Blarney
Sharkfinn
Keystone
Twistedpath
Messiah
Pinwale
Blazingsaddles
Nevershakeababy
As has been pointed out, it’s not easy to tell what they are or what their aims are just by name. Tracfin, for example, traces our credit card purchases.
As the revelations trickle out, I play a guessing game with myself wondering what will be next. Here’s my guess: I think one of the next revelations will be that all of our credit cards and passwords will have been hacked by the NSA. Nothing else is secure from their prying eyes and they will undoubtedly say that they need to track banking and other transfers of funds that might be supporting terrorism. They might say they only do this to “targets”—but we now know we are all targets.
If no financial transaction in the Internet is secure from the prying eyes of these guys….
 (these are a few of the ever vigilant NSA guys who look at our stuff—feel safer?)
Source
…then pretty much every business that operates online is in trouble. We, the customers who have—little lambs that we are—trusted those businesses, are also in trouble. No business can continue to operate under these conditions. Maybe businesses will pressure the government more than we are able to in order to keep the Internet secure (I personally doubt that it can ever be really secure). Thousands of guys like those above have access to our information, and to think that none of them will be tempted to abuse that information and power? You’ve got to be kidding. That kind of secret power begs for abuse.
Europeans and Latin Americans will inevitably sever their online ties with the US and UK as quickly as they can, if they haven’t already. Naturally, the big tech companies who rely on secure financial transactions will freak out. However, as their own business models are based on tracking our viewing, buying and social behavior, their outrage will have a limit. It will only go as far as it needs to protect their own interests. The rest of us will have to fend for ourselves. They are, after all, the ones who gave our information to the NSA—they have denied this, but it seems obvious.
That will, I suspect, come out in another revelation: it will be shown that the tech companies are more complicit in the NSA monitoring than they presently admit. One has to remember that if no one was supposed to find out about this, then there was no pragmatic reason for the tech companies to prevent it. Moral and ethical reasons—yes—but let’s see how moral and ethical they really are.
It’s a real shame. Just when we were getting to the point where we could have some perspective on what effect the Internet has on us—for better and worse—and just when we might have been able to reasonably deal with that, with focus on the “better”, it gets completely broken.
Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe the very nature of the Internet (tentacles reaching everywhere, touching everyone) and the fact that inevitably a hacker, cyber criminal, government agency or large corporation would use that nature as a way of keeping tabs on us all would have been revealed sooner or later. Information flows every which and any which way.
Some folks have written that these developments imply that the web needs to be regulated. I do think we need regulations and laws to reign in parts of ourselves and our behavior. Many people will agree that banks need to be regulated and we’re not supposed to take the law into our own hands. All social animals have “rules” that allow their communities to function. I may not love the cruel social hierarchies that many social animals live by, but the rules of behavior do seem to serve a function. Does that mean we need rules on the web? Lots of folks will complain about that and lots of big businesses will do much more than simply complain. The ad-based web companies like Google and the rest can’t function unless they track us, so they will have zero interest in allowing us to have our privacy back.
Someone cleverer than I am might have ideas regarding how to restore some balance. Jaron Lanier wrote something about us being compensated for giving our information up. Corporations make a lot of money off what we give them for nothing. At present, it’s pretty damn hard not to give it up, so unless we can acquire some control over our own connections, we don’t have a chance.
Most folks might wonder what all this fuss is about. If Amazon and Google offer good suggestions based on what they know about you, then what’s the problem? I think the problem will become apparent and obvious when our SS and credit card information is revealed not to be secure. Or imagine someone gets into office and wants to destroy their perceived enemies, by rounding them up as persons of interest or maybe just slowly wiping clean their bank accounts. I sound incredibly paranoid now, but aren’t we almost there?
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