“It is most unexpected that these first fossils do not come from marine sediments,” said researcher Martin Kennedy, a geologist at the University of California at Riverside.
“Lakes are typically short-lived features on the Earth’s surface, and they are not nearly as consistent environments as oceans are,” he explained. “So it’s surprising that the first evidence of animals we find is associated with lakes, which are far more variable environments than the ocean. You’d expect the first appearance of animals to be in the most conservative, stable environments we could imagine.”
I am always hesitant to post prescriptive rules of dress, but these are amusing* at least:
Communicating an attitude of complete indifference to one’s personal appearance is only achievable through a process of self-reflexive critique bordering on the obsessive. Artists who are in reality oblivious to how they dress never achieve this effect.
Or:
An artist compensates for a limited wardrobe budget by making creative and entertaining clothing choices, much in the way that a dog compensates for a lack of speech through vigorous barking.
*Clearly, they are intended to be amusing, the question is whether one ought to read it with the same posture as Derrida’s re-mark that he “takes irony very seriously.”
Q: Andrew, I just finished watching Dogville, the second time. You spoke of “shaking for days,” after seeing it. If you can recall, what shook you?
(I ask because I’m shaking again, or at least, I’m haunted.)
My answer was: [http://www.clusterflock.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/1004.MP3] Download
He then asked me a follow up:
Q. What have you carried with you, since viewing the film. Were you changed in some elemental way?
And my answer: [http://www.clusterflock.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Dogville2.mp3] Download
Edited out were some reflections/impressions on how/why the film reflected America and its foreign relations, but it was, frankly, uncompelling. I also don’t feel like I answered the question really, but I am not sure that that is entirely the point.
“You can’t tell if it’s a comedy, or if it’s a drama, or what it is!” complained some with whom I excitedly sought to discuss the movie. While my adolescent mind couldn’t counter this grievance, I now realize that coming up with a genre to fit Rushmore into is an exercise not only doomed to futility but ignorant of the very seat of the film’s strength: you can’t tell if it’s a comedy or a drama or what because it isn’t. It is, strictly speaking, a film without genre, which is to say, a film without any of the bundles of clichés that constitute the genres’ membership qualifications. This must have rendered marketing a futile ordeal, which would account for the movie’s unimpressive domestic box office performance. (But since genre is a labor-saving marketer’s device in the first place, perhaps this is a simple case of reaping what’s been sown.)
I will argue unto death that Rushmore is Anderson’s’ best film.
Continuing our discussion on cities, I got this email from Foad Mardukhi, the contents of which I’ll post below. For those that have never heard of him, Foad Mardukhi is a news compiler/filter extraordinaire. His distro list consists mostly of academics (Jeff Sach’s wife is the one who turned me on to him). He has a knack for taking a current topic/trend and compiling all the interesting relevant news stories on the topic. For example, today’s email (he doesnt send them too often which is nice) was about cities. To get on his listserv, all you have to do is email him (foadmardukhi@hotmail.com) and ask to be added.
FURTHER READING:
NYT piece by Harvard economist Ed Glaeser titled “New York, New York: America’s Resilient City”:
Wall Street is just about to finish the worst year since 1931. American housing markets are finishing their worst year in recorded history. New York’s economy is highly dependent on Wall Street; about 40 percent of Manhattan’s total payroll was in finance and insurance in 2006. These three facts should have created the mother of all price crashes in New York City real estate.
Yet New York’s housing prices are doing remarkably well relative to elsewhere in America.
…The secret of New York’s post-1970 reinvention was that smart people, who knew each other and learned from each, innovated in ways that made billions in financial services. The same density that once served to get hogsheads onto clipper ships served to spread ideas.
What does this mean for the future?
New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.
I won’t be surprised if Manhattan prices do drop in the next few years, but I also strongly believe that the future of New York City continues to be bright. Homo sapiens are a social species; almost all of what we know we learn from each other. Dense cities, like New York, succeed when they take advantage of this fundamental aspect of our humanity. They thrive by enabling us to connect with each other, which then promotes learning and innovation. The current downturn will only increase the returns to being smart, and you get smart by hanging around smart people. As long as New York continues to attract and connect those people, the city will continue to thrive.
Glaeser had a great BG op-ed on why urbanity was a necessary precondition for the American revolution:
The Fourth of July is an opportunity to reflect on the long, difficult path to liberty. The organized uprisings, like t he American Revolution, that toppled tyrants were often urban affairs that started with surreptitious meetings in crowded pubs and guildhalls. They were led by creatures of the city: merchants, lawyers, weavers, butchers, and brewers. As we celebrate our freedom at spacious suburban barbecues, we should remember that the road to freedom started on far more crowded city streets.
In the fight for freedom between dictatorship and democracy, dictatorship starts with a big edge.
Dictatorships have a small number of insiders who have strong incentives to fight for their regime. Because the benefits of democracy are so widely shared, no one has particularly strong incentives to fight to create or preserve representative government.
Democracies have a massive free-rider problem where all of us have a natural tendency to let someone else die for our liberty. Solving this free rider problem requires coordination and this is what urban density has done for millennia. Urban density connects citizens and enables them to meet and plan and talk. With enough talking, groups like the Sons of Liberty may even convince themselves that it is worth dying for a common cause. Monarchies flourished in our agricultural past, because effective democratic opposition was far more difficult to organize in a dispersed rural setting.
Johann Hari column titled “What? Copenhagen, Vancouver and Zurich are greater cities than London and New York?”:
Pack your bags! Sell your house! It’s time to leave behind sleepy, dull old London and head for the wild, crazy adrenaline-rush of… Copenhagen. Or Vancouver. Or Zzzzzzzurich. Yes, another one of those “studies” to discover The Best City In The World has come up with these excruciating museum-cities, and left us off the list. Who draws up these charts – ninety-year old valium addicts?
I have been to five of the top ten cities. The experience was invariably like being in a coma, with Rowan Williams talking incessantly at your bedside. When I arrived in Munich, I thought it was closed. When I visited my relatives in Zurich, I found the city riveted by a debate about parking offences. It had been going on for six years. I have been to Helsinki, Stockholm and Minneapolis – and I cannot remember a single thing about them. The only vaguely interesting city on the list is Paris – and even she has become the Disney-Land of Love, selling a parody of herself for a tossed-aside euro.
These lists pose as impartial assessments of “quality of life”, but they involve value judgments most of us don’t share. They assume we would choose serenity over excitement. Monocle magazine chose Copenhagen as the best city because life there is, they said, “frictionless” – but it is friction that causes sparks. Those of us who choose to live in this big dirty stretch of concrete on the Thames knowingly sacrifice peace for something we value more: the thrill of knowing we are at the centre of the world.
Hitchens’ ode to the West Village in Vanity Fair (“Last Call, Bohemia”):
It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who to his last days lent the patina to the Saint-Germain district of Paris, just as it is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats, who by continuing to operate his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach still gives continuity with the past.
In aspect and design, New York’s West Village is the opposite of Soho in London in that it began its existence before the famous evolution of Manhattan as a grid had taken shape. As Malcolm Cowley phrased it, evoking the Village just after the First World War, “Most of us drifted to Manhattan to the crooked streets south of Fourteenth, where you could rent a furnished hall-bedroom for two or three dollars weekly.… We came to the Village … because living was cheap, because friends of ours had come already … because it seemed that New York was the only city where a young writer could be published.” Trying to sum up the ethos, Cowley wrote that for his generation the Village was something more than “a place, a mood, a way of life: Like all bohemias, it was also a doctrine.”
“Doctrine” might sound a shade pretentious. But try picturing American culture without the contribution of this unique square mile. Inter alia, you would have to subtract Bob Dylan and the Cafe Wha?, Norman Mailer and The Village Voice, Isadora Duncan, John Reed and Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Beats, the gay movement and Christopher Street and the Stonewall Inn, Lauren Bacall as “Miss Greenwich Village of 1942,” Eugene O’Neill, Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern, Dawn Powell and Djuna Barnes. In his book which has the wonderful title Republic of Dreams, Ross Wetzsteon managed to evoke what he admitted was sometimes “a cult of carefree irresponsibility, but in the service of transcendental ideas.” That could be Bohemia defined.
NYT columnist Roger Cohen on returning to New York:
All the debt, personal and national, notwithstanding, I have to second that. As it happened, I’d been up very early that morning to talk to CNN’s excellent John Roberts about Iran. Waiting for the show, I looked east across Central Park to the rising sun just knotting its tie over the serried high rises of midtown and the Upper East Side.
It was a magnificent sight, the city resplendent. New York has recovered, if not its stride, at least its balance.
…My dawn moment with the skyline is a moment every New Yorker knows, when the demanding city suddenly gives back, yields beauty from its pounding restlessness, grants some miracle of iron and light, and in so doing summons the energy and civility that has helped set things right.
Cohen had an elegiac piece comparing Havana and Paris:
Since visiting Cuba a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about the visual assault on our lives. Climb in a New York taxi these days and a TV comes on with its bombardment of news and ads. It’s become passé to gaze out the window, watch the sunlight on a wall, a child’s smile, the city breathing.
In Havana, I’d spend long hours contemplating a single street. Nothing — not a brand, an advertisement or a neon sign — distracted me from the city’s sunlit surrender to time passing. At a colossal price, Fidel Castro’s pursuit of socialism has forged a unique aesthetic, freed from agitation, caught in a haunting equilibrium of stillness and decay.
Such empty spaces, away from the assault of marketing, beyond every form of message (e-mail, text, twitter), erode in the modern world, to the point that silence provokes a why-am-I-not-in-demand anxiety. Technology induces ever more subtle forms of addiction, to products, but also to agitation itself. The global mall reproduces itself, its bright and air-conditioned sterility extinguishing every distinctive germ.
Paris, of course, has resisted homogenization. It’s still Paris, with its strong Haussmannian arteries, its parks of satisfying geometry, its islands pointing their prows toward the solemn bridges, its gilt and gravel, its zinc-roofed maids’ rooms arrayed atop the city as if deposited by some magician who stole in at night.
It’s still a place where temptation exists only to be yielded to and where time stops to guard forever an image in the heart. All young lovers should have a row in the Tuileries in order to make up on the Pont Neuf.
Yet, for all its enduring seductiveness, Paris has ceased to be the city that I knew. The modern world has sucked out some essence, leaving a film-set perfection hollowed out behind the five-story facades. The past has been anaesthetized. It has been packaged. It now seems less a part of the city’s fabric than it is a kitschy gimmick as easily reproduced as a Lautrec poster.
I know, in middle age the business of life is less about doing things for the first than for the last time. It is easy to feel a twinge of regret. Those briny oysters, the glistening mackerel on their bed of ice at the Rue Mouffetard, the drowsy emptied city in August, the unctuousness of a Beef Bourguignon: these things can be experienced for the first time only once.
Leon Wieseltier column (“Scratches”) elevating elegy to an art form:
Once upon a time, before the panicked society-wide attempt to expel contingency from American life, existence was organized, or left sufficiently unorganized, for the refreshments of serendipity. The domination of the days and the years by logistics had not yet gone from authoritarian to totalitarian: interventions of experience, and island paradises of idle time, still got through. There were walks, and on those walks, finds. On a snowy afternoon a few years ago, for example, I stopped in a record store (more evidence of the antiquity of my tale) and discovered–but first I must introduce a distinction, to clarify my complaint. It is the distinction between searching and browsing. On that lucky day I was not searching, I was browsing. They are antithetical activities in their pace, in their range, and in their yield. The one is curious and the other is efficient. Anyway, what I found while I was loafing in the record store in Dupont Circle was the compact disc of one of Dizzy Gillespie’s most exquisite records, called Portrait of Jenny, from 1970. I had feared that it had not survived the war on vinyl, but some fratelli in Florence finally made the transfer. And my thrill did not end with its acquisition. I put the CD on and at the very beginning, just as the trumpet first stated its simmering theme, I heard a sound that excited me even more. I heard a scratch! I mean on the record, not on the CD. And then another scratch, and then another. And the sounds of the scratches were beautiful to me. They were the traces of human use, of human ardor. They restored me to the liberal age that preceded the frigid perfectionism of the new technologies of reproduction. The more you listened to a record, and studied it, and deployed it as a soundtrack for intimacy or interiority, the more scars it bore, and they were the scars of true feeling. You listened past them, the way you listened past the muffled panting of a Russian pianist or the clinking of glasses on a far table in Birdland. I know that CDs also get scratched, but their flaws have no significance: they are only interferences with a silvery promise of pristinity. A scratched disc is worthless, but a scratched record is a madeleine.
Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone, is moving to London. He has decided that the market town of Newbury in Berkshire is not the place for the headquarters of the world’s biggest mobile phone operator.
The company said last week that, while hundreds of employees would remain at Vodafone’s Newbury premises, the leadership team would be joining Mr Colao in London, where he already lives.
I recall some years back going up to St Helens in the north-west of England to interview another Italian chief executive of a British company – Paolo Scaroni, then head of Pilkington, the glass maker. I asked how he had settled in, expecting warm words about the local hospitality and his new love of rugby league. He looked at me as if I was mad. He didn’t live in St Helens, he said. He lived in London and came up to St Helens for a day-and-a-half a week.
In the view of two recent surveys, however, London is no place to live. Nor is New York. Tokyo perhaps passes muster. Shanghai? Forget about it.
The two surveys – one by Monocle magazine, the other by the Economist Intelligence Unit – rank cities for their “liveability”. This sounds like a dreadful neologism, but the Oxford Shorter Dictionary is quite happy with it, defining liveable as “conducive to comfortable living”.
Zurich is the world’s most liveable city, declares Monocle. My colleague Tyler Brûlé, who is editor-in-chief of that excellent publication, writes that Zurich gets the wink for its “high-quality housing, impeccable public transport network, a refreshing lake at its core, a well-connected and user-friendly airport, cosy little cinemas, well-tended bars and diverse population”. Copenhagen took second place. Neither London nor New York made the top 25.
Vancouver, 14th in the Monocle survey, won top spot in the Economist Intelligence Unit liveability table, which ranked cities for their stability, healthcare, culture, environment, education and infrastructure. Vienna came second, Melbourne third.
Tokyo came only 19th in the Economist table, well behind the third slot Monocle assigned it. But then, as readers of his Financial Times Weekend column know, Tokyo is a personal favourite of Tyler’s. I have visited the city twice, and loved it too. But one FT letter writer declared it “traffic-snarled, polluted and architecturally challenged”. That is the fun of these city rankings. They get people worked up.
Of course, no city is intrinsically better than any other. Which you find more amenable depends on your preferences. If you like to get around by bicycle, London is pretty horrible (so, perhaps as a consequence, are its cyclists). If you want to be on your surfboard after work, Honolulu (11th in the Monocle hierarchy) is a better bet than Amsterdam (ranked 21st).
I can’t, however, help noticing one feature of these supposedly liveable cities. Not that many people live in them. Zurich has a population of only 360,000. Copenhagen has a little over 600,000.
Leaving aside Tokyo, you have to get down to Monocle’s 13th place before you find a city (Sydney) with more than 4m people.
Many people are choosing new cities. Every week, one million people move to cities around the world, according to a study carried out late last year by AT Kearney, the management consultants, Foreign Policy magazine and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
They are going to places such as São Paulo, Mumbai and Shanghai, with populations of more than 11m. They are not choosing cities for their liveability, but because that is where the opportunities are. Of course, the quality of life for many in these expanding metropolises is awful.
Is there a way to combine urban dynamism with, if not pristine cycle paths and spotless metro stations, a reasonable quality of life?
The AT Kearney researchers had a go. They looked at cities’ business activity – the value of their capital markets and how many global companies were headquartered there. They examined the number of international schools and the percentage of residents with degrees. They considered how many international news bureaux had set up and how much world news there was in the newspapers. They looked at the cultural attractions, at how many think-tanks were located in each city and how many political conferences took place there.
The result? New York first, London second, Paris third and Tokyo fourth. Of the “liveable” cities, Zurich ranked 26th and Copenhagen 36th. Vancouver did not make it into the top 60, kept out by the likes of Buenos Aires, Milan and Tel Aviv.
The AT Kearney cities are, in its words, those “whose ideas and values shape the world”. I’ll take that over liveability. So, it seems, will Vodafone’s Mr Colao.
He had also been a nonpareil dancer. The British ballet teacher Richard Glasstone maintains that the three greatest dancers he ever saw were Fred Astaire, Margot Fonteyn and Mr. Cunningham. He was American modern dance’s equivalent of Nijinsky: the long neck, the animal intensity, the amazing leap. In old age, when he could no longer jump and when his feet were gnarled with arthritis, he remained a rivetingly dramatic performer, capable of many moods.
I was imaging Jupiter until about midnight and seriously thought about packing up and going back to the house to watch the golf and the cricket. In the end I decided to just take a break and I went back to the house to watch Tom Watson almost make history.
I came back down half an hour later and I could see this black mark had turned into view.
Ever been flogged with your hair while driving in a convertible?
A team of Stanford engineering students has collaborated with their counterparts at the Technical University of Munich to develop a potential solution something they call OpenRoad. Essentially, it’s a hole in the windshield. The idea in play here is quite simple: the air flowing through the center of the windshield creates a stream that prevents the air at the sides of the cockpit from curling back around.
Most intriguing of the hypotheses in the book is the “audacious” prediction offered in the last chapter. Disclosing it will be a disservice to you and the author–pick up the book if only for this one–but it does remind me of the short story The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges. In it Borges describes the predicament of Troglodytes who, escaping the inevitability of death that makes us precious and pathetic, become ascetics devoted to the now unparalleled complexity of thought. Cowen offers a related, economic analysis inflected take on the future of the universe itself.
Myself, after a lifetime of experimentation, I find I prefer the fortuities and disjunctions that arise from eschewing arrangement altogether: my books end up on my shelves according to where I can jam them, which has the advantage of cutting down on random acts of borrowing, as only I know where anything is located.
Joel Tenebaum is being sued for $4.5 million by the RIAA for sharing a Nirvana song online. About a month ago, a similar case, brought through the courts, produced an outcome in favour of the RIAA for $1.9 against a 31 year old single mother. This is a pretty remarkable article from the cutting edge of the decimation of the Major Label system.
And then in August 2007, I came home from work to find a stack of papers, maybe 50 pages thick, sitting at the door to my apartment. That’s when I found out what it was like to have possibly the most talented copyright lawyers in the business, bankrolled by multibillion-dollar corporations, throwing everything they had at someone who wanted to share Come As You Are with other Nirvana fans.
