Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth

We went to see the new Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I movie a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it enough to finally get the old one (as old as 1998? that was a surprise -- and to see that it was made the same year as Shakespeare in Love when we looked it up to see whether it had received any Oscars) and watch it on DVD last night. Jenny stayed up late to watch the special features, and pointed out to me just as I was going to bed that the director made no bones about historical accuracy not being the point of the movie(s): he started with the icon, and made the story fit the icon. Elizabeth I as super-hero, as it were.

Our famous doctor

Jenny's ob-gyn, Laura Minikel, is in Time magazine because of the long-distance relationship she's had with her husband for years. The image of her is in consequence a specially interesting one -- her face on TV, with her husband in Denmark looking on.

White Chalk

I got P.J. Harvey's new album, White Chalk, a few weeks ago, and have been listening to it in the car when there's an opportunity (Elena is very clear about her listening preferences right now, and if it isn't Raffi or Music Together or Les Garcons Joufflus, she wants me to change the music or turn it off). I have to admit that although P.J. Harvey's more raucous music has an energy I like, and which can become mesmerizing in concert (I saw her at Slim's with Stevie some years ago, and then at the Warfield a few years later with Richard Retecki), I can't listen to that side of her oeuvre over and over the way I can her more melodic work, like the very first album, To Bring You My Love, and the one she did with John Parish and now this one.

Back to Monterey for a day

We drove down last night, stayed at the Munras Lodge which is maybe a block from the much more expensive Casa Munras (justified only by its bloodwarm pool). The night manager was a friendly Pole who allowed me to practice my two Czech phrases on him after he noted that my name meant "freedom" in Czech, and that he was from Czech's "northern neighbor." We drove by Mexcal, hoping to have dinner there again, but the banner had been removed from the building and the place looked very closed, although there were no notices posted indicating it had closed for good -- just nothing that would indicate the restaurant was still a going concern. We went to Denny's instead and had food that was probably prepared from chubs. To the Aquarium today, where it turns out the area known as the Splash Zone, most suitable for toddlers, is closed for refurbishment and won't reopen until March 17 of next year. However, we did see a lot of wonderful fish, including the young great white shark, and had some enjoyable conversations with volunteers who know the place intimately. Then we had lunch for the second time at the Bistro Moulin, which makes a very tasty French onion soup and a fine platter of mussels. Finally, before leaving we played for an hour at Dennis the Menace park, where we met other parents and kids, including a woman from Czech with her two kids.

Before the Dawn

After reading Klein's book The Dawn of Human Culture I jumped right to a more recent book on the same subject, Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, in hopes of learning where the science has gone in the three or four years since Klein's book was published. Although there was some good information about what has been happening in the field, chiefly due to the separate lines of scientific development going on in the application of genetics to the field, the presentation was totally different, and it took me half the book before I realized that what I was reading was journalism, not science. What it comes down to in my view is that journalists are willing to cut corners on science for a good story, whereas for a truly good popular scientific writer the science always is the story. There are intermediate cases: Brian Greene would be one such in my experience. His books about physics and string theory are meant to be popular scientific arguments, but it's possible that when the subject gets too close to the cutting edge that he too is guilty of cutting some corners. I mean, the guy in my opinion was almost single-handedly responsible for string theory being seen as scientific orthodoxy by the general public.

Anyway, Wade is ever anxious to point out the ways in which concepts like "race" actually do have scientific validity. His game seems to be to go over areas that touch on a lot of political sensitivities and see whether anything explosive, and yet "proven" by some combination of genetic evidence and probabilistic reasoning (which is never made explicit enough to be understood in the book itself), can be drawn out of applying natural selection to modern human history. Whereas an author like Klein is always willing to describe the paucity of evidence involved in getting to the prevailing view of human history, Wade always leans toward a sophisticated version of "the scientists tell you so" when discussing why a particular scientist's view is or is not orthodox, confirmable, or based on evidence that is still in a state of flux. Wade's book left a bad taste in my mouth, as much as I appreciate and agree with his foremost argument, which is that the idea that natural selection stopped when human culture arose is absurd.

Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould

I finished Up in the Old Hotel, the collection of Joseph Mitchell's works, last night. The final piece in the book is "Joe Gould's Secret," which qualifies in my mind for the category of nonfiction novel and is a kind of depressing, but Borgesian, masterpiece. Joe Gould and his vast work-in-progress, the Oral History, both are and aren't (because the guy, and his secret, were real) stand-ins for the reader's and Joseph Mitchell's own highest aspirations. Mitchell doesn't simplify the moral dilemmas he finds himself in at any point, and there's a sense in which the reader becomes implicated as well, in his relationship with a mentally imbalanced, self-promoting homeless person who's capable of flashes of wit as well as delusions of grandeur. Where most of us would "do the right thing" in terms of what seems to be asked of us today and pull away (we've been taught by a kind of weakened, and evil, but comfortable, version of Alcoholics Anonymous theology that we are actually being most moral when we do nothing to support or interact with an alcoholic or person of similar disorder), Mitchell is unable to do so, and conveys a palpable sense of being besmirched by his choices with regard to Gould, no matter what they are. It's a marvelous, and still morally relevant work that Dostoevsky would be proud to have written, I think.

Mary Heilmann

Is the subject of cover stories in both Art in America and Artforum this month, and I received both magazines on the same day. Many of the same images are used in her stories in both magazines -- in fact, the cover image from Art in America is reproduced at almost the same size in Artforum. I almost never read stories straight through in these magazines, even stories about painters, so what's interesting for me at the moment is wondering whether the two stories might not even be identical -- I do remember the phrase "painter's painter," actually the phrase "painter's painter" itself already enclosed in double quotation marks, being found in both stories. But even if the two stories were the same word for word, I'd probably take them differently because of their subtly different contexts: the Art in America story being one that would present a less-known artist to the general "art public," whereas the Artforum story (which does have an additional article of objets "curated" by Heilmann to distinguish it) presents the painter as a source of both painting practice and conceptual theory. I could read the first story as an introduction to Heilmann's work, and then read the second one as an inculcation into her intentions, and disregard the fact that the words were the same in each story...

Garcons Joufflus

I've been spending most of my listening time in the car (driving to and from BART, or going to the library after work with Elena) on Stephane Calbo's Les Garcons Joufflus, subtitled "Muzak meets Pop on the Computer," an addictive and eclectic assembly of instrumental tunes that hearkens to Lush and shoe-gazing msuic of the early 90's as well as to the whole range of French, Italian and American pop of the 60's and 70's. It's an absolutely wonderful album that establishes its own unique world of emotional tonalities, all derived from but unlike the familiar ones...

Inland Empire

We've had David Lynch's move Inland Empire out from Netflix for a month, and finally started watching it last Saturday when we had our friends Michael and Lesley over for dinner. We made it through about an hour and a half of it at that sitting, and then I watched the remaining almost hour and a half later this week, albeit without my full attention. If I didn't know that the movie had been made by David Lynch, I might have taken the movie for the work of a younger auteur who wanted to construct an hommage to Tarkovsky and Sukorov (and probably Bela Tarr, but I have to admit I've never seen a Bela Tarr movie) and Lynch all at once. It's not just the fact that half the movie is made in Polish and apparently in Poland, it's the languorous shots, the use of shadows, and even one shot that looked like a direct reference to the fantastic scene in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia where the camera traverses a mini-landscape that appears to be located entirely inside a building.

The Lives of Others

The opening scenes of this year's Academy-award winning Best Foreign Film promised a compelling experience of going inside the head of a participant in a system of political belief we know little about, except that it is going to implode in a matter of three or four years. The question of how people in the secret police of a utopian world convince themselves that they're doing good certainly fascinates me and bears a relation to debates that might be going on, unknown to me, inside the "war on terror" in our own country. Unfortunately, after that promising beginning the movie for me was a long unravelling into implausibility and unmotivated sentiment -- a big disappointment.

The Dawn of Human Culture

Feeding my continuing fascination with the historical origins of consciousness and art, I finished reading Richard G. Klein's The Dawn of Human Culture last night. Klein demonstrates as well as any scientist I've read how well scientific practitioners (with a little help perhaps) can translate their work for a non-scientific audience. The book reminds me of the work of Ernst Mayr in that respect (I've never understood why Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould are considered such wonderful writers about science). The book is also an extended exploration of how difficult it is to make conclusive statements about human origins based on the available physical evidence, meaning the very meager collection of bones that Klein catalogues exhaustively through the book. Evolutionary theory is augmented by a kind of storytelling that is reminscent, as Klein points out, of the way legal cases are made.

Consciousness in the brain stem

An article in the September 15 issue of Science News claims that kids without cerebral cortexes display enough basic evidence of consciousness to invalidate the automatic identification of the possibility of consciousness with a human cerebral cortex. The implications drawn in the story range from questioning when a person can be considered to be in a vegetative state, to whether newborns can feel pain, to whether the form of consciousness achieved by these kids extends to all vertebrates. As I understand the hypothesis being proposed, all of these entities have in common the inability to retain any meaningful memory of what happened to them more than an instant ago, except through behavioral types of conditioning (which is still enough for some of the kids in the story to learn to associate sounds like "mama" with particular people for whom they feel emotions). So are we forced by our inability to treat brown rats as conscious beings with rights (at any rate, I'm certainly unable to do so) to insist on a certain threshold of continuing memory for full consciousness, and to devalue the actual experience of consciousness, where actual suffering and experience of pain and pleasure as well as "being in the moment" occur? Would our ability to somehow use the memories of others to replace our own (by using Google, for instance, or because someone's willing to take care of us) make up for our own lacks in guaranteeing our rights as conscious beings? Where does this slippery slope end?

It's about water

Final installment of my rant about global warming, for now, is to raise the issues I heard raised by Larry Dale, most recently as mentioned a couple of posts ago in a visit he and his co-researchers at the Climate Change Center made to a group of us at PG&E. The relationships of gasoline, coal and natural gas to global warming are obvious -- they're all fossil fuels (refined or unrefined), and the fact that they're in some ways substitutable for each other raises complicated and interesting questions about trying to limit their use. But water?

Well, from my perspective working at PG&E, water is a renewable generation source, again substitutable for other energy sources such as fossil fuels. But what Larry Dale's research has been about, the changes in how water will be "delivered" to the state of California by our friendly neighborhood climate, affects the use of water for consumption as much as it does the use of water for electricity production. What we think we know so far is that:

1) Global warming will reduce California's ability to store its annual water supply in the Sierra snow pack, effectively eliminating a huge state reservoir of all the man-made ones.

2) California may get almost the same amount of rain, on average per year, fifty or a hundred years from now as it does now. But the characteristics of the rainfall patterns may be drastically different: the general picture is of rains starting earlier and ending earlier, on average, making the storage of water to serve the period of its greatest demand, the dry summer, more difficult. Also, weather may be more volatile and more rain may come in the form of "extreme" events like larger storms.

3) Because of the still enormous supplies of water underground in the state, California is blessed or cursed with the possibility of almost directly substituting energy use for natural weather patterns in maintaining its water supplies. This doesn't mean our droughts haven't been real, as I take it, but that at a high enough cost in energy our essential needs could be met even under future scenarios that deliver a lot less water from the mountains to the farms and cities.

It's about coal

Continuing on with the subject of climate change, one of the presentations at the Rutgers forum I mentioned in my first blog post that really stuck with me cast doubt not only on emissions trading but on a carbon tax as a way of constraining greenhouse emissions. The point of this presentation was a simple one: both coal and natural gas produce greenhouse emissions, but coal is a much, much cheaper way of producing electricity (when it can be produced close to the source, that is -- otherwise transportation costs can change the relative economics). So in areas where coal is economic, a carbon tax is actually going to have the perverse effect of knocking the cleaner natural gas power plants (cleaner in considering all the other pollutants in addition to carbon dioxide that power plants produce, like sulfur and nitrogen oxides) out of the running before they do coal -- in other words, a carbon tax across the board will make coal more rather than less attractive as our major source of electric generation, unless a really massive amount of renewable or nuclear power is developed to knock coal out of the running as well as natural gas. And the latter development, in the proportions needed to have that effect, is probably a twenty year development project at least, so in the meantime (meaning most of the rest of my lifetime, at any rate) even with a carbon tax we're stuck with coal. And the corollary of this analysis is the equally grim point that if we choose to unilaterally abandon coal, we're probably back in the Laffer argument that the only way we can reduce greenhouse emissions in the short term by any substantial amount is by constraining economic activity... All of this thinking about coal is especially useful for those of us in California who don't use coal to generate electricity in the first place, and so tend to forget how important it is in the rest of the U.S.

It's about gasoline prices

I've been mulling a couple of issues related to global warming, the result of attending a forum on the subject here in the City a couple of weeks ago, and then having Larry Dale from the U.C. Berkeley Climate Change Center come to PG&E for an exchange of information just this week.

At Hanson Bridgett's forum on the state of renewable energy, the "least political" (actually maybe the most political) and most controversial speaker, as you might expect, was the academic, Severin Borenstein, the local media's favorite talking head on energy issues in the state of California. The main points I garnered from what he had to say were

1) Approaches based on decisions about how to reduce greenhouse emissions based on the current view and centralized incentive systems (renewable portfolio standards as well as cap and trade systems) are likely to have unforeseen effects and may not work. (I would note that Arthur Laffer has been campaigning recently against the cap and trade initiatives from the vantage of his pure free enterprise ideology, on what seems to me a pretty reasonable argument that caps may ultimately have to be implemented as pure constraints on our energy usage, if we can't find substitutes for fossil fuels like coal, so that there aren't enough carbon credits around to trade.)

2) The only approach that is really likely to work is a carbon tax, because the economic incentives aren't tied to any particular kind of technology (allowing new technologies or solutions to come into the mix on an equal footing with the current favorites), and because it's the best way to price externalities. Severin didn't go into the utter impossibility of proposing a tax that would be seen at the gas pump at a time when the Democrats, of all people, have made a huge issue of high gas prices...

3) The climate change deniers are mutating into climate change "adapters," meaning that the perspective of those who don't see a point to limiting greenhouse emissions is becoming that we can't do anything about reversing global warming, so let's make the best of it. Severin expressed his opposition to that perspective on the grounds that the "adapters" are thinking in terms of averages, whereas the catastrophic effects of extreme events are so drastic that we really need to be trying to change the trajectory rather than pretending that we can ride the wave. I'm actually not sure if that's the right approach to take: I don't want conservative ideologues controlling the debate on social adaptation to climate change, and ultimately I'm not convinced that science indicates we can do anything to change the trajectory (and that's not to deny the human role in climate change or the fact of its happening). But the moral part of his argument, which I take to be that those who have caused or exacerbated climate change bear moral responsibility when extreme events caused by that climate change affect others.

Sculpture versus the work

Lesley and Michael came over for potato pancakes last night, and we watched a DVD I've had out from Netflix since mid-July which turned out to be two distinct documentaries on Donald Judd and Tony Cragg. We've been talking about going to Marfa, Texas with Lesley and Michael for a couple of years, Michael having emigrated from Texas to California and still having family there, so the Judd documentary was like a vicarious version of our dreamed-of road trip. As for Tony Cragg, we bought an etching of his from Crown Point Press a few years ago without knowing anything about him, and all I had learned since was that he had won the Turner Prize back before that was the key to becoming a billionaire British artist. Watching the two documentaries in sequence was most interesting in terms of trying to get past the rhetorical devices that made Cragg "look bad" in the inevitable comparison between the two. It's clear, first of all, that Judd has a "theory" and displays work that has an attention to ongoing consistency and that these inherently play better when confronted with a video camera whose purpose, like Naughty Noo-Noo's, is to gobble up anything that moves. Tony Cragg's work, as viewed through a half-hour lens, looks like it's all over the place, the range being such that almost anyone is likely to wince at some piece of his even while considering a couple of others pretty interesting. Also, he's portrayed in the thick of managing his career as a sculptor as well as making art, whereas Judd is completely separated from either the creative or the physical processes that went into creating his works (which would have been great to see). It's Judd, by the way, who gets the chance before Cragg (the way this DVD is organized) to state that he never refers to his work as sculpture, a way of handily sweeping Cragg and his cohorts into the dustpan of history without ever even having a fair fight about it.

Ancient memories and spirits

Our friend David Miller has a really wonderful interview with Hiroshi Sugimoto on the subject of spirituality in his on-line SFGate column "Finding My Religion" this week. Sugimoto divulges some amazing information about the travails and costs of creating his "Sea of Buddha" photograph in the interview, and makes clear his sense of not being a Buddhist artist, at least not in the sense of what Buddhism means to him in Japan. I loved Sugimoto's comment that in the process of doing the conceptual investigations that are his art process, he "sometimes stirs up ancient memories and spirits" (hence the title of this installment). Given the overall tone of the interview, he could've stopped with the "ancient memories" and been a logically consistent skeptic -- but he added the "spirits," whatever those are, into the mix.

Back from New York

Jenny, Elena and I spent five days (actually, four full days and six nights, plus flight time) in New York City and got back yesterday. Traveling with a twenty-two month old was wonderful and frustrating. The opportunity to see the world again through utterly fresh eyes is one of the great privileges of parenthood, of course, but the counter to that is that one's own visions of how one is going to experience things tend not to work out as planned. The Museum of Natural History's dinosaur bones and dioramas were perfect places to point at things and ask Elena "What's that?" She's at a point where she has enough categories to place things in that she can come up with a plausible, and sometimes creative, answer to almost any question like that (so for example she tended to identify dioramas of antelope or deer as "cows," "goats," or "horses" even as she internalized the words I said to her, "antelope" or "deer" or better, "koodoo" or "okapi"). She's also a bit obsessed right now with sea creatures, and spent a lot of time looking at fish or the remains of fish in the museum as at the Central Park Zoo. In fact, she spent as much time looking for a sticker on the floor with a picture of a sea star (aka starfish) that happened to be repeated throughout the dinosaur exhibits to point toward a special exhibition, as she did on anything else, running excitedly to the next sticker and sitting down on the floor to look closely at it each time.

The other side of the coin was that I saw a lot of the paintings I was hoping to see, but for no more than five or ten seconds at a time. Matisse's Red Studio, Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon,
the huge Kandinsky paintings, the vast Pollock, all at the MOMA, and then the Van Eyck and Workshop Last Judgement at the Met, were all seen with half an eye. I was able to take a bit more time in the Neo Rauch exhibition, and looking at some of the twentieth century work at the Met -- maybe Elena was napping. Warhol's monumental Mao was one of my favorites.

A serious museum

Kenneth Baker delivered a balanced though slippery non-story about developments at the DeYoung Museum in the Chronicle yesterday. What it comes down to is that people are complaining about an apparent softening of content in exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums, in spite of three very substantial shows either on now (Hiroshi Sugimoto at the DeYoung and a huge exhibition of works on paper from the Achenbach at the Legion of Honor) or coming soon (Louise Nevelson). The substantial shows have been counterweighted by a series of fashion and decorative art exhibitions, as well as a coming exhibition of glasswork by Dale Chihuly. I have to say that I don't think the criticism is very substantial, but it's a glass half full situation -- all a matter of how one interprets things through the prism of public relations. I really do think the Sugimoto show is one of the best presentations of contemporary art to have happened at the DeYoung, and in fact I think it holds its own against shows at SFMOMA because of the respect given to the Sugimoto's decisions about how to present his work. As a docent I've never seen audiences so engaged with contemporary work at the DeYoung, and it's been a great pleasure to tour the show with people willing to take time to respond to the work as well as ask questions and discuss their own responses to it. I don't remember any comparable exhibition being put on during the tenure of Harry Parker, so I give the new director the credit for bringing Sugimoto here and not doing it in a cursory way (i.e., re-hanging based on the previous venues).

As for the fashion shows, and likewise the decorative arts and craft art shows, I tend not to go through them myself (another example Baker could have highlighted was the exhibition of French jewelry recently at the Legion) even though in the back of my mind I think that as someone who wants to be an artist I should be looking at them as source material just as I do anything else that's in my world. But these shows are great favorites with my fellow docents, because of their personal tastes and also because they tend to be experiences that can be nicely augmented with information that can be communicated during a tour. I guess Monet in Normandy, the great "real art" crowd-pleaser of recent years at the Legion of Honor, was a more substantial program than the fashion shows -- but really, on the ground it all comes down to pleasure.

Terrible twos

A couple of days ago I finished reading Your Two-Year-Old: Terrible or Tender (no question mark -- I was tagging one on out of long experience in the supermarket aisles), a book from the Gessel Institute of Human Development by Louise Bates Ames. It's one of my two favorites among the many books I've read in preparation for Elena, which I was doing at least a year before she was born. (The other is What's Going on in There?, and that one does have a question mark in the title.)

Total eclipse of the moon

We got up at 3:30 to see what we could of the lunar eclipse. We could tell we'd missed the maximum -- there was already a stripe of light around the left edge of the moon -- but there was still something mysterious and wonderful about it, and about going outside in the middle of the night with Elena to see it. And Elena learned the word "eclipse" to account for her untimely waking...

Painting and work

A week of painting is tonic for my forming soul, but the only way I've been able to manage the time for that so far is take vacation for one week painting workshops, once at the S.F. Art Institute the summer before Elena was born, and now in the week just past with Eva Bovenzi at U.C. Berkeley Extension. If I were to work as a painter of paintings full-time, I imagine doing it the way I gather Germans like Gerhard Richter and Neo Rauch do, as a very clearly delineated "work time" rather than as an unstructured process that would certainly (were I to take it up tomorrow) leave me napping and reading eight hours for every one of actual painting.

Afternoon ultimatum

My sister Lisa is visiting, and made Jenny and I a wonderful gift by babysitting Elena for a couple of hours yesterday so we could go to a matinee. We went to see The Bourne Ultimatum, and quite enjoyed it. The non-linear narrative elements of film (editing and charismatic performance) overwhelm all doubts...

Soul downloads

I finished Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon over the weekend. My brother Charles had passed it on to me several years ago, but something about the Wired look of the cover design had put me off until I did some shifting on my bookshelves and it came to surface a month or so back. The packaging of cyberpunk has become pretty annoying to my tastes, and the blurb on the cover advertising the book as a combination of cyberpunk and hardboiled noir struck me as a humorous redundancy (cyberpunk being essentially a combination of science-fiction and noir in the first place), but once I got past the cover the theme of selves being uploaded and downloaded engrossed me and induced a Philip K. Dickish existential vertigo. Morgan's idea of how the up and down loading would happen involves in the first place a neural implant called the "stack" which stores one's identity in terms of memory and narrative, and is periodically archived to allow the possibility of being revived from a recent "version" of oneself. Beyond the body one is born into, the idea is that one gets "sleeved" by one's "stack" being implanted into another body, either artificially grown or belonging to someone who's lost the right to it. So there are questions of whether storage of anything can be sufficient to reconstruct a sense of self in an organism, whether the loss of continuity (experienced as death by the original organism) can possibly be replaced by the conviction of a new organism that it is the continued identity of the self, and how much or how little the body into which this self is injected can change/transform/reject that self. All raised at least tangentially in the course of a detective story narrative. I guess my prejudices are indicated by my use of the word "organism": a novelistic treatment isn't going to be enough to convince me that the death of the organism is real, irrespective of whether the "information" that somehow equals the identity of that organism survives. Isn't that after all a part of what art is about? And isn't that one of the differences between an organism and an imagined protagonist?

On Peaks

I've read Gary Snyder's poetry occasionally but with satisfaction as part of the process of what I might term living through my history, reading his first couple of books as a byproduct of encountering him through the distorting glass of Kerouac's Dharma Bums in my early teens, and out of a generalized passion for poetry basedon a then intense desire to be a poet; then reading Turtle Island in the mid 70's, the last historical moment when Snyder's world-view came closest to becoming "established," and he won the Pulitzer Prize; and now, after all the intervening decades of our retrenchment, in Danger on Peaks, a book which I guess is already a year or two old. The true north of Snyder's approach to Buddhism gives the latest work a commonality with the earliest that is not the same thing as a lack of development, philosophically or poetically.

I loved the following poem because I've driven the Grapevine in varying degrees of awareness so many times, and the poem seems to distill all of that experience, my own and that of the millions of others who travel that river:

In the Santa Clarita Valley

Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up
hexagonal "Denny's" sign
starry "Carl's"
loopy "McDonald's"
eight-petaled yellow "Shell"
blue-and-white "Mobil" with a big red "O"

growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.

The play of the apostrophes in the poem, the open-heartedness toward the trademarks as if they were phenomena in the natural world, or really the tuning to the way the nature emerges in the man-made world in spite of or even through the commercial attempt to own the world, really delight me.

Then the following, with further awareness of the motorized world as a kind of anonymous nature, but this time a death-dealing nature -- also a perfect Buddhist obituary:

For Anthea Corinne Snyder Lowry

1932-2002

She was on the Marin County Grand Jury, heading to a meeting,
south of Petaluma on the 101. The pickup ahaead of her lost a grass-
mower off the back. She pulled onto the shoulder, and walked right
out into the lane to take it off. That had always been her way. Struck
by a speedy car, an instant death.




White egrets standing there
always standing there
there at the crossing

on the Petaluma River

North San Juan

We spent Sunday evening (after a wrong turn that cost us an hour), Monday, and Tuesday morning in North San Juan, where my brother Charles, sister-and-law Laura, and nephew Randy live on the most expansive of the Svoboda properties. It was a family reunion: Susie, Stephane and Luca were visiting from France, and Stevie just made it over after returning from two weeks in Bali. Others stayed in tents in the front yard, but Jenny, Elena and I stayed at a very pleasant bed and breakfast, Milano's Inn, run by Frank and Jeanie Milano, built from the ground up by the two of them. North San Juan is a part of the world where people do things like that by themselves; fortunately for me, I didn't have to compare myself with them all day, and we returned to Oakland in time for the National Night Out Ice Cream Social at the local toddler's park, where Elena ran herself to exhaustion while we met our neighbors and discussed preschools with them.

Consciousness and identity

This week's Nature has a story about restoration of consciousness to a person in a "minimally conscious state". What I understand of the approach is that it involves stimulating portions of the brain that enable a rebuilding of consciousness. The story raises a lot of exciting and troubling ethical questions for me, on both sides of what one might call the Terri Schiavo Fissure in popular thinking about medical ethics. Obviously one implication of the story is that people who would previously have been allowed (or encouraged) to die are actually candidates for recovery of a sort (and it's easy for a naive reader like me to extend that hope to the next category of unconsciousness on the way to total nonexistence, the "persistent vegetative state" that was actually Terri Schiavo's, though I should stress that the authors of the Nature paper, or rather the popular review of the paper that precedes the paper itself, and which I actually read, are emphatic in stating that nothing discovered in this therapeutic method would extend to the persistently vegetative), making it more difficult to decide when to pull the plug on someone, or to plan to pull the plug on oneself (and by the way, I join Richard Poussette-Dart in the category of people who do want extraordinary measures taken to keep me alive if it should come to that). But there's also the question that should circle around scorpion-like to bite the fundamentalists, which is whether the consciousness restored is the same identity that was previously lost, even at this stage in the development of therapies, and whether if there is no common identity there can be said to be a common soul before and after the loss and recovery. I don't know whether any personal memory accompanies the restoration of consciousness from the near zero state of minimal consciousness, but what if there is none? Would the nexus of relationships with people whom one finds waiting for one's recovery be enough of a system of memory to qualify as a persistent identity? It's as easy to construe the Nature story as an argument against the existence of the soul as it is to construe it as one in favor...

Big Hands

I did my second docent tour of the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition at the DeYoung yesterday. Something I had never noticed was pointed out by two different women who'd looked at the Wax Museum portraits of Henry VIII's six wives: their hands look, as the first woman put it, "like man's hands," meaning they are disproportionately large. The question was whether the disproportion was the result of Sugimoto's chosen photographic point of view (for example, a question of focus), the craft of the wax museum figure-makers (who might have made the hands out-size to clarify their getures), or as a result of faithful translation of the original drawings/paintings by Hans Holbein (on the supposition that portraits commonly do the hands larger because it looks more correct, at least on first view).

Belgian Danish Tsotsi

At the Grand Lake Farmer's Market, we (Elena and I) bought a Belgian Danish for Elena because Panorama Bakery wasn't present, so we had to find an alternative source of sweet baked goods -- we'd have bought a Panorama chocolate chip cookie otherwise. The Belgian Danish wasn't a complete success, although Elena enjoyed picking out the raisins. No repeated requests for "more." We also bought a couple of fresh ears of white corn, which Elena eats raw, a cantaloupe which Jenny says was good, and a saucisson sec from the French charcuterie booth. Then we went to the DeYoung Museum and gave an informal tour to Maria and her relatives of the contemporary collections, the Art of the Americas, and the current Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition. The general favorites were Deborah Oropallo's temporary exhibition of gender superimpositions on paper and in tapestry, and the Sugimoto. Vanessa, a friend of Maria's niece Melanie and newly graduated like her from high school, asked me how Jess got the oil paint so thick in his paintings and then scratched the titles of books out in the paint -- I didn't know.

After putting Elena to bed last night, Jenny and I finally watched Tsotsi, on DVD -- we've had it out from Netflix for weeks. The story element of the very small baby being cared for ignorantly by the young thug protagonist was really hard for Jenny to take, but I thought the movie presented the desperation and emotional stuntedness of a world built by orphans of AIDS better than any fictional depiction of children gone savage (e.g., Lord of the Flies which we all read in high school), and thought the central performance was terrific even if most of the accompanying roles weren't so perfect and tended toward melodrama.

Wireless transmission of power

There was an article in Science News (I think it was this week, though the way I read it I just pick up whatever's sitting on the kitchen table when it happens to catch my eye) about developments in the wireless transmission of power, via a magnetic field over a short distance that isn't harmful to humans and other living things (assuming you don't believe the whole anecdotal argument about how unnatural magnetic fields harm the organism). The experiment described managed to power a light bulb remotely, and the immediate direction of development is for powering wireless devices, but the practical possibility of such a thing also hearkens back to the proposals of Nicolai Tesla for sending pulses of large amounts of power over great distances, which for some reason I translated into my dream imagination as fireballs conveyed by catapult from mountain top to mountain top... When I first came to PG&E I worked with a Portuguese electrical engineer named Luis Ferreira who thought Tesla had been taken down in a criminal way by my namesake, Thomas Alva Edison, and loved describing his proposals as if they were in fact good solutions to the distribution of electrical energy (as the Science News report mentions, corporate support of Tesla's work was pulled when the investors realized Tesla had no way of billing for the energy he wanted to send abroad...)

Meanwhile, my last dream of the night was about giants, one-eyed giants like the ones in the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe movie from Disney (I still want to delve into Matthew Barney's role in the imagery of that film) rampaging around in houses, people including myself cowering and unable to do anything about them. I woke up when it looked as though the giant was going to go after Elena, who was with me -- the first time I think that I've seen her in my dreams.

Vitamins

I start my day with juice and vitamins purportedly for "medical" reasons, because of a book I read a couple of years ago on "improving one's memory" (really, preventing Alzheimer's) by an author claiming to be a doctor. Given that any internal sense of mental clarity that I derive from this (mostly) daily procedure could almost certainly be equally well produced by taking placebo pills, I have to regard my ritual as a kind of superstition, a desire for "effects at a distance" without a need for definitive scientific truth. So then why do I make fun of Jenny's interest in homeopathic medicines? Only because I read a story in Science News indicating no measurable effects of same, while I haven't read the comparable story on "Neuro-Optimizer" pills or Acetyl L-Carnitine in that journal...

Old New York

I'm reading Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, originally recommended by my friend David, whose father had had a copy. Feature journalism in Mitchell's mode was meant to combine studies of the human condition with the preservation of the world he circulated in. His profiles of eccentrics can have the parabolic heft of Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories, about which I want to write more; and at the same time they are redolent of the New York City I got a glimpse of in the Sixties when I went to visit my grandmother, who lived on East 86th Street in an area known as "Yorkville."

Back from Monterey

We took a two-day trip to Monterey with David and Kim and their daughter Gabriella, which Elena pronounces "Gabella" or "Lalalalella" depending on the occasion. I hadn't been to the Aquarium before. Jenny and Elena visited the last time we were in Monterey, a month ago (in the meantime, I attended a conference on energy regulation put on by Rutgers). The big tanks, especially the Kelp Forest and the Outer Bay, possess a sculptural vitality. The ceaseless rounds of the fish, subtly illuminated, overwhelm or at least counteract the soporific muzak which I have to believe is intended as much for crowd control as to serve as aural backdrop. The deep clarity of the water and the varieties of fish coexisting but not interacting (meaning the sharks and tunas don't eat the other fish but are fed by the aquarium keepers) induce a mental state of exhilaration and awe that reminds me of my reaction to the work of Bill Viola at SFMOMA a few years ago.

We ate at a really excellent Mexican restaurant called the Mexcal where the staff were endlessly tolerant of our not-quite-two-year-olds and served superb margaritas and food with a variety of influences from Oaxaca to Acapulco, all excellent (I would particularly recommend the Nachos Azadas).

The other great highlight of the trip was drifting in the Casa Munras' blood-warm swimming pool as the cold fog of the Monterey afternoon rolled in...