“There was a time before the Internet. Innovation and creativity were different then…” p. 104 The Future of Ideas

copyright, patent, intellectual property rights, end to end, World Wide Web, media, the future of technology, the history if the internet, commons

the tragedy of the commons

a list of changes I wasn’t looking for, but have now made actual by witnessing them, r.i.p.:

• Rite Aid — closed, empty
• Hollywood Video — closed, empty
• Circuit City — all remnants of the red now gone
• Mann Festival on Lindbrook closed — “thanks for your patronage”
• National Theatre on Lindbrook closed and demolished (you can still see in on Google Maps street view for living in the past)
• Native Foods — you no longer order at the counter? it’s still as tiny as in memory though
• gift store on west side of Westwood Blvd. where i once bought a prism — closed, empty, along with nearly everything else on the block. There was once a Hawaiian BBQ place.

This is just recent changes. This is just in an accidental few-block tour of the mini-city.

There have been other slower and faster deaths through the years. There are other disappearances I didn’t bother to seek out.

“The years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.” — C.G. Jung reflecting on Liber Novus (The Red Book)

The “Milgram Experiment,” along with the Stanford Prison Experiment, is probably one of the better-known sociological experiments of the ’60s / ’70s. While I knew the basics (a person goes in for a psychological experiment—supposedly about the affects of punishment on learning—and is told by an experimenter to shock the “learner” (actually an actor) with increasingly higher voltage), the book was good in explaining how they varied the experiment to delve into the reasons for people’s behavior. Milgram and his colleagues were surprised at the percentages of people who obeyed the experimenter and shocked the “learner” while he is strapped down to a chair and protesting in pain, so they did a thorough job of investigating the reasons for this unexpected behavior. They also went beyond proving that people tend to obey authority and tested out what constitutes “authority.”

Roles: “teacher” — the actual subject, the person who came in for the supposed learning experiment; “learner” — an actor supposedly getting shocked; “experimenter” — the person in charge of the experiment

In the most basic version the teacher and learner arrive, are told by the experimenter about the learning experiment, and draw assignments from a hat as to who will be learner and who will be teacher. The drawing is rigged, but it’s an important aspect of the experiment (one of very few topics that Milgram doesn’t address as much as I would have liked) that the teacher think that he/she could just as easily have been in the other role, getting shocked.

The book is well worth reading, and I won’t get into all Milgram’s explanations and findings, but here are the versions of the experiment:

Experiment (# of people) (explanation)

1 Remote (40) (learner in the other room, strapped down, but no feedback; only deterrent is that shock levels are labeled as dangerous)

2 Voice-Feedback (40) (learner in the other room, strapped down and yelling in pain after the 150v shock level)

3 Proximity (40) (learner in the same room)

4 Touch-Proximity (40) (learner in the same room and refusing to be shocked, teacher must hold his hand to shock pad to proceed)

5 More Meager Lab (40) (new version of same experiment — this lab is not as fancy looking)

6 Change of Personnel (40) (if the learner seems more dominating, would that change things?)

7 Experimenter Absent (40) (experimenter leaves the room, is available by phone to tell the teacher to continue administering shocks)

8 Women (40) (all other groups were men only; this is male experimenter, male learner, female teacher)

9 Heart Condition (40) (learner begins the experiment by mentioning he has a minor heart condition)

10 Office Building (40) (setting is local office building instead of university lab)

11 Subject Chooses Shock Level (40) (teacher does not administer shocks beyond the maximum level he feels comfortable shocking the victim at)

12 Learner Demands to Be Shocked (20) (experimenter says let’s stop, but learner says let’s go on)

13 Ordinary Man Gives Orders (20) (instead of the experimenter being in charge, another supposed subject (actually another actor) is involved — another rigged drawing puts the three in their roles)

13a Subject as Bystander (16) (if in 13, the teacher refuses to admister shocks, the third person says “If you won’t, I will”)

14 Authority as Victim (20) (learner refuses to be shocked until he sees the experimenter go through the situation first)

15 Two Authorities, Contradictory Commands (20) (two experimenters giving opposite commands — continue / stop)

16 Two Authorities, One as Victim (20) (combination of 15 and 14)

17 Two Peers Rebel * (40) (there are three co-teachers (two of them are actors), and the two opt out at certain points)

18 Peer Administers Shocks (40) (subject is in the room in teacher role, but co-teacher with someone else who has to actually push the button)

*This is the only one that’s not entirely satisfyingly explained, which Milgram admits. More of the “teachers” refused to finish the experiment in this situation, but is that peer influence, or realizing there are no repercussions for quitting, or the idea of quitting being introduced as an option, or feeling judged by the other two (who remain in the room) for proceeding when they didn’t, etc.

in philosophy
Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling — Abraham as more than the knight of infinite resignation, as the knight of faith, facing down the absurd, and furthermore willing it

in philosophy / philology
Crispin Sartwell: End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History — references Job and Abraham (à la Kierkegaard) as examples of loss of telos / loss of plot / loss of a “sense of narrative coherence” (18)

in sociology
Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority — cites the Abraham story as an example of the age-old “dilemma” of obedience (preface)

in song
Bob Dylan: “Highway 61 Revisited” — “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’”

in fiction
Neil Simon: God’s Favorite — Job modernized and made comical

in philosophy / anthropology
René Girard: Job the Victim of his People — Job as scapegoat (not yet read)

in psychology
C.G. Jung: Answer to Job and Edward F. Edinger: Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job (not yet read)

other disturbing lessons:
Cain and Abel (in fiction: East of Eden by John Steinbeck)

David and Bathsheba and Uriah (in fiction: God Knows by Joseph Heller)

the prodigal son (As a child I objected to the prodigal son getting a feast while the “good” son gets no reward. As an adult I’m frustrated that my brain is stuck believing “prodigal” means someone who has gone away and now returned. I always have to concentrate to land on the right definition.)

(I discovered this not by looking up Heaviside, though he would’ve deserved as much, but by reading about Tesla’s research into transmitting power and energy wirelessly. I thought something like, “Hey, there’s Heaviside again. This guy I’d never heard of until yesterday certainly gets around. Where has he been all my life?” (an approximation… my actual thought was more along the lines of “Should I have heard of him? Was I just not paying attention in physics?”))

Notes:

Crawford
-Hitler wanted to “cleanse” music too; wanted to get rid of the culture of chaos in the Weimar Republic

-book covers 31 of the musicians who immigrated to L.A. during the Nazi era including composers and all kinds of performers, especially focused on those with paper “legacy” for research — letters etc.

-utilized Gladys Caldwell’s collection of newspaper articles about live music reviews starting from the ’20s from LAPL

-writers came to L.A. too and some of these people knew each other (Mann, Brecht); émigré circles

-chapter about film composers — how they saved themselves as “composers” (didn’t want to be looked down on as film composers only); composer for Errol Flynn movies

-in those days in Hollywood every studio had a full orchestra

-LACC opera workshop, first of its kind (i.e. at public school); but no opera in L.A. until 1986 which was tough for many of the composers who came from opera-rich Europe, so singers trained in L.A. had to go to Europe

-why did so many of these artists end up in L.A.? tried other European cities first but the Great Depression meant quotas had been set up to save jobs for locals, whereas the film industry had a lot of jobs to go around. +, of course, the weather

-Ojai Festival

-people saving their money to bring people out of Europe

Kraft
-after the wars arts take on a new dimension: after WWI experimentation (Schoenberg 12-tone), after WWII trying to make order from the chaos; in these cases didn’t draw on the past so much

-Tom Mix westerns uncredited composers

-”no minor chords” (Sam Goldwyn)

-L.A. Music Festival (Waxman)

-playing “donuts” = whole notes

*3 “Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim?” by Laurence C. Smith
–how global warming will affect where we settle with consideration to infrastructure already in place in Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia

*17 “Mirror Neurons: Are We Ethical by Nature?” by Christian Keysers
–how one person’s premotor cortex, for ex., will mirror that of someone they’re watching perform a task and how that might be an argument for “intuitive altruism”

*26 “How to Enhance Human Beings” by Nick Bostrom
–a look at possible enhancements with a look to why evolution may not have already enhanced us in these ways (”changed trade-offs,” “value discordance,” and/or “evolutionary restrictions”)

41 “Our Place in an Unnatural Universe” by Sean Carroll
–entropy, physics

53 “Just What Is Dark Energy?” by Stephon H. S. Alexander
–dark matter/cosmological constant

70 “Development of the Social Brain in Adolescence” by Sarah-Jayne Blackmore
–social brain / mentalizing, brain doesn’t stop changing in early childhood

*78 “Watching Minds Interact” by Jason P. Mitchell
–social brain

90 “What Makes Big Ideas Sticky” by Matthew D. Lieberman
–Descartes vs. Becher, Eastern vs. Western culture, are our brains predisposed to believe or need to believe certain things?

*105 “Fruit Flies of the Moral Mind” by Joshua D. Greene
–moral dilemmas, are our “moral” decisions based on evolutionary instincts? and how do these interact in a newly technological world that evolution hasn’t yet caught up with?

*117 “How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?” by Lera Boroditsky
–how the structure of language might impact culture, the Kuuk Thaayorre in Australia always use cardinal directions to indicate direction (instead of “left” “right” “behind”) (doesn’t seem to adequately explain that it’s language that causes the difference in thought and not thought that causes the difference in language or some other cause)

*131 “Memory Enhancement, Memory Erasure: The Future of Our Past” by Sam Cooke
–nootropics, erasing memories, creating memories

145 “The Vital Importance of Imagination” by Deena Skolnick Weisberg
–differences in imagination between children and adults, imagination as a tool for learning

*156 “Brain Time” by David M. Eagleman
–how our brain handles the fact that sensory input happening at the same time takes different amounts of time to reach our brain

171 “Out of Our Minds: How Did Homo sapiens Come Down from the Trees, and Why Did No One Follow?” by Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare
–dogs, silver foxes, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans: communication and cooperation

186 “The Aliens Among Us” by Nathan Wolfe
–viruses: the good and the bad

*198 “How Did the Social Insects Become Social?” by Seirian Sumner
–socially polymorphic bees and wasps that can choose to be social or not: are these the evolutionary link between non-social and wholly social? what are the evolutionary benefits of having only one queen?

212 “Extinction and the Evolution of Humankind” by Katerina Havarti
–the extinction of other branches of humankind

225 “Why Hasn’t Specialization Led to the Balkanization of Science?” by Gavin Schmidt
–is interdisciplinary study better than specialization?

*my favorites, but they’re all very interesting

brief notes:

Rita Gonzalez (Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art) and Alex Klein (Ralph M. Parsons Curatorial Fellow, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department)
Intro:
-Anthony McCall: “In recent years, the art world has paid a lot of attention to work in film and video, yet the dichotomy between avant-garde film (and video) makers, and artists ‘working in film/video,’ still seems to be with us. Despite the important role being played by museums such as the Whitney in bridging this divide, the two worlds sometimes seem like Crick and Watson’s double helix, spiraling closely around one another without ever quite meeting.”
-how film is physically presented and therefore historicized
-ruining actual context with ~artificial art context?
-ramifications of sudden commodification of film as “art”
-where is film located disciplinarily and institutionally?
-time-based work in gallery setting

Gloria Sutton, art historian, emphasis on Stan VanDerBeek
-his quote new “aesthetics of anticipation” vs. older “aesthetics of meditation”
-VanDerBeek worked with John Cage (Variations V)
-what is film? different forms edited different ways. Poemfields, BEFLIX; which print is the “actual” work?
-Movie-Drome – utopian vision, in some ways more the art than the actual place
-”expanded cinema” “experimental” “avant garde” American version
-Vision ‘65 using computers for graphic design etc.
-communication theories of Sontag and McLuhan
-his work was more about changing models of audience reception than technophilia; how people occupy space
-Kubelka’s Invisible Cinema
-steam screens
-utopian and dystopian use of technology

Stuart Comer, Curator of Film, Tate Modern
-why is the art museum the arbiter of value now?
-we haven’t yet figured out what the legacy of the recent era of experimental filmmakers is/will be
-only now being taken seriously because shown in commercial galleries—double edged sword—will drive up price at a point when the work needs to be archived before it literally starts falling apart
-like with VanDerBeek “where a certain medium was always being cannibalized and re-mediated through other media”
-not video installations, cinema presentations
-turbine space at the Tate

panel discussion / questions
-why not set up rooms/displays of the films: people walk by rather than engage with the film (vs. room w/ computers, where they sit and watch)
-the artists put requirements on how things should be displayed.
-what about artists who want the film to look/be legitimately degraded over the years; conflict with “art world” of archiving, saving, commodifying
-why current young artists use old mediums such at 16mm; fetishizing the past + a “wishful conversation across time”
-films recorded 16mm should be shown 16mm because that’s the work; but there is a role for showing archived versions–digital or youtube
-value is assigned to objects—so the actual film or the projector
-there are limited ways to develop / produce certain kinds of film, so why engage with that? (because of that?)
-roles of curators, politics of museums
-when museum “owns” work, do they have the “right” to do what they want with it?
-models of spectatorship are culturally inculcated

I miss you terribly
I’m terrible at missing you
It’s terrible this missing you

how is it that the people who keep you from feeling lonely also make you feel the loneliest?

“It’s more than I could have wished / hoped / asked for, but it’s not what i wished / hoped / asked for” (and other thankful ingratitudes)

tension crowds the dirty streets and the
why can’t I why can’t I meet;
complacent on a Sunday afternoon,
complicit with the gloom

“If I’m a spider, I don’t want to be sprayed with Lysol, you know?”

Notes:

Ch. 1 Why Aren’t Our Cities Like That?
-leaders as architects: FDR (amateur) and Jefferson vs. Louis XIV
-from the French: avenues = important diagonal streets; boulevards = broad promenades
-”With very few exceptions… we have made street corners, not plazas, into symbolic civic places.” (27) Hollywood/Vine or Times Square vs. Red Square or Piazza San Marco
-John Lukacs on American restlessness: we have street corners b/c we are mobile; we are mobile because we have a vast continent to move on in (34)

Ch 2. The Measure of a Town
-word roots: German (burg), French (bourg, ville), Latin (urbs, rus), Old English (t?n), Old French (cité), Spanish (ciudad), Italian (cittá)
-American city planner Kevin Lynch’s three conceptual models for cities: cosmic, practical, organic
-French historian Fernand Braudel’s three stages in early history of English gowns: open, closed, subjugated

Ch 3. A New, Uncrowded World
-Hispanic vs. French vs. English colonial urbanization
-The Laws of the Indies
-Native American settlements

Ch. 4 A Frenchman in New York
-Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave-Auguste de Beaumont
-de Tocqueville on democracy leaving art at the mercy of the masses (101)
-New York as commercial capital, Boston as cultural capitol, and Washington as seat of govt. “This diffusion of powers was not accidental.” (104)

Ch. 5 In the Land of the Dollar
-the word “downtown” is of American origin

Ch. 6 Civic Art
-the skyscraper—symbol of commercialism in America (144)

Ch. 7 High Hopes
-1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition
-Le Corbusier
-highway construction as Pyrrhic victory—”There was a temporary creation of construction jobs, to be sure, but the highways (usually elevated) wrought physical havoc on the established urban fabric…” (161)
-Cabrini-Green, Chicago

Ch. 8 Country Homes for City People
-city vs. suburb

Ch. 9 The New Downtown
-the rise of malls
-private property/public space
-supermarkets (due to cars)

Ch. 10 The Best of Both Worlds