Is it Easier to be Half a Christian, or Half a Comedian?

Uses and Misuses of the English Language

In a recent newsletter from my pastor, I see that he quotes a book by Steven Furtlick titled Sun Stand Still.  Pastor Furtlick apparently dislikes a phrase from contemporary Christian practice: "full-time ministry."  He says, "I know what it's supposed to mean, but I vehemently disagree with its implications.  To say that someone is called to 'full-time ministry' suggests that others are permitted to do 'part-time' ministry."  He disagrees, and goes on to say that Jesus "didn't die on a part-time cross."  He says, "There's no such thing as a part-time Christian, and [ so therefore ] there's no such thing as a part-time ministry."

This passion (which I do admire, separate from any theological discussion) reminds me of the late, great George Carlin.  He said about the instructions to cook a turkey, how can one "pre-heat" an oven?  After all, there are only two possible states for an oven to be in, ON or OFF.  If it is on, even a little bit, it is a heating (or heated) oven.  If it is not, it is not.  After all (I will say, agreeing with his outrage), if in one's pre-heated oven, while inserting the turkey, one's hand touches the rack, then you're injured.  You're not pre-injured, you're just injured, and go ouch and reach for an ice pack.  Ovens are either on or off, either hot or cold.  If you turn the switch to off, are you pre-cooling it?

I suppose my kids might disagree with my analysis.  As a cook, I was (and am) notoriously casual about such things as measuring cups, cooking times, and, in fact, directions in general.  Next time somebody asks me what I am doing in the kitchen, perhaps I can answer, "pre-burning tonight's dinner."

George Carlin also objected to the phrase when in an airport that a given flight was about to begin pre-boarding.  As with an oven, either people are getting on (they are boarding) or they are not.  Who gets on first or second doesn't change that: the first folks to exit the terminal and walk down the jetway are not pre-boarding, they are completely and utterly boarding, plan and simple.  I do agree with him on this: to my mind, the only way any of us could preboard would be if they had some kind of module with all of the seats attached to it.  If in some kind of a holding area all the passengers took their seats in the module, and then, only later, if the module were lifted up by a skip loader and slid into the side of the plane sideways, THEN I would agree, we had pre-boarded.

Recently I heard a German banker talking about the Euro debt crisis.  He said (in very good English) that it is not just premature to talk about further loans and rescue attempts, but that it is MORE than premature.  This makes no sense to me.  How can something come before the fact that it has not yet come yet?  It is either a premature plan or else it is a timely plan, but it can't be a pre-premature plan yet.  That sounds like a biological impossibility: mom and dad haven't even met at Schooners yet for their first date, so the baby isn't premature because it does not even exist yet.

Of course we are used to living with contradictions and redundant phrases.  I am at a conference in Reno, whose central street has this sign:

Apparently, as little cities go, Reno used to be a littler little city, because I remember this same slogan from the mid-1960s, and the sign was definitely smaller then.  (If I can find that image, I will add it to this post once I get back to campus.)

Isn't this Reno phrase a sort of demographic impossibility?  If it's a little city, it can't also be a big city.  Only in particle physics can light be a particle and a wave at the same time.  In Newtonian physics, big is big and small is small.  If it keeps growing, will Reno some day be the littlest big city in the world?  And, eventually, with a few more malls and casinos, then the middle-littlest big city in the world?  The expression makes no sense.

We use the term at AVC that so and so is a "part-time student."  I feel about this the way that Pastor Furtlick feels about Christians.  One either is a student or one isn't, and if one is, then learning and growth and discovery are constant goals, constant companions.  I would hope that whether one is taking six units or twenty-six, the openness to ideas and new ways of being would be equally present.  (As Furtlick might say, one does not go to just a part-time Heaven.  And for us, there are no half-credit degrees.  Either you have the credits for a degree or you do not: Dr. Fisher at commencement this coming June won't be handing out 3/4 diplomas or 5/8th ones.  All or nothing, in learning as it is in life.)

Of course maybe for some of my students, the ones, say, texting during the lectures, we might say that they have already started to pre-fail the final exam....

T.S. Eliot's iPad

More Developments with Digital Books

I had lunch with one of my editors last week and he was joking yet a little bit serious when he said, "How long until you have your first iPad book, Hood?"

"Five years," was my answer, surprising even me, as it came out of my mouth.  That it is coming is certain; that for poetry it may not be immediate is also true.  The start-up costs are too high, at least initially.

Of course if I wanted to be serious about photography, that "five years" answer might be smaller: most professional photographers now use an iPad as their portfolio when meeting with clients and art directors, and many of the publishers of high-end "art" photography books (what are sometimes called monographs or coffee table books, as opposed to "how to shoot a wedding" kind of photo book) will either be dual platform (hard copy and e-version) or e-version alone.

This series before has talked about Kindle versus conventional books.  Now the Kindle seems like old news in the million-miles-a-minute way that computer technologies evolve; it is the Nook and the iPad and other digital platforms that seem to be the newest stars in the sky.  Amazon supposedly has its own iPad kind of super reader in the works too --- the only surprising thing is that it took them so long.

Exciting book formats can be found on an iPad, to be sure.  A Kindle is fun and useful and may be the future of textbooks.  Cal State Bakersfield, for example, allows students to take literature courses uses the Kindle as their platform of choice, if they do not want to use a "real" book.  But a Kindle is no iPad, and not be able to catch up.  As an example of this, Santi Tafarella, our Antelope Valley blog king (featured here recently and also in the campus paper), showed me over the summer a T.S. Eliot application on his iPad.

Eliot is the best-known, most academically-certified poet in English language arts and letters since the Romantics; his 1922 book-length poem, The Wasteland, represents Modernism in literature the way that Picasso does in art or the Beatles do for rock.  Brilliant, dense, complicated, allusive, elusive, and poly-lingual, with references in six languages and sudden jump cuts in mood and scene, this poem repays serious study.  But it's not the sort of thing that one might expect to be a best seller.

On the iPad though, the presentation of this text is so rich and engaging, with so many "valued added products" to borrow from marketing, that we even had a discussion about just that one app at our department's summer comp retreat.

Now it is Jack Kerouac's On the Road that has come up as profoundly better and different in its iPad version.  According to an article in the current issue of Poets & Writers, it even briefly outsold electronic versions of the Bible.  From that same article, here is this heads-up: "For the time being, plain text still rules the e-book roost, but it's clear that the industry is concerned that the ascendancy of the tablet may signal the obsolescence of dedicated e-readers."  The article further reminds readers that there are over 200 million iPad-driven tablets already in use, and since it's Apple's number one money maker right now, they don't plan to limit production any time soon.

Maybe when my editor asked me about poetry for the iPad, my answer should have been, "Well, how soon I get one out depends on you.  How soon do you plan to hirer a coder and get me released as an app?"  Development costs for Apple are just the price of doing business, and given that they bring in billions of dollars a month (NOT a typo), they have the capital to re-invest.  Most small presses that I know, the companies releasing poetry and indy rock and oddball theatrical pieces and hybrid art-novel-performances, which is to say, the companies doing now what T.S. Eliot was doing in 1922, can't afford big bucks for iPad development.  After editor A asked me my lunch question, I went to editor B, at another firm, a publisher with whom I also release books. I asked them the same question.  How long until you're doing iPad editions?

Press B just said flat out, "We can't get into that right now --- we don't have the staff, we don't have the marketing department, we don't even have the demo iPads laying around the office for people to fiddle with."  I appreciate this.  Reality is reality.  I would like to get into larger format photography, but a top-end large-negative digital camera, like the ones that they use to shoot the cover of Cosmo magazine, would cost $40,000.  Thanks but no thanks.  For now I will stick with my Nikons.

So the i-Book route may not be feasible . . . yet.  It may well be that do-it-yourself versions (conversion kits for amateurs) will come along eventually --- something that for $100 I can buy, plug my Word manuscript into, and bingo, a small press can use a few simple templates and have the iPad version. 

So what do you think.  Five years?

Maybe ten.  But then again, maybe not, maybe just two.  Maybe one.

Maybe tomorrow.

Until then, there's always the old fashioned delivery methods.  Not hand-made Bibles from monks, not printed books, not Kindles --- I am talking about license plates.  And on that note, good night.

Electric Cars, Wind Turbines, and Logical Fallacies

contrarian thoughts on alternative energy

Among the faculty at AVC there are a fair number of shop-at-Trader-Joe's, voted-for-Obama, left-of-center types, and among those (many of whom are dear friends and fabulous teachers) there's a vague sense that wind turbines are a good thing, as are electric cars.

Indeed, in the newly redone parking lots, shaded now with the ubiquitous solar panels, there are electric car charging stations.

I've not seen anybody at them, but I assumed it was all vaguely for the public good.

A photography expert, Ken Rockwell, writes a very respected independent photo blog, and while his Libertarian politics do manifest themselves, on average, he stays clear of general politics or cultural commentary.  He did break that rule recently, to talk about electric cars.  While I encourage you to see the site itself (kenrockwell.com), some of his points are so provocative, they merit discussion here.

Among the points he raises are these.

---Electric cars consume huge amounts of electrical power.  Rockwell: "One electric car consumes as much power in typical operation as four homes."

---If electric cars become widespread, we will need to increase energy output.  That means not just more power plants (up to four times as many as now exist, if the USA went all electric) but four times as many transmission lines and sub-stations.  The skyline would be nothing but utility towers, from horizon to horizon.

While some phone poles have a kind of quaint, "out West" feel along a deserted road, we hardly need more things to create even more visual static. 

---Rockwell again: "It is ironic that the same people who worry about replacing real bulbs with carcinogenic CFL bulbs loaded with mercury, lead, EMI and EMF just to save five watts are the same ones mislead into thinking that an electric car that charges at 10,000 watts overnight on 440V three-phase [ equipment ] is saving energy."

---One problem is the inherent waste in the system.  No car is 100% efficient, nor are the transmission systems efficient, nor the production methods, even with nuclear power (which has its own very problematic ancillary issues).  "When you ignore all the free subsidies handed out like cocaine to get people hooked," he says, then you have to admit that "electric cars need to burn about four times as much [ oil ] to fuel the [ average ] power plant compared to just burning it in your car."  He does the math: "75% of the heat energy of combustion is wasted converting heat to spinning motion in a power plant, [ then ] converting that motion to electricity, transmission to your home, storage in a battery, and conversion back into motion in your car, all with more heat lossses over simply burning the same fuel in your car to make that motion directly."

---A final point of concern is a bit dystopian, but may make some of us pause: "Repressive governments love electric cars, because as soon as power is cut during an uprising, no one can recharge their cars until the civil unrest subsides and the government chooses to restore power."  This assumes that we could buy and pump gasoline without electricity (which, on average, we can't), and assumes too, the refineries and distribution infrastructure would be intact (which it might not be), but I do love the point itself.  Be careful what you give up, as you may want it back one day.

But what about the wind?  That's clean, right?  Couldn't a wind-powered sailboat car park here?

I am in the minority who don't find miles of windmills on the ridges attractive, but that's no reason not to go full-ahead with wind farms, so long as they do what are promised.

But do they?  If we ignore who builds the ball-bearings and which countries sell us the rare metals for the innards and where the money comes from to install them, once up, are wind turbines an answer to everything?

Not for the wildlife.  Ever see those Star Wars kinds of sci-fi films where the hero has to cross a narrow catwalk then dodge between the spinning blades of a turbine fan?  It is like trying to make your way through a garbage grinder.

That is what wind farms are to things that fly, namely hawks, eagles, songbirds, and bats.

Bat Conservation International has a page about bats versus wind turbines on their website.  They claim to have the documentation that shows how "Wind-energy sites, especially those on ridge tops in the eastern United States, are causing unexpectedly high bat fatalities."  Don't think that this won't effect us.  Among the insect-eating species, one bat can eat 600 mosquitoes in an hour, while other types prey on the moths whose larval forms destroy crops.  Other bats pollinate saguaro cactus and the plants that tequila comes from.

At Altamont Pass near San Francisco, 2000 eagles and hawks a year are killed, some chopped right in two, following their annual migration routes from Alaska down over the ridges towards wintering grounds in Mexico, the Antelope Valley, and other wide open spaces.  Just as a hang glider needs to use thermal winds to provide lift, so too for raptors, and where the wind flows through a series of turbines (over 6000 on those ridges as one leaves I-5 before Stockton for the swing west to San Francisco), it is murder alley.

Not all news is bad, though, and after many years of debate, the relevant utility companies are going to start dismantling the old style "lethal" windmills and replace them which much taller units that not only can generate a lot more juice per pole, but also will be placed to cause much less harm to the residents of that airspace.

(A note on photo sources: while almost all of the photos in this blog are by Charles Hood or else are clearly credited to their source, this osprey, above, is better than any of my reference pictures, and came pre-loaded on my Aperture photo software.  I don't know who took it, but it's a great shot!)

The world always seems to be a contradictory and unyielding place.  If electric cars soak up too much just and wind turbines place slice-n-dice with birds of prey, what's left?  Gas is expensive and running out (and probably causes global warming), solar power has yet to become significant, nuclear power is expensive and dangerous (especially in earthquake areas), and so-called "cold fusion" turned out to be a hoax.

I was talking about this once with somebody in Brazil, where they supplement a lot of their petrol with ethanol.  One man told me he had the perfect solution .... and patted his horse's head.

I guess the Lone Ranger never had to wait in line at Arco on a Friday night.  Hi ho Silver, awaaaay!

Liberty, 9/11, and a Million Blog Hits in the AV

Santi Tafarella Talks About the Ultimate Freedom: Uncensored Thinking

Recently AVC faculty member Santi Tafarella passed an amazing number. . . his independent, un-sponsored, just him in his PJs blog passed one million hits.  (That was over a month ago, and it's still scooting along.)  Titled "Prometheus Unbound," it talks about politics, museums, art, literature, religion, philosophy, and about ten thousand other topics besides.  As we approach the 9/11 weekend, here is what he has to say about his blog and its numbers. 

WHY I BLOG

Some people around campus have noticed that my blog, which I started in June of 2008, has passed the million hit mark and want to know why I blog. I'll offer three.

Here's my first answer. Freedom.

I named my blog after Percy Shelley's poem, Prometheus Unbound. Shelley was an atheist at a time when it was not safe to be an atheist, and in that poem Shelley imagines Prometheus, who famously stole fire from heaven on behalf of humanity, freed from the rock that the king of the gods, Zeus, had bound him to.

Shelley’s poem was a response to an ancient Greek play by Aeschylus titled Prometheus Bound. In Aeschylus’s version of the Prometheus myth, Zeus’s binding of Prometheus to a rock as punishment for stealing fire from heaven was completely justified. By Aeschylus’s lights, Prometheus had done something villainous because all beings must respect the sacred order. It is, according to Aeschylus, madness to fight the gods. You should know your place, and accept it.

But, as an atheist, Shelley didn’t accept his place. What he saw as wrong in the world—including what he found wrong in religion—he meant to change. And so, in his poem, he celebrates Prometheus and unbinds him. Shelley's Prometheus is a symbol of freedom (much as the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of freedom).

Likewise, my blog, named after Shelley’s Prometheus, is a place where I exercise my freedom; where I speak my mind.

I speak my mind on my blog because I'm of the opinion that adults can hear things. The first Americans fought a revolution in 1776 that individuals might obtain liberty, including the liberty to speak forthrightly in public. And a great deal of blood has been spilled since then to assure that we retain this liberty.

So, I blog because I'm a free individual. Because I'm a member of no flock. I'm not a sheep. Sheep don't blog (unless they're just repeating—bleating—what they hear around them). Sheep don't think. I'm a thinker. I think about things. And I speak.

Every time I put a blog post out into the world saying exactly what I think, not writing under a pseudonym, I strike a small blow for human integrity and greater intellectual freedom in the world. It's pushback against all would-be censors. And this is true of every person who takes up blogging, whatever their views on religion and politics, or what it is they choose to obsess about. It does wonders for the soul to exercise the habit of expressing yourself openly—to be out there, a free person in the world who will not be shut up. 

So when people ask me what I'm doing blogging, I ask them, if they claim to have free souls and minds, what they're doing not blogging.

The second reason I blog is to discover truth.

Socrates noticed that one way that a human being can come to the truth of a matter is by a process of dialectic—of dialogue—and blogging is ideal for this. This comes in two forms: inner dialogue and outer dialogue. When, for example, I'm writing a blog post, I'm in a Jacob-wrestling process of inner dialogue: Do I really believe what I'm saying? Should I say it differently? Is there a way I can say it better? What am I neglecting here?

And when the blog is posted, things shift to an outer dialogue: people will come around, read what I wrote, and in the comment threads (the "comboxes") throw me for a loop, thinking of something (or an angle on the matter) that hadn't occurred to me. Agonistic give-and-take with others helps me think; helps me get at the truth of matters. Two heads are better than one. And ten heads in a vigorous comments thread are better still.   

The third reason I blog is the sheer pleasure of writing. If I'm going to be a writing instructor, I better practice writing of some sort on a daily basis. And I better like it. And I do.

The Tallest Pregnant Woman in New Zealand

Cameras and Museums and You

Sculptor Ron Mueck should be sponsored by Apple. His hyper-real, larger-than-life (and yet sometimes smaller-than-life) statues of naked people make visitors reach compulsively for their iPhones. Nobody takes out a piece of scratch paper and begins sketching, nobody writes a sonnet about Ozymandias, but more people than not want to get pictures, and those pictures almost entirely are taken with cell phones. Is that a good thing? How should we feel about the recent compulsions to log our experiences with our phones? This week’s blog wants to look at art, vernacular photography, and our expectations of memory, using Mueck as a test case.

His work recently made an austral tour, and I found it on view in the pleasant little city-town of Christchurch, New Zealand (sort of a pre-boom version of Portland, Oregon). My hotel was nearby, and one of the back office gals heard me talking about the show with the owner, who herself had not yet been to see it. The second person had been to the show twice, but in coming out to join the conversation at the front desk, she didn’t want us to hear her talk about it, she wanted us to see her iPhone pictures. It was almost as if she felt her observations had no validity unless backed up with proof.

This makes sense. We privilege images over narrative, and even phones and entry-level digital SLRs are now so good in dim light, we can record almost everything, even in situations when flash is not allowed. Batteries charge easily and last all day (sometimes all month, depending on your model), and you can get good pictures with a magic box hardly bigger than a cigarette pack. It bears repeating: for the first time in history, we can record almost everything.

Mostly, though, we don’t. Most art in most museums goes unphotographed, even when the location freely permits noncommercial images. What is it about tall, naked people that makes the cameras come out, and, once out, is it true that those cameras help us see the art better? Is the camera a good tool for seeing? Or—as is the usual critique—do the cameras substitute for and/or get in the way of the experience itself?

As a simple experiment, I went to the show twice, once with a camera on day one, and once without, day two.

On the surface of it, his sculptures are as real as it gets: real hair inserted with a needle, one strand at a time. Brows seemingly have sweat on them, backs have pimples, the penis exists in boring and unperfected clinical realism. He models in clay, casts in various resins, and finishes with the dispassion of House, M.D. The spots are where they should be, the hair is where it should be, but somehow it’s a Lucian Freud body the size of a pillar, and we just are not used to seeing common people enlarged three times normal size.

It does make you stop, that much is certain. Richard Wolfe, writing for the Christchurch Museum Bulletin, says that when “it comes to creative encounters, there can be few that match the first sighting of a Ron Mueck sculpture. As with other landmark events, you are unlikely to forget exactly where you were when that formative experience took place.”

A newborn baby, minutes out of the womb, would make an interesting sculptural subject in itself, but his happens to be over eight feet long. We don’t know whether to be repulsed or in awe or a mix of both. We’re not used to real children in paintings. It’s easy to be critical of all those Renaissance altarpiece babies that look like miniaturized Sumo wrestlers, but compared to placental slime and an extruding umbilical cord, we might actually prefer the abstracted Italian versions.

Religion is present here, but democratized. As far as modern Christs go, there’s the bored man in a swimming pool, not reading, not talking on the phone, maybe trying to deal with an extra-long layover in Miami by killing time at the hotel, the man who also happens to be the Hunter S. Thompson version of JC Himself. Fun, provocative stuff, and well in tune with our current sense of blue-jeans theology.

Yet leaving aside the animal diorama realism of the art’s execution, and skipping for the moment the Jesus-as-a-guest-at-Super-8 theme, what is the relationship between art and cell phones? I think we all agree that if most museum goers had to draw the art in order to share it with others, they would not bother, and indeed, if they even had to lug around a pro camera rig, ditto. Phone-cameras these days are small, instant, effortless. Resolution is good and auto-focus and auto-exposure strip away any need to understand the mechanics of shutter speed and f/stop diameter. Everybody has a phone, and everybody’s phone takes pretty good pictures, especially if your end use is to send jpegs by email.

Does this ease of use and ubiquity of ownership enhance art appreciation, replace it with some lesser experience, or do a third (perhaps neutral) thing? Let’s play it all three ways.

Argument the First: cell phone photography inside a museum is a good thing. The ease of technology does not diminish the act of homage, and the very fact that people are taking pictures means that art is at least holding its own against Lindsay Lohan. In this view, the photo-takers have seen something valuable and want to record the experience, share it, blog about it, distribute it. Right on. A blog such as this one presumes evangelical zeal—ideas should be shared and spread: “Go forth and witness to the unconverted and share the joy of The Word.” In my case, one reason I photograph in museums is to have a piece to study later, when I may have more time or may be less overwhelmed, the way that a ground squirrel fills up cheek pouches with sunflower seeds at the picnic table, to have some food in the burrow later on. I can only take in x amount of beauty or horror per hour, so I stuff some of that beauty or horror in a doggie bag for later. Others may be doing the same. And certainly in my case I do make shots inside art museums (even inside those galleries which forbid it, at least until I am caught) with end-use sharing in mind, whether through a blog like this one or my classes or even just private journal pages that I hope will lead to other, different, public work later on. Snapshot away, o happy visitors: you are doing yourselves (and the world) a good service.

Counter argument. No, people don’t value art: if they did, they would bring better cameras with them, for one thing. The ease of procurement does lessen value. Just compare the act of eating a loaf of bread that you and your lover have baked from scratch—the attentiveness to texture, the satisfaction of the taste, the glowing warmth of just-from-the-oven-ness as the butter melts and the steam rises—to when you’re mindlessly noshing doughnut holes in the staff room while waiting for the Xerox machine to warm up. Similar foods, different experiences. Effort does influence experience, as does anticipation and interaction.

One reason nature photographers still use tripods even though digital cameras shoot at fast speeds in dim light is that the very act of looking becomes more careful and precise the more carefully and precisely you enact it. You “see” better by having to go slowly and frame the scene on a tripod, then move a bit forward, a bit back. You also get better pictures in a technical sense, just by stopping to think about lighting and depth of field. In contrast, grab-and-run phone photography treats every subject as a treat to be gobbled and forgotten. Nobody lingers with an iPhone, not even Chase Jarvis, whose iPhone photographs are among the best.

Third option. Most people in most museums are bored most of the time. Taking a quick snapshot here or there does little to counter-balance that. They maybe see a little bit better for a brief moment, as they hold up the camera or process images at home later, but then they may miss a few things too as they fish around in their pockets to find their phones or when they spend more time looking at the phone’s screen (to see if the shot came out) than they do looking at the piece itself. It is about an even wash.

There is of course the trophy aspect: photography as big game collecting. We have looked at this before, in other entries throughout this blog. It’s a way of saying I was here, I experienced this, I had the authentic moment. For some reason the poultry shot above seems to me to prove this rather vividly.

One problem is not the inane and constant snapshot-shooting inside a show like Mueck’s, but that 90+% of people don’t really do anything with their images, once they have them. They may not even remember to download them onto their computers. If all grocery stores were free and constantly restocked, people would exit pushing pyramids of exotic food in their carts out to the car and work in a relay for an hour to get it all in the house. Yet once home with all this stuff, now what? I bet that once there, most of the food would spoil or hide forgotten in the back of the pantry. Even if markets were free, most people would eat more or less the same things they do now, in more or less the same quantities. We may want to pretend to ourselves that tomorrow for a before-dinner snack we’ll make little coracles out of walnut shell and coriandered caviar, but in actuality, it ain’t ever going to happen.

Simple experiment proves this. How many readers of this blog have pictures still on a phone or camera you have yet to download onto a computer? And then on your computer, how many of you have pictures you have yet to sort and label, crop and delete? Oh yes, some day. You’re going to sort out all those Christmas pictures some day. “Some Day” is the one day of the week that never arrives. Maybe it’s like Leap Year’s February 29th, a day that exists in theory but most of us don’t remember having experienced.

Two problems come from our reliance on cameras, especially on cameras whose images we don’t get around to salvaging. The first is that I think we usually do let the camera do the remembering: in the art show discussed here, I went in as a moderately informed observer who can go to art museums three or four times a week if I am in a city like L.A. or London. Even so, rather than looking, part of me was just “there,” relying on my images to help me think about the art after the fact. If people had to select between views once they got home, deleting the duplicates and the duds, then at that point they could re-live the show’s content and theme, but since they usually do NOT do such a review and selection of images later, they do not “think” about the art later, either.

And second, because we do have such good and relatively inexpensive cameras, and because it is socially acceptable to use them almost everywhere, even during hanky panky, I am willing to suggest that most of us—myself included—no longer have the capacity for detailed, saturated looking that can create stable, indelible memories. Why remember things? We have the pictures, after all. Well, sure, any of us do, so long as we can remember which file we put them in, or so long as our computer doesn’t crash, or so long as jpg remains a commonly supported format that our display devices can recognize.

Elise Engler, an artist in the same Antarctic artists program I was associated with, once decided to draw every object she owned: it came out to be a series 13,127 drawings. It took a year and a half to finish. I am impressed that she even could find everything (I doubt I could), but more importantly, I deeply admire the devotion of such a Whitmanesque project. After such a journey, you would know one fork from another, be able to tell which sock was mismatched, treasure your light bulbs for the sculptural marvels that they are. The key thing here is that she drew each one: she had to attend to its material qualities, the heft and balance of the light, the way that object inhabited the space of the world. What a lovely record for future archaeologists. Certainly she has to know herself and her world better as a consequence of this project.

I had said I had gone twice to the Ron Mueck show. The second time, camera-less, was different if for no other reason that I happen to use an especially macho camera set-up, with prime glass lenses on a motordrive body. That sucker weighs almost five pounds. Leaving it behind is a pleasure. Whether it changed my experience or not I don’t want to say, since it gets into other issues too about being away from home and the better and worse ways one interacts with art when lonely. But I will just offer this as a challenge. The next time you do go to the Getty or some large, fun, object-filled space, do not bring a phone, do not bring a pocket point-and-shoot, but do bring a good quality pocket sketchbook or Moleskine journal, and set yourself the goal of drawing five objects from your day. It does not have to be a piece of art—even your Snapple bottle is a good place to start. It doesn’t have to be good or accurate, it just has to be an honest attempt to remember the world in a true and lasting way.

And at the end of the day, you’ll have five drawings. That’s not a bad thing. And when you get home, you can then look around and say, right on—just 13,122 left to go.

Polar Bears, God, and Evolution

can evolution save the polar bear?

There have been recent reports of polar bears hybridizing with grizzly bears: is this a good thing?  Normally the two never meet.  Though it's easy to think of places like Alaska as being just "north," in actuality the habitats are more subtle than that.  More or less everywhere in Alaska on the main "land" part of the state (forest, rivers, mountains, and open tundra), the grizzly bear survives.  Some eat a lot of salmon, some are more vegetarian, but they are found widely and the eat just about everything, from mice to garbage to human beings.

The polar bear lives in Alaska but off the coast, on the sea ice or along the beaches.

Most of us have probably just seen a polar bear stuffed, usually in a museum (though the airport in Anchorage has a dandy one, and my wife says that the White King casino in Elko, Nevada, purports to have the largest record in the world on display).  Here is one from the San Diego Museum of Natural History.

The Los Angeles Zoo always had polar bears on display when I was growing up, though I learned later that they had to use bleach to keep the fur from going green with mold.  Here is a recent shot from the San Diego Zoo, with a bear chomping on his morning "enrichment": a treat of carrots, which I assume have the snap, crackle, pop of seal bones.

Their usual diet though is meat, and lots of it, sometimes in the form of a dead whale but usually from seals.  Part of a polar bear's daily intake is indicated by this fridge full of fiberglass meat, also at the San Diego Zoo.

As the reality of global warming begins to show its effect (and please note, I am not saying anything controversial, such as the fact that I drove to work today caused global warming; I merely saying that in the Arctic, ice sheets and glaciers are melting: I have seen it first hand), polar bears won't be able to hunt seals. 

What next?  Can they learn from grizzly bears, switch over to tundra food like mushrooms or voles or dead caribou?  One one hand, it seems plausible.  If we look at the skulls, we can see how close these two species are.

(This display also is in the San Diego Natural History Museum.  AVC biologist Cal Yorke joins Hood in praising the quality of their exhibits, even as we note that some of the best best exhibits of all are in Chicago, at the Field Museum, in New York City, and in London, at their Natural History Museum in Kensington, across from the Victoria & Albert Museum.)

That explains how the two species have come to hybridize recently.  One estimate that I have heard is that they diverged as species in just the past 500,000 years or so.

Several related questions tie in with this.  Is their extinction inevitable, and if so, would cross-breeding with grizzly bears help prevent that, where does God fit in with extinction, and, last, if humans are directly or indirectly responsible for extinction, should we feel badly about that fact?

To start with these in reverse order, I do want to debunk one myth.  That is the notion that indigenous North American people (the Inuit, for example, in the far north, and other First Nation inhabitants continent-wide) are somehow more spiritually attuned to the natural world.  Certainly, they CAN be: I would like to think that anybody can become attuned to anything, from an exquisitely rendered violin concerto to the song of the Western Meadowlark to the sound of a car engine that needs a tune-up.  But in terms of the relationship to nature, humans today have a variety of complex contact points, ranging from those who think it all should be bulldozed in order to make way for more Wal-Mart parking, on over to the tree-huggers who wear hemp and don't think introduced goats should be removed from offshore islands where they are decimating native plants. 

If people rely on nature directly, they are obligated to be aware of it.  Broadly speaking, the Eskimos do have 100 words for snow.  (Well, for snow and ice and related weather.)  Yet as anybody's direct dependence changes, so to does their culture and their awareness.  My grandmother was born in Sweden, but that does not mean I know how to speak Swedish.  So too, a current-day Inuit may have identical skills and values to their sealskin-kayak-building ancestors from a hundred years ago, but then again, they may not.  It is not inevitable.  When I did stay with an Eskimo family a few years ago on an island in between Nome and Siberia, here is what was in their entry space by the front door.

This is hard to see (my photographic skills have gotten better recently) but is a broken outboard motor and an uncured polar bear hide, stiff and useless, both tossed aside in their front porch area.  They had shot a polar bear earlier in the season but had not salvaged the skin properly, and now it was beyond salvaging.  This is neither good nor bad, it is just a fact.  A polar bear was shot, and they opted not to do anything more, after skinning it.  (Any animal skin needs to be cured or prepared, if it's not to rot or become too stiff to work.)  Being of a particular race or culture does not inherently make one at tuned with nature.

The same people in this village used to hunt whales from kayaks.  Here is a picture I did not take.

I bought this in Anchorage and it's undated; from context, I would guess c 1960.  (This is from Stewart Photo, in Anchorage, who retain copyright.)  Killing an animal for food or clothing or even as an initiation rite seems to me a different interaction with nature than killing things because (armed with a rifle and a snowmobile) you just can.  The Inuit may be able to help us understand how to manage our resources in Alaska and elsewhere, but they, too, may have moved past direct reverence.  Maybe we are all "post-natural" now.

To explore this issue, this past summer I went to the Norwegian Arctic to see polar bears for myself.  My wife and I joined 18 others and 5 crew on this historic ship, the Noorderlicht ("Northern Lights").

It has an iron hull and a shallow draft, and we could explore islands and fjords inaccessible to other expedition ships, including ones being run this summer by National Geographic.  We saw 14 bears alive, and one dead one, about which more later.  Some of the yearling cubs had no idea what we were, and would come over and try to puzzle us out, like this fellow, below.

What is happening is that as the temperature of the planet changes, the thickness and the location of pack ice changes, and in turn (to oversimplify) the polar bears swim around for hundreds of miles, unable to find thick enough ice to support them and the seals they eat.  Bottom line?  They starve.  This is happening now.  I saw polar bears eating grass, I saw polar bears eating seaweed, I saw polar bears swimming in futile circles after eider ducks, trying to catch the chicks.  They were desperately hungry.

Here is what a dead polar bear looks like.  This is not a zoo, this is not Photoshop, this is just direct reality.

So what can the bears do?  If they co-mingle with grizzly bears, will that solve everything?

I wish it would, but what they need can't be replaced so easily.  You need to have paws a certain size in order to walk on snow.  You need to have a body a certain minimum size in order to have a surface-to-bulk ratio that is efficient in cold weather.  These things can't be slimmed down.  Polar bears are larger, on average, than grizzly bears, and those in turn are larger than the more southerly bears, the ones we have in Angeles Crest, the black bears.  A gazelle is slim and fast and can live on relatively small plants, but it can't survive a prolonged blizzard.  Polar bears are the size they are and the color they are for incontrovertible  ecological reasons.

I am not suggesting that we know all the facts about how weather works or what drives climate.  Nor am I suggesting that the most recent episode couldn't be a normal swing (though evidence implicates modern man fairly damningly).  But the fact is, animal distribution and the mix of what lives, what does not come back next season will change, whether we want it to or not.

Some think this may be God's will in action.  I want to know how that can fit in, then, with the concept of stewardship that so many Christian leaders and thinkers find as part of our moral obligations.  Others think that there is no such thing as evolution, because it's not directly explained by the narratives of the Bible.  One of the AVC biologists, Dr. Matt Rainbow, has thought very profoundly about this, and certainly, he is just this side of being a full theological scholar.  He knows his Bible (and his Bible scholarship) very very well.  He has a way of helping us (on the one hand) understand evolution in all its molecular complexity, while (on the other hand) still retaining room in a rigorous scientific model for a God who initiated it all.  I will not summarize all of his work here, and especially not so briefly, other than to encourage you, if this fascinates you, to talk to him during his office hours.

We have a grizzly bear on the California state flag, but now they are extirpated, which is to say, extinct here (though surviving elsewhere, such as Yellowstone National Park).  If we were to go back in time a few hundred years, the Antelope Valley would have had, yes, antelope (the species called pronghorn), and also complex grass communities that no longer exist, surface pools of water, condors, and, yes, grizzly bears.  Is it better to have Claim Jumper and dollar stores?  Maybe not better or worse, just different, but that too has implications for the future.

On the long-term scale, polar bears can evolve into something different--perhaps a kind of whale bear, able to breath through the top of its head, competing with the orca for seals and salmon schools.  But on the short term scale, their genetic dispersal through the half-grizzly hybrid scheme is bound to fail.

We will have icebergs and the northern lights, either way.  What kinds of things we want to be stewards of, from polar bears to gazelles to whales to fields of poppies, depends on the decisions we make today, on the futures we imagine, on the possibilities we inhabit.  The choice is ours.

Windows (the glass kind, not the computer kind)

....windows, and why we like to look out of them so much

I used to live at the beach, but the way poor people do, not rich people.  If a rich person says that he or she lives at the beach, we picture something fronting the sea, with a wide view over the waves and sand.  When I taught at UC Irvine, off and on for five years I lived at the beach.  Depending on the state of the tide, at any given moment my back door might be within 200 yards of prime breaking surf.  Of course the thing is, my house was on the alley just BEHIND the houses that looked at over the beach itself.  I could see an itty bitty sliver of ocean through my bathroom window if I looked west through the alley and then over the fence of the rich person's house that really was on the beach.  I just lived near the beach, not at the beach.

It is the window and its view that makes the difference.  In the case of Newport Beach, about two million dollars of difference.

I was thinking about this because English teacher Santi Tafarella recently gave me a book.  There's a term in art history, "vernacular photography," which is the sixty cent way of saying "snapshots that us regular folks take."  His book is a celebration of an imaginary 24 hour day all around the world, made up of photographs taken by blog contributors.  Each shot is a view out a window, with the time of day indicated.

Some views are scenic, some are bleak, some are quirky.  It made me think about our relationship to windows, and to the kinds of photographs we take from them.

During a visit to England this summer, a friend of a friend loaned us a beach house in Suffolk.  Here is the view of the house from their front yard.

The view from the ground floor just looked back out into the garden.

From the upstairs, however, if we stood just right and used binoculars, there was an entire seascape that one could watch.  Here's the view (except I took it from outside the house, where I was when this delightful ship passed).  What can I say?  It is nice to have rich friends...or more exactly, at least to have friends who themselves have rich friends.  Clearly, the owners of this house live AT the beach.

Looking out the window and wanting to capture the view is not just something achieved recently.  True, in the past, actual glass was expensive to make (and in Tudor England, heavily taxed), so one might even take one's windows with one if going from the town house to the country house.  Later the invention of plate glass allowed for multistory apartments and factories to be built; you needed a lot of cheap glass to make a modern city, from the mid-19th century onwards.

Artists have wanted to paint the scene from their window perhaps going all the way back to cave art.  A recent survey at the Met in New York focused on that.  Their exhibit catalog (from which the next two images come) is called in a nod to an EM Forster novel Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century.

This charming piece is a bit like a Zen poem, in that it takes you outside slowly, and in ever-widening circles.  It was done by the German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich, and it dates from 1822.  The title is minimal: just Woman at the Window.  I first saw it in Berlin, many years ago, though it also has been displayed here in Los Angeles.  What one sees better in person than in a book (or a blog) is the mast of the ship, just right of the midline, as the boat moves into view.  That makes us think about the rest of the ship, the part we cannot see, and also the motion of its slow, stately passage through a canal.  And that in turn lets us thinking about where it has been and where it is going: a dynamic "through axis" for what initially seems to be a quiet, domestic scene.  Scholars believe that the woman is the painter's young wife, so he may have had many thoughts as he looked at her, at their new house, and at the passing maritime commerce.

Another interesting window view that seems just as good as a photograph or maybe even better is this one, also from the same exhibition.

This time we are in Rome, not Northern Europe, and Achille-Etna Michallon, a French scholarship student, reveals what he could see from his studio window.  This is pencil on ivory-colored paper (it has darkened a bit, over the years), and can't you just admire the heck out of his draftsmanship?  This artist died in his twenties (from pneumonia, apparently), so that's why you do not know his name.

I can't pass a sexy window without grabbing my camera.  I wish I could draw as well as the people in the Met's book, but for me, I use Fujichrome and other tools.  Here is a scanned slide from a hotel in a national park in Patagonia.  I never did find out who the horse belonged to.

Another time I was blessed with a view outside of my usual income bracket was on a whale watching survey in the Maldives.  Through the luck of the draw, on this two week trip I got put into the deluxe cabin.  Each day, as the anchor came up and I looked out from the bed to watch for dolphins, here was the kind of view I had:

Not all ships that I have been on have been this nice.  In a recent trip to the Norwegian Arctic, we had more rain than snow.  (Thanks to global warming, I suppose.)  We were further north than the topmost part of Alaska by many hundreds of miles, but instead of snow, here was the view.  This is not from my cabin, which was a dank little cell below decks, but from the common room.

Oh well.  Not every trip is a dream trip, and at least we saw fourteen polar bears.

This college has a study abroad program, sending AVC students and faculty to London and to Salamanca, Spain.  Last fall I was one of the lucky (the VERY lucky) winners to teach in London.  Student housing is arranged through the program with either home-stay family hosts or in shared apartments.  Faculty made their own rental arrangements.  Here was the view from my kitchen.

It certainly made dong the dishes pleasant, except later in winter, when it got dark at 4:30.  London's fireworks holiday is not in the summer as our Independence Day is, but is in fall, on Guy Fawkes Day.  He was the foiled terrorist associated with the Gunpowder Plot, made famous to Americans by the 2006 movie V for Vendetta.  (Those masks, from that movie, appeared in San Francisco recently, as a reaction to BART shutting off cell phone access to protestors.)  The name is also in the Harry Potter books, as the name of a phoenix, a creature that rises from its own ashes.  Here are my neighbors really going at it for Bonfire Night (as Guy Fawkes Days is also called).  I shot this from the same kitchen window.

It is probably a bit less hazardous than it looks since this being England, all the shrubbery is utterly saturated by the daily rain.

In looking through the book of window views that Santi gave me and this art catalog of the windows in paintings, it has made me want to open my own house up.  Right now the curtains are closed against the glare, but I think it's time to let some of that acetylene AV light come flooding in.

Yes, certainly.  There is just one thing I need to do first ... first I should get the Windex and make it so at least I can see out.

Better get going!