Commentary on September 11th

draft

I was in NYC on September 11th. By far the worst part was not that day, but the months afterwards as my fellow NYers put up posters acknowledging their loved one was missing. Literally everyone I knew in NY either knew someone in the two towers who died or was one person removed. Second, it is probably not well known outside of NY or maybe I am wrong about this: but no one actually knows how many people died in the collapse of the towers. Why is that, you may ask, its because there is illegal immigration in all areas of american life, and the financial industries are far from immune and when something bad happens, the family is not going to go to the police only to have ICE show up in a week or month to deport them. Finally, you make your guess at how many people died, then make a guess as to their average body weight, then realize that the clean up crews had to remove that much dead body parts that was layered through the wreckage. Do the math. You will be surprised.

Still Time to Prepare REDACTED for Revolution

 draft

 

I realize you are too important to have a conversation with me, but I still think it is a mistake that you are not arming REDACTED for the coming revolution, even if I am uncertain what side you will be on. Better safe than sorry, I always say. A dozen or so anti armor weapons, some RPGs and of course a few SAMs as bought on the ever helpful darkweb. I could see you maintaining a covert communications channel based on the plumbing and infrastructure of underground NY, or maybe laser/microwave line of sight over the park to the East Side or perhaps over the river to NJ. A stockpile of a couple of hundred AR 15s and several 10s of thousands rounds of ammunition, whats the harm? Not to mention a first aid station. Lets not be stupid here, which ever side you are on, the indications of approaching violence are clear and present. I am ready to come by and help out! You only need to call!

 

Fashion Week 2017 in New York

draft

I was discussing Fashion Week in NYC with Ken Perlin and the recent trends in models to come from Eastern Europe or the Midwest. In both cases it was noted the high percentage of genetic material from Northern Europe which results in very tall, very slender women, at least when they are young.

As I read more about these trends and the issue of moral responsibility as poor, young women from the former Soviet Union literally starve themselves to death, starve themselves to fainting, throw themselves into hooking to make ends meet, resort to surgery to reduce weight, an industry observer, Emma Nussbaum, made the following observation:

A large number of the dominant fashion designers are homosexual men with pederastic interests and they insist that their female models lean toward the looks of boys in their early adolescence, which requires a very thin and lanky appearance, and the tall and masculine girls willing or forced to starve themselves to present such looks are going to disproportionately come from regions comprising of a large number of poor individuals with a Northern European appearance.

So I thought about that for a moment.

 Oh, I said.

You can read the rest of her comments here:

http://www.femininebeauty.info/eastern-european-fashion-models

Implications of the 270 Riverside Drive Experience

As readers of this blog know well, no event is random, and no situation should be assumed to be without consequence but all of them should be analyzed and re-analyzed for their deeper meaning and for clues to our mysterious future and probable doom.

In this search for meaning in our pointless lives, sometimes the use of the Esoteric Knowledge is necessary but sometimes it is not. In this case, no esoteric knowledge is required to see our stark choices. The future is only too clear.

First review my little post about my former living conditions at 270 Riverside Drive to understand the situation. Now lets ask some questions about what living there might have meant.

At the time I was living there, I was vaguely aware of how lucky I was and that this was a situation that would be hard to recreate were it to ever go away, which inevitably it must. In part that was mixed in with my conclusion that living there also allowed me to live in Manhattan which was itself quite a blessing. But beyond that, what did it mean?

What was really going on, I conclude in retrospect, is that through an artifact of the ancient rent control laws of Manhattan, themselves left over from a more Socialist period when, briefly, the living conditions of the poor and disenfranchised were a concern, however modest, of our political elite. Through a series of lucky breaks, I had been permitted to live in a situation that I could otherwise never afford. But even more important, this was a living situation that I also did not deserve.

This is where the lower animals deserve to live

You see, in America, it is only the rich who are permitted to live in a way that their life is enhanced and ennobled. The rest of the population, by the very definition of being not-rich, are a lower animal form who are unworthy of any of this. They should live in dreary poverty, stupid stucco dingbats, or endlessly similar suburban housing, where they can pay inflated rents and mortgages, buy from chain supermarkets, and live out what is left of their so-called lives as servants of the rich.

The kind of lifestyle I had when at 270 RSD was thus completely anomalous and should not be allowed to occur and in general it does not. My choices now are to live in poverty and despair or in some way prove myself by making in excess of many tens of millions of dollars, no doubt through entrepreneurial activity or, to judge from the history of great fortunes in America, through various types of theft, crime or amoral and sociopathic behavior.

This does not seem like such a hard lesson to learn, but somehow it is.

270 Riverside Drive Apt 12A New York City

When I lived in NYC in the 1990s I was lucky enough to live in some spectacular apartments.This is all due to friends who welcomed me to New York and made it possible for me to stay there when by rights I should have had to leave. One of these apartments was on Central Park West in the upper west side.  The other was on Riverside Drive at 99 and Riverside.

This apartment was on the top floor of the building with a view of the Hudson from almost every room. It was, they tell me a classic eight (or seven?) with four bedrooms, three baths, a formal dining room, a living room, a study and my office (the former maid's room). One of the bedrooms was allocated for our guests, something that is quite rare in Manhattan where space is at a premium.

This apartment had been rent controlled for decades and the person who had the lease was very generous with those he sublet rooms to and I only had to pay my share of the total reduced rent. Ultimately he became a victim of his own pride in a dispute with the landlord and lost his lease so we all had to leave.  The place needed to be fixed up (it is an artifact of the rent control laws that such apartments are allowed to grow more decrepit) and I always wondered what it would rent for (or sell for if in a coop situation).

Thanks to the power of the bold, new Internet paradigm, we can easily find out. The apartment is listed on Zillow at about $6.8 million (see here for the Zillow listing).

If you look at the pictures in this listing, you would have no idea how completely wonderful this apartment is and what it was like to live there. Part of the reason for this is that they did not photograph the place to show you its environment and they made other mistakes as well.  Here are some photographs that may correct this impression and give a hint of the grace conferred on those who lived there.

View out one of the windows

On the street where you live

At night

Snow

Stuart Cudlitz (? - 2015)

My friend Stuart Cudlitz has passed away after a long illness. I know of Stuart through my friend Sally Syberg as she had worked at Colossal Pictures in SF for many years, and so had Stuart. Stuart had the misfortune of working on several interesting visual effects projects and formed the incorrect belief that this was a creative way to work in the motion picture industry (the belief is incorrect, because the two pictures were exceptional, which is one of the reasons their visual effects were sent to Colossal to begin with).

At one point his significant other got a good job with Nickelodeon in NYC and he moved there, perhaps a little over a decade ago, and we spent some time together. He told me how difficult it was to have a beautiful wife who loved him and supported him in Manhattan where all he had to do was paint fine art or whatever else he wanted to do. It seems funny in retrospect, at the time I was bitterly jealous, of course.

My friend Stuart was a complete character and he will be missed.

Please go enjoy your day while you still can.

A biography of Stuart as taken from his website (see below)

Stuart Cudlitz is an artist, writer, filmmaker and educator. As an exhibiting multi-media studio artist and a published illustrator, writer and composer he has applied these legacy skills to the design and direction for his work many credits on commercial and independent films and interactive media employing emerging technologies. As a guest lecturer and adjunct faculty Cudlitz utilizes a professional studio approach to teach curriculum in both MFA and BFA programs with emphasis on techniques in visual thinking, interdisciplinary animation methodology and the integration of traditional arts and narrative techniques across all media. He is currently writing a book on the relationships between the legacy of traditional art methodology and digital media creation and distribution while continuing to provide creative direction and design solutions for the media, communications and electronics industries. Recent accomplishments include co-invention of a proprietary patented technology for the storage, retrieval and exchange of personal profile data enabling consistent interpretation across multiple device, applications and data services based on a social networking model.  Professional Associations include ASCAP, ACM and IEEE.

Stuart's Website

http://www.stuartink.com/

Pictures of Stuart and Lili
http://www.yogile.com/xwfu9n5c#51m

The Professional Objectivist

This essay is an indirect meditation on the very broad questions of what it is that makes a place desirable, or entertaining or pleasant.    For some people, it is the weather of S. California with its endless overly bright sunlight and extremely strong opinions about what constitutes success and failure.  For me, there are many issues but one of them, discussed here, is my eccentric sense of what is entertaining.  So, for example, the following afternoon social event which I describe here I found tremendously amusing.  It still makes me smile whenever I think of it.  But I wonder how many other people would find it as rewarding?

For many years I lived in the Upper West Side of New York City in a sublet of an incredible apartment overlooking Riverside Drive and the Hudson River (estuary). I have been fortunate to also live in other places that had high entertainment value, such as Los Angeles in the 1980s when computer animation was but a gleam in a few idealist's eyes, but none so beautiful and rewarding as the apartment on Riverside Drive.

Although my role in the Hayden Planetarium's Digital Galaxy Project was sadly over I still maintained many relationships with my friends there. One afternoon I was invited to join two of them, Anthony Braun and Gretchen Schwartz of the museum, for afternoon tea at some cafe on Columbus Avenue. It was a beautiful day and we sat outside. I am pretty sure that Steve Gano was there that day as well. (1) Gretchen had also invited her girlfriend who we will call Amy. Amy and Gretchen had both been interns for Michael Moore, the famous director of documentaries (and they both hated Mr. Moore with a passion).

Amy had invited her current boyfriend a tall, good looking young man.

So what did Amy's boyfriend do? It seems he was an “intellectual”, and that he worked as an Objectivist philosopher for the Ayn Rand Institute.

Ayn Rand being interviewed somewhere

Now, let me ask you, did you ever read Ayn Rand? Well, I was an undergraduate once, and I read Ayn Rand like everybody else, and was somewhat amused. It did not seem very practical. And I wondered, I truly wondered, who could write that 150 page rant near the end of Atlas Shrugged that went on and on and fucking on? It turns out that Ayn Rand was a Jewish refugee from Stalin's socialist paradise. So a Russian Jewish author of romantic political tracts, we now knew who could write such ummm, well, emphatic material. Ayn Rand, or whatever her real name was, could.

One more thing, to help complete the picture before I comment thereon. It was clear to me that whatever Amy's long term interest in this Objectivist was, her short term interest was, ummm, romantic, which I think puts a more respectable spin on what she wanted from this relationship. That was my impression. A nice looking, big, healthy young man. Such are the lofty motives of so many of our peers and colleagues.

Now, how many Objectivists are there in the world? Well, there are a fair number of people who might call themselves an Objectivist, I suppose. But how many of them get paid for it? Only very few, I think. In the entire world, are there ten professional Objectivists? I doubt it. In all this world are there five professional Objectivists? Perhaps there are five. Perhaps.

So this was truly a great and rare honor. I was having tea with a professional Objectivist!

Now out here in Hollywood I know many interesting and accomplished people. Writers, visual effects supervisors, academy award winners, famous computer scientists, successful entrepreneurs, actors, actresses, poets and porn stars.

But in all these years on the west coast, I never once met a professional Objectivist.

The Ayn Rand Institute

http://www.aynrand.org/

Objectivism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)

Atlas Shrugged

http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145

_____________________________________

1. Some of the people who read this blog will know Steve well. He is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and a veteran of Apple / Kaleida among other ventures.

Jon Snoddy in New York City

One of the reasons I started with photography again after many years was because I noticed I seemed to have a large number of interesting friends, and that pictures of them as time went by would be entertaining.

Perhaps one of the inspirations for this was that famous black photographer of Harlem clubs, whose name I have forgotten, who took photographs of the people who came to play at clubs he hung out at and who eventually ended up with a photographic record of the history of jazz and blues in this country.

This is Jon Snoddy visiting me in New York City.  I think we are at a cafe on Columbus Ave in the Upper West Side.  I forget if he was working for Walt Disney Imagineering at the time or if this was during one of his entrepreneurial activities, perhaps Gameworks.

Jon is now back at Imagineering and has the misfortune of being rather senior in the Imagineering R&D organization.   We all make mistakes.

Politics and Friendship

So I have a great friend in NY or I used to. We have known each other for decades but just in the last 5 years or so starting talking almost daily. A talented outsider artist, IMHO, we would discuss all sorts of important matters such as the stupidity of modern computer graphics and the failure of that movement, the importance of the Hollow Earth, Lovecraft, the Illuminati's role in modern society, Keats, Blake, Bulwer-Lytton and so forth.

My friend is well known for helping other people who are down. No one can figure out how he supports himself but among other things he is very frugal (but that is not enough). He has had some adversity in life but does not seem to notice. Like all my artist friends who are successful in some sense of that word, he works extremely hard, and is very productive. He has stood by friends in need on several different occasions that I am aware of even when it was not convenient (a test of character, in Southern terminology). Since I am impoverished because of my work and commitment to computer animation he helped me find a place to stay in NYC so that I could visit, which otherwise I could not afford. He spent a billion hours with me when I visited NY and really helped to make that trip great. His daily chats and emails would often cheer me up, and since I am currently ostracized and living in abject poverty, I enjoyed hearing from him. It helped to break the near total isolation.

And he is a die hard Republican.

Loved Romney, thought he would make a great president. Hates Obama more than he would hate Hitler. Benghazi this and Hillary that. Obamacare blah blah blah. Jews controlling the media, how much the Jews are hated, etc. I would hear this stuff daily, more or less, in chats on Google mail and by email. It was occasionally annoying but I enjoyed talking to him, he had high entertainment value. I presumed he was being occasionally sincere but often just provocative.

But he kept assuming he knew what I thought and that I was a typical lefty liberal, whatever that may mean. I kept telling him that he did not know what I thought, really. He did not realize that my third generation elitist Virginian reform Jewish atheist roots and the history of Orthodox and Hasidic rabbis in my family in the Eighteenth century or so, as well as my time at the RAND Corporation left me with somewhat eccentric and non-mainstream beliefs.

So one day, after reading about an hour of rants about Democratic villainy from his point of view I told him .0001 percent of what I believe. Just one time, after hearing this stuff from him literally every other day (if not every day) for years.

I told him what I believed on just one issue just one time.

That the Supreme Court pissed on the constitution in public in November 2000 when they installed their goon, Bush Jr, as president in a classic coup d'etat. That the NY Times was just a right-wing rag when it rolled over and did not even slightly object to this gross injustice thus revealing its true colors. That everything Bush did was therefore illegal. That every decision that the Supreme Court made since that black day needed to be reevaluated in light of this crime to see which of their decisions were legal and which needed to be overturned.

And he never talked to me again.

So what is the moral of our little story? I guess the moral is that you should never tell someone what you believe unless you are perfectly ok with them never talking to you again. It doesn't have to be fair, and it doesn't have to be reciprocal, that is the way it is.   We might also conclude something about how Republicans relate to opinions outside their cult, but we already knew that.

The Goddess Phoebe in Manhattan

the rewrite

The following essay does NOT contain any spoilers beyond a throw-away joke at the beginning of a play.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I used to live in NY and only went to see plays when visitors came in from out of town and forced me to go. One such occassion involved a very distant friend (1) who bought us tickets to see the play Communicating Doors (1994) by Alan Ayckbourne. This would have been about 1998.

To avoid spoilers, I must tell only a very minimum version of this joke.

An attractive young woman in an outrageous skin-tight leather outfit is invited to a hotel room in London. She is a "specialist" she says, a dominatrix, no sex. Her nickname is "Poopay" which is not an appropriate stage name for her specialization so she is looking for a more dignified name, perhaps "Severa". This name should connote the idea of a goddess and inspire awe and fear in her customers.

Our Goddess in human form from the San Francisco Production

Another character, a respectable older woman, asks her what her real name is. "Phoebe", she replies, in total disgust at the outrageous fortune that has assigned her such a wimpy first name.

The whole audience laughs.  What's so funny, I thought. Why is everybody laughing?

Then I remembered my classical mythology and realized, of course, Phoebe is the name of a Goddess. Well, OK, technically she is a Titan, one of the sets of children of Uranus and Gaia, and traditionally associated with the moon. But I think that from this distance a Titan can be considered to be goddess for all theatrical purposes.

I was entertained by the notion that the playwright would write a throw-away joke that required knowledge of Greek mythology/religion (4) and expect the audience to get it.  And of course, I thought it was amusing that in fact the audience in NY did in fact get it.  I would not expect that to be the case in most of the country, but hey, maybe I am wrong.  Maybe on the East coast this kind of knowledge of classical civilization is part of the standard kit of people who go to the theatre. 

Out here in Hollywood, I do not think we would make this kind of assumption.   No one would be assumed to know Greek religion/mythology unless it happened to be featured in a recent graphic novel. Perhaps if some underage pop star or ingenue called herself "Phoebe the Goddess" on television or the internet only then could one be expected to know this bit of cultural information.

It is this understanding and appreciation of the American audience and, by extension, the world audience, that makes American films so popular and approachable, I think.  (3) In other words, we dumb it down or in some cases, don't bother to hire writers that would know this kind of stuff to begin with.  That is the best way: ignorance is good for commerce.   

_________________________________________________

1. Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

2. By prompting I mean, there was nothing that would indicate a reference to Greek religion was about to occur. Had this been a performance of a play by Euripides, for example, then that would be a different matter.

3. How do we know for certain that American films are the best? By that one key attribute by which all American cultural works are judged: the amount of money it generates, possibly adjusted for inflation and exchange rate. That one criteria above all else condenses all the vague and subjective qualities of a creative work into a single, objective index of excellence. And it is the genius of our culture and civilization to recognize this and put all our energies and resources into this one overarching goal: make more money.

4. Greek religion was always presented to me as "mythology" which implied some sort of fictional folk belief.  Actually, what we call mythology is a form of deprecation, the Greek's thought of it as religion and were quite devout about it judging from some of the votive deposits that have been found and described in literature.   So where you see the term "mythology" applied to the Greeks, just substitute "religion" and you will be much closer to the reality.

_________________________________________________

See also:

Communicating Doors (1994)

http://communicatingdoors.alanayckbourn.net/

Review of the San Francisco Production of Communicating Doors (spoilers!)
http://www.edgesanfrancisco.com/index.php?ch=columnists&sc=Mickey%20Weems&id=124794

David McCallum's Notes on Communicating Doors

http://www.davidmccallumfansonline.com/comdors.htm

Phoebe on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_(mythology)

Impressions of NYC, November 2013 (revised)

[revised 11/26/2013]

This was my first trip back to NYC since about 2004 or so. For my benefit more than anything else, these are my notes about what has and has not changed in the city from my lowly point of view.

1. It was shocking to me how quickly my knowledge about how to get around had deteriorated. You forget which streets are one way, you forget which is the uptown/downtown entrance to the subways. You stop at crosswalks instead of blasting right through with an eye on the incoming traffic. I reached for my little fold out map maybe 200 times in 8 days. When I lived there, I never needed a map. You spend a LOT more money on taxi's because at some point you just say, "fuck it, get me there", where a local would just walk or take the subway. I got lost maybe a dozen times and I never used to get lost in Manhattan.

There is obviously some backstory here

2. There continues to be a disturbing trend towards branded nationwide chains in Manhattan.

3. The taxis have done away with the celebrity greetings, which were there to try and make tourists feel better about using taxicabs. I miss hearing Rodney Dangerfield remind me to take my bags as I left. There is in its place a nice GPS map of Manhattan showing you where you are if you knew how to get at it on the touch panel display. Oh Brave New World !

4. Pizza has gone from being $1.50 for a slice of plain to $2.50.

My barber in Little Italy

5. People in NY, or at least my friends in NY, are constantly visiting people, galleries, parties, and/or other social events. Constantly. I know one person in LA who lives that way, but no one else. There are no social events worth speaking of down where I live.

6. The perceived expense of visiting NY is real. NY is much less expensive to live in than to visit assuming you have a reasonable place to live. The money is spent on hotels (or whereever it is you stay), transportation and to some extent on food depending on whether you eat out all the time. Is this worse than other cities? Not really, I think. Maybe hotel rooms are more expensive overall. But taxis are less expensive in NY than in LA, although of course you tend to use them more in NY.

7. Taking a taxi from LAX to Culver City is nearly $40.00 today.

8. More of NY is going upscale, and some of the older neighborhoods are changing. Broome street, where I was staying, is midway in the process of becoming a trendy, soho-like place.

Tom Brigham in front of House of Vegetarian

9. The new "world trade center" is just ok. Its a nice enough building except for the stupid tower on top to try and make it seem taller than it is. It is not the WTC in either scale or impressiveness, but I don't think anyone will really care in a few years. Lets see how they do with the monument. I am not holding my breathe.

10. Little Italy is much reduced. Apparently this happened long ago, when I was still living there, as a way of reducing the influence of certain Sicilian families, they tell me.

11. Chinatown is still there and as weird as ever.

12. But most of all what impressed me is that NYC is drop dead beautiful. The architecture, the lighting, the weather and the people all makes for a dramatic and fascinating place to live.

13.  As always when in NY one should buy a Metrocard, which is a little card which keeps subway and other transit fares, like a phone card.    You can put any amount of money on the card, but when one buys a certain amount you get a decent discount so you should do that.   What the Metrocard does for you is to make any of the mass transit systems in NY easier to use.  No fumbling for money, no exact change, no waiting in line for a ticket.  You just swipe your card through the turnstile and it lets you through and tells you your balance.

On this trip I was staying in a part of town I rarely spent much time in (Broome street near Christie, near Chinatown) and I did not know how it really fit into the subways.   I needed to go to B&H Photo at 34th street and as I was pondering whether I felt like walking 30+ blocks, a 3rd Avenue bus went by.   So I took out my Metrocard and I was on the uptown bus, which stops at 34th street.   Ok, admittedly, I got a little lucky here.  But the idea behind a well-designed and run transit system is that tourists and residents should get lucky now and then.

14.  I always have conversations with my cab drivers.   I dont know why, maybe it puts me at ease, but they are almost always interesting people to talk to, usually recent immigrants (where recent can be as much as 10 years or so).  Usually pretty fluent in English.

15. I found that after a while, I enjoyed staying at Arlene's Home for Wayward Children, where I had a couch and shared the bathroom with six other people.  Everyone was well behaved and easy to get along with, even Arlene when you calmed her down.   I could live there for a while and be perfectly happy.  If only I could afford it.   Not a giant fan of that part of town (Broome and Christie) but there are people who swear by it.  I am more of an upper west side kind of guy, I suppose.

16. Its nice to see a technology community thriving in NYC.  I hope it persists and continues to thrive, it gives me some hope that I would be able to find suitable employment there one day.

NY Tech Meetup and the Delusion of Optimism

When I was in New York, I had the opportunity to attend the November meeting of the oddly named "New York Tech Meetup" at NYU's Skirball Center. The November meeting is reserved for academic presentations, e.g. presentations of new technology (or old technology) by universities and schools, professors and students. We had 20 presentations and each lasting about 3 minutes long.

High School students frisbee throwing robot that failed to throw frisbees

We had one set of students who had used image understanding software to cheat at completing jigsaw puzzles. Another group of students (high schoolers) had built a robot that threw frisbees. We had a Harvard based group of people who showed their website that allowed programs to be written with a visible programming language from MIT that allowed you to snap pieces of programs together. And we had our own NYU Media Research Lab show the current status of a very inexpensive immersive reality system that used about $500 in parts.

Backstage at Skirball with Ken Perlin and Students getting the immersive reality demo to work

But the audience was the most impressive part.  Maybe 500 to 600 people, all enthusiastic, all well dressed, all maybe 25-45 years old.   All of them ready to do that big tech startup and get rich!

When it was all over, we had a reception hosted by, I think, Google.  On the 10th floor, a view of Manhattan, and filled with enthusiastic people "networking".

So you know me, Mr Reality here.  Mr Sourpuss here.  I go and find the organizers and complement them, but mention one little issue I had:  "It was all so upbeat" I said. "It was all so optimistic"

"Well, whats the matter with that?" they asked.

You do realize that there is 25% unemployment in this country, right? That there are more people on food stamps today than have ever been, and it is not because of some stupid right wing craziness about lazy people. That 9 out of 10 startups fail, right? You know that, right?

They just looked at me in horror and turned away.

Sorry to spoil their party, I guess.

NY Tech Meetup:

http://nytm.org/
________________________________________

This PS may be unnecessary, it may actually be in a comment.  So read the comments!  -- MW

P.S. Ok, the point has been made by one of our NY correspondents that this is a bit too negative.  In fact, even if 9 of 10 fail, the 1 surviving may end up hiring all the others. Also, we should not fail to encourage those who might improve themselves by their own initiative.   OK, sure, I agree with this, but let us not on the other hand have unbounded optimism either.  Many will fail, and failure can be painful and destructive.

Also, I feel rather strongly that if you want to succeed in America, it is helpful to have a lot of money. It is possible to succeed without a lot of money, but it is a lot harder.

Self-Portrait in NYC

My bedroom in NYC. 

Notice the Hudson River outside the window.

I think I look like a cartoon character in this picture.

Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Importance of Science Education

While we are on the subject of science education, c.f. the post on "Giant Intelligent Vegetable on Mars", I am happy to see that my friend Dr. Tyson is doing his job and speaking out about the importance of science and the importance of funding science and science education.

A recent NY Times article has an interview with Dr. Tyson in which he spins the recent meteor strikes into an impassioned plea for more science funding.

One of the many fringe benefits of working at the Hayden Planetarium many years ago was to be able to work with the many idealists at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), first among them being Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Neil is unlikely to use the word "motherfucker" in public.

To give you one example of this idealism, and because it always makes me laugh, at a meeting about the Digital Galaxy that we were building for visualization, the project leader, Dennis Davison, asked what measures we were taking to insure "the integrity of the data".   We hardly ever talk about the "integrity of the data" when working on Zombie movies or blowing up planets, generally speaking.

It is a slight exaggeration to say that Neil's job is to be public and get kids (and adults, but mostly kids) excited about science.  And he does this really well.  Part of the secret to his success is that he is completely sincere in doing so.  He thinks science IS important, and he thinks science education is very important and he charges out there in public and uses every opportunity to say so.

When the Hayden was being rebuilt and the AMNH was racing towards its end of the fake Millennium deadline, Neil engaged in a dialogue to have the AMNH create a small astrophysics department.  What you may not be aware of is that there have been almost no new astrophysics departments in this country since the great expansion in the science in the 1950s as part of the Cold War and the Space Race.   The AMNH was not jumping up and down about adding more costs  to their overhead, but Neil insisted and he won.  The point is, the AMNH is the only organization in this country (that I am aware of) that has as its mission doing real science and communicating results directly to the American people.  In other words, their mission is not to train more graduate students, Universities do that, and the AMNH has a good relationship with Columbia and many other schools.  The AMNH's job is to do both research and direct science education to the general population.   Hence, if you have a Planetarium, you should also have an Astrophysics department.

Neil has an interesting background, the whole story of which I am not completely clear on.  But I do know that he went to the Bronx High School of Science, scholarship to Princeton, and is a living example of the promise of higher education to create opportunity for minority groups (although I suspect that Neil is something of a ringer in this regard).

Astrophysics is a very tricky field.  It is incredibly elitist and the field as a whole can be quite nasty, and I assure you that Neil's immense popularity wins him no friends in the field of Astrophysics.  But he is on a mission, he is one of the most recognizable people in NYC, and I assure you he is completely sincere.

By the way, Neil is unlikely to use the word "motherfucker" in public, but I thought that the above image of Neil making a point at some public forum was very funny, so I stole it from a post someone did on Facebook.

_______________________________________________

American Museum of Natural History
www.amnh.org

The American Tradition of Christmas and the Mystery of the Aluminum Christmas Tree

In the spirit of the holidays, I set out to write a short essay on what I had learned about the origins of our Midwinter holiday and its traditions. I grew up in Virginia where Christmas was a much more important religious holiday than it is out here or other places I have lived, so perhaps that explains my interest.

So in this essay, I hoped to cover (a) the specific mechanisms by which Christmas traditions came into the popular culture in this country, (b) why these traditions seem to be rather oddly selected from a much larger set of European traditions, (c) why these traditions seem to be rather secular, which is odd, given that nature of the holiday, (d) whether any of these traditions are in any way based on the old religions of Europe as might seem likely in a few cases (e.g. the decorated evergreen), (e) why it is that Virginia seemed more devout and frankly Christian in its celebration than other places I have lived in this country, and (f) why an Aluminum Christmas Tree.  Lesser issues would also include the origins of the Yule Log, the various nativity scenes that are often set up, the tradition of the shop window Christmas displays such as one sees at Macy's in New York City, and the tradition of the candle in the window as one sees in Virginia.

Implicit in this might be why a third generation atheist liberal Jewish Virginian family such as mine should celebrate Christmas at all.  Not all of these questions are answered in this essay, but a few of them are partially answered. 

When I grew up in Virginia we had an aluminum Christmas tree. My father, a reformed sports writer, worked for Reynolds Aluminum and perhaps that is why we had a Christmas tree. It was pretty great, although as you might imagine it did not smell as good as a real evergreen. I always wanted to know where this thing had come from.

As I studied the origins of the various traditions of Christmas that I had experienced while growing up, two observations were reinforced, none of them particularly original.   The first is that what we celebrate in America seems to be combination of (as you would expect) a large number of Anglo-Saxon traditions in place about the time of the colonization but with an almost equal number of traditions seemingly picked almost at random from a large number of potential continental European traditions. The second observation was that these traditions were nearly all secular in origin and purpose.

But a third observation was somewhat new to me, but certainly not new to others who had studied the topic.  Apparently a significant number of attributes of what we consider to be a traditional Christmas celebration actually is American in origin and rather recent, e.g. the 19th century.   They just pretend to be older traditions, something I find amusing.

The following is an incomplete list of my research. I expect that many of you knew this already, but I did not know most of this.

I wish to emphasize here that there is a lot bad information out there which I hope I am not contributing to, but I probably am.   One such "wrong" belief is the common lore about the origin of the date of Christmas, at least in the Western Church, December 25th.  For many years I thought that it was accepted that the date of the Western Church's Christmas came from a very specific holiday, Sol Invictus, of the late Roman Empire.  I had been led to believe this by literally dozens and dozens of essays on the subject.  Looking a bit closer, I learn, again, that what one is commonly told is just flat out false.  So we begin with the issue of why December 25.

1. Most historians do NOT believe that the Western Church celebrates Christmas on December 25th because it was the date of a significant Roman religious celebration (e.g. Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, which was itself layered on top of other previous traditions). They do not believe it, because when Christians had started celebrating the birth of Christ, in the 3rd century AD, they were still in their conflict with Rome, e.g. before Constantine, and working hard to distance themselves from pagan traditions in any way they could.

The most commonly held belief among scholars for the date has to do with the psychology of determining aspects of Jesus's life from traditions in the so-called Old Testament regarding prophecy of the Messiah. The trick here is to find a day such that Jesus was conceived (not born, conceived in Mary's womb, e.g. a miracle) and executed which was the same day of the year although obviously in a different year.   So take the date of the Crucifixion as the date of conception, advance 9 months for a canonical pregnancy period, and you have December 25 as a birth date.   People used to do calculations like this all the time back in the good old days (e.g. 2000 years ago).

This is a specific example of a larger heuristic: that if Jesus was the messiah, then he must have fulfilled various biblical prophecy about who the messiah was.  Therefore, people worked backwards from these prophecies or what they thought those prophecies must have been to determine details about Jesus for which there was no clear documentation.  Getting to the bottom of what was and what was not prophecy for this and other matters is a job for a specialist, and I am not going to go further here.

Note that the Eastern Church(es) also have disparate ways of celebrating the event, but their chosen day is January 6. Note that this is all mixed in with issues involving the Marian traditions of the various churches, specifically the Feast of the Annunciation which celebrates the visit by the Angel Gabriel to Mary to tell her that she should expect a blessed event, as unlikely as that might have seemed to her at the time.

This reminds me of a joke I learned in the Upper West Side of New York.   How to annoy your Christian friends on Christmas day.   On Christmas, you call up a friend and invite them out for pizza.  When they say "But today is Christmas!", you feign ignorance and say: "Oh! Is that today?"

2. There were various traditions in Anglo-Saxon England for midwinter celebrations, including the tradition of a family dinner on December 25th (the wealthy had roast beef, but the poorer classes had a goose which was far less expensive, hence the Christmas goose). And also a tradition of people singing carols outside homes on Christmas eve, particularly homes where they might expect the people inside to give them a few coins for their effort. In other words, it was mixed in with the various traditions that make it more socially acceptable for the poor to request money from the more wealthy on a special day. Many of these traditions would have crossed the Atlantic with the settlers, particularly those who came to the more Anglican part of the colonies, e.g. Virginia and also (but its more complicated) to the mid-Atlantic states.

[I am told that beef is now much less expensive than goose today, but the point that Hutton was trying to make was that goose was less expensive back then].

3. Most Americans are blissfully ignorant of most of the history of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, but this affected everything in Europe and it certainly affected the Colonies and what beliefs were transferred.  England had a reformation all its own and there were several centuries of a complicated and messy process of  determining which pre-reformation traditions they were going to keep, and which they were going to suppress. But the more purely Calvinist in England believed rather strongly that the celebration of Christ's birth was an accretion that was not justified by scripture, more papist frippery if you will. As you must have guessed by now, these Calvinist dissenters emigrated (or some of them did) to New England and are who we incorrectly call Puritans.

4. So to begin with we have the Calvinists of New England, the more Anglican states like Virginia, and the mid-Atlantic states which have their own unique story here including as it does not only members of the Roman Catholic church but also protestants from other parts of Europe, especially and including the Low Countries, e.g. the Dutch Netherlands who settled New Amsterdam, and various regions of Germany who went to various places in the middle Atlantic, often Pennsylvania, and still spoke German and maintained their traditions.  Other dissenters from England, not the Calvinists we call Puritans, but of other beliefs, such as Quakers, generally went to the middle Atlantic states.

[Just a reminder, the Calvinists mostly went to New England to build their "City on the Hill".  People of other variations on the theme of Christianity, e.g. Quakers, Catholics, presumably Lutherans, in general went to the mid-Atlantic states: New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland.  Various religious groups went to Virginia but most of them were vanilla Anglicans of one school or another.  There were also other faiths such as Presbyterian in Virginia from the earliest days.  This is not a hard and fast rule: the Calvinists in New England were quite strict, but the mid-Atlantic states were specifically open, and Virginia and other territories did not have much of a policy either way as far as I can tell.  What they did have was an Anglican "founder effect" which persists to this day.]

5. We now jump ahead to after the American Revolution: the Anglicans in this country have become Episcopalians because of the issue of Archbishop of Canterbury needing to swear loyalty to the King. New England is no longer a pure Calvinist enclave but has begrudingly diversified by allowing people of other faiths to live among them. The Middle Atlantic states have enclaves of Germans who are true to their traditions and language. And there have been a few Jews there all along the seaboard, from top to bottom, although they play very little role in the rest of our story ironically since, of course, Jesus was a very devout 1st Century AD Jewish apocalyptic prophet and the influence of Judaism is all over the various Christianities in various diverse ways.   There are other minority communities seeded here and there in North America, keeping or not keeping to their traditions each in their own way.

6. Our story now enters the 19th century, e.g. from the 1800's on, and we have some specific events in popular culture that have immense impact.

In 1809, former lawyer and writer Washington Irving, executed a hoax claiming that a Dutch writer and historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, had disappeared and failed to pay his hotel bill, and if he or someone on his behalf did not pay the bill, that the hotel would publish a manuscript found in his room.

This was all made up of course, and the manuscript had been authored by Washington Irving and purported to be a history of New York from the beginning of time to the present day, from a Dutch point of view.   This was also a satire on the self-important local histories that one could find in different communities.

New Yorkers fell for this hoax hook, line and sinker, and as it was serialized, it went viral, as we say today.  A search was supposedly made for the disappeared Dutch historian, Mr. Knickerbocker, but to no avail.  Eventually the book got published, was very popular and established Mr. Irving's reputation.

In the history of New Amsterdam, Irving/Knickerbocker discuss the traditions from the Low Countries of Sinterklaas, of St. Nicholas, and of hanging stockings by the bed to be filled mysteriously with various edible goodies and toys by the morning of Christmas Day.  And this is the accepted version of the specific reason that we in America who are not from the Low Countries originally associate Santa Claus, St. Nicholas and hanging stockings on Christmas Eve with Christmas.

Knickerbocker's History of New York Complete by Washington Irving
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13042

7.  In England another writer, and social reformer, Charles Dickens, was struggling with his work and very upset about the poverty and misery among the working poor, after a lecture he gave in Manchester in 1843, walked around Manchester at night and conceived of a story of a greedy industrialist who is visited one Christmas eve by the ghost of his former business partner.   He went home and wrote the story as a short novel in six weeks and published it on 19 December 1843.   To his surprise, it became immensely popular, and has never been out of print since.

According to various accounts, including that of historian Ronald Hutton, whose book we discuss later, this story had a vast impact.  From it, he claims, came the particularly British charitable tradition that no one should go hungry on Christmas.   Whether or not this is true seems difficult to believe, but that is what he and other sources say.   Furthermore, it supposedly influenced an industrialist to begin the tradition of letting the workers have Christmas Day off, a tradition our right wing has been fighting and trying to destroy ever since.

[My readers in England dispute that Dickens was ever surprised by his success and dispute that Christmas Carol had that much influence on the charitable organizations.  I also wonder about this, but historians such as Hutton claim up and down that it is true.  Read Hutton and tell me what you think.]

8. Note we still have not explained Santa Claus' sleigh with reindeer, with his bag of gifts, in a red suit, or even the notion of having a decorated tree and other important elements.

9. Then in 1823 a poem was published anonymously in Troy, NY called "A Visit from St. Nicholas". It had been written by a professor of Classics at Columbia University and published without his permission (or his name) in a local newspaper. The poem tells the story of a Christmas Eve and a man who wakes up in the middle of the night to find a miniature sleigh flying over his house with eight miniature reindeer, and a person who is recognized as St. Nicholas (an elven and miniaturized version of the 4th Century AD Greek saint and bishop, I suppose) who climbs down the chimney with a sack of presents, and fills the children's stockings with candy. The man and the mysterious visitor exchange a conspiratorial wink, then the stranger leaves by the chimney and flies away saying "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!".

Clement Moore supposedly came up with the idea during a sleigh ride to do some Christmas shopping for his family, incorporating certain aspects about St. Nicholas that he had learned from a local Dutch handyman. But the rest of it, the sleigh, the eight reindeer, their names, etc, he made up himself out of whole cloth.  This poem became immensely popular, went viral as we say, and I end the essay with it.

10. But we still have not explained the tradition of the Christmas Tree. The various German ethnic groups that had emigrated to this country, the Moravians, etc, had/have a variety of traditions for their Christmas celebration. One of them is the notion of having a tree, given the time of year it is an evergreen, and having a celebration in which the tree is decorated with little ornaments. Somehow this became something that the President of the United States did every year in the White House.  But believe it or not, it is not clear when the tradition started.  Some say it was in the 1850s when Franklin Pierce was President, and other say it was 1889 during the Harrison Administration.  This became a tradition, became electrified, and is now one of the ceremonies of the season in Washington DC, the lighting of the Christmas tree.  From this, it is alleged, having a Christmas tree became a generalized holiday tradition for the American household.

Implicit in this explanation is the idea that perhaps the President was running for reelection and was trying to attract votes from the German ethnic groups in this country.  This last observation is pure cynical speculation on my part and is not in any way implied by anything I have read on the topic.

At some point we are going to get to the topic of the Aluminum Christmas tree, but this seems a good time to interject that Pierce or Harrison may electrify their tree, but if you have an aluminum tree it would be a very bad idea to try to electrify it.   Aluminum is very conductive of electricity and an electrical short would be very exciting but also unpleasant.   One uses an external color wheel to illuminate the tree in a festive manner.

Of course this begs the question of where the German's got their tradition from and whether it is a remnant of an archaic belief system, perhaps of the evergreen representing eternal life, as some assert. This essay will not go into that, it will have to be a topic for another time.  For now we must be content with the notion of how a specific German tradition came into American popular culture.

11. Although there is far more to mention, our research and this essay will almost but not quite end with mentioning one more influence because it was so important.  Apparently, a lot of what Americans think about Christmas from a visual point of view came from an illustrator and publisher, Thomas Nast, in the mid to late 19th century. He is known for many things, including his depiction of Boss Tweed, Uncle Sam and last but not least Santa Claus in his red suit (a Nast invention, among others).  (I have checked and this Nast appears to have no relationship to Conde Nast).

Not allergic to cats, I hope! 

But still we are not done, for we have not explained the notion of an Aluminum Christmas Tree, the Yule Log, the candle in the window, why Virginia appears to be more devout (e.g. Christian) in their celebration, and other matters.  I have not been able to figure out where the Aluminum Christmas Tree came from but I suspect from the image I found online and put at the top of this essay, that it may have been a marketing effort on the part of the Richmond, Va based Reynolds Aluminum.   I only know that we had one and that I was very unhappy to hear that it had been thrown out because it was in such bad shape after decades of use. It was in our family when I was growing up, and I wish it was in our family today.

What can we conclude from the stories reported above?   That Christmas in this country was, as it appears to be, a pastiche of traditions from England and the rest of Europe, but not all of them by any means, and that they were in part selected for their secular character because many Americans were ambivalent about the various religious traditions of Europe.  Whatever a stocking or a decorated tree may stand for, the relationship to the birth of Christ is not obvious.   The closest we get to religion seems to be a reference to a saint (St. Nicholas) and that star at the top of the tree, which may indeed be the Star of Bethlehem.   Even more amusing is that the details of many of these traditions were elaborated and created in this country by writers and artists of various types and only pretend to be older than they are.

When I transcribed Clement Moore's poem written for his children, also published here without his permission as is traditional, I discovered to my amazement that I knew it by heart. I have no idea how it is that I happened to know this poem by heart, but I do.

And so with that thought, I am wishing you a happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

A Visit From St. Nicholas

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar plums danc'd in their heads,

And Mama in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap —
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters, and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow,
Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below;
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and call'd them by name:
"Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer and Vixen,
"On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Donder and Blitzen;
"To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall!
"Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys — and St. Nicholas too:
And then in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound:
He was dress'd all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnish'd with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys was flung on his back,
And he look'd like a peddler just opening his pack:
His eyes — how they twinkled! His dimples: how merry,
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And fill'd all the stockings; then turn'd with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.
He sprung to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew, like the down of a thistle:
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight —
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

____________________________

By far the most comprehensive work that discusses and attempts to explain where various Holiday traditions in England came from is Ronald Hutton's book "The Stations of the Sun".  If you are at all interested in this topic, this is the book to get.
http://www.amazon.com/Stations-Sun-Ronald-Hutton/dp/0192854488

Essay on the origin of American Christmas Myth and Customs

http://www.arthuriana.co.uk/xmas/swartz/American%20Christmas%20Origins.htm

Clement Moore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Clarke_Moore

Sinterklaas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas

A Christmas Carol Wikipedia Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol

The Manuscript for A Christmas Carol

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/dickens/ChristmasCarol/1

A Christmas Carol at Project Guttenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46


[December 25, 2012: This is the 4th rewrite of this essay, and it will not be the last].
[December 26, 2012: We have some comments from friends in England, see below].
[December 27, 2012: More rewrite on the date of Christmas]
[December 25, 2013: Miscellaneous but especially on the ambiguity of which president started the tree]

The Story of Columbia University's Second Campus

So I am going to tell you a New York real estate story, the story of Columbia University's second campus. Their current location is their third campus.

Columbia University has been around since 1754, in other words, before the American Revolution. It is a recent college by the standards of a Virginian or a European, but it is still venerable.

It was originally located down by Wall Street, the street named for the wall they built to keep the Native Americans out. That's right they built a wall, and south of that wall was "civilization". How ironic given the pestilent sore of moral depravity that Wall Street represents to the world today! Back then, there was a lot of open country, a lot of farms, and no skyscrapers. But it started getting crowded, people were building the area up, so they decided to move out of there and bought a second campus somewhere around what we call today midtown, and sold their first campus.

After a while, they realized that they had made a mistake. They should have kept their first campus as a long term real estate investment and merely leased it out to others as Wall Street real estate was proving to be a good investment. So, when, years later, midtown was also getting crowded and they started looking for a new campus, they remembered this lesson. This time they leased their old campus and moved to their new location, the location they have now, in Morningside Heights.

So the question you are supposed to be asking yourself, is where in midtown the second Columbia campus was located and what is it called today.

The second campus was Rockefeller Center.

When I heard this, I realized that I had been told this long ago, but had not understood what I had been told. I remember reading that when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center that what they had actually bought was the buildings not the land. The buildings themselves had been built on land owned by the Columbia trust on a 99 year lease said the article in the NY Times.

Now Columbia is one of those old American names filled with Symbolism and doesn't necessarily refer to Columbia University.  We used to call everything Columbia. The Statue of Liberty is called Columbia. So I thought nothing of it, and just assumed it was the name of an old financial institution or something like that. But no, when they said Columbia Trust, what they meant was the Trust for Columbia University.

The moral of the story is that educational institutions are well positioned to benefit from long term real estate investments in the cities where they reside. For two other examples, check out the history of the real estate investments of Harvard and Stanford.

Wikipedia page for Columbia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Setup

It used to be the thing to do to go to the Museum of Natural History the night before the Macy's Parade and watch them set up, which would involve, among other things, a bunch of really large balloons on their backs being inflated.   Now it has been discovered, and it is a tourist thing, and real NYers stay away, I am told.  This happens on 79th and 81st street, between Columbus and CPW.   

This picture would be from the late 1990s. For those who are unaware of the capabilities of various high speed black and white films, I have enclosed a detail from this picture which, if you look carefully, shows good detail inside a utility room inside the building.     I doubt it was handheld, so the camera had probably been stabilized on some available geometry, such as a mailbox or fire hydrant.  

Whenever I think of this event, I remember the first time I saw it, before it was discovered, and an embarrassing celebrity moment that occurred. This would have been in the late 1970s or early 1980s and a few years after Annie Hall (1977) had come out, and the "Annie Hall - look" was an identifiable fashion trend.   Diane Keaton actually dresses that way, one heard, and so Woody Allen just incorporated it into the movie.   So that night, watching the balloons being inflated, I saw across the street a particularly egregious case of someone dressed up to look like Diane Keaton in full Annie Hall regalia. After a while, I figured out it was Diane Keaton and I should stop staring at her.  Its impolite to stare, anyway.