Interesting Ideas Update

John Martin by Martin Myrone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was awed by the ultra-detailed epic paintings by John Martin I had seen at the Tate and the Smithsonian. The ridiculous level of detail and the apocalyptic imagery oscillate between brilliance and kitsch. This book, tied to an exhibition I’d dearly love to see, tries to explain why. It turns out there was more to Martin than meets the eye.

Click here to see images of Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon.

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Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography by Errol Morris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Errol Morris brings the same brilliant curiosity to this book about the nature of photographs as he does to his films. To appreciate this book you need to care deeply about photography, but if you do you likely will.

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New Topographics by Britt Salvesen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This catalog from a reprise of a 1975 photography exhibit at Eastman House includes some of my long-standing favorite photographers, Stephen Shore and the Bechers, plus some others that are growing on me. The show was not well-received when first mounted but proved to be extremely influential in the rise of deadpan landscape photography.

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From my fat and lazy perspective I don’t have much standing to grouse about the tactics of the Occupy movement. Whether they’ve clearly articulated their goals, or whether I would agree with them all if they did, or whether I find the drumming annoying, at least these people are trying to do something active about the state of the nation. All I do is get depressed.

Still, even if I envy the movement’s pluck, I don’t love the creation of spectacles aimed at media consumption. For decades this has been the Left’s tactic of choice. The realists have believed it’s the most direct way to exert pressure on those who control the levers of power (the media itself, politicians, and perhaps even big business). The unrealists have believed it could supply the spark to mobilize the masses (now quantified as the 99 percent) into that endlessly overdue uprising.

I think there’s actually some validity in both perspectives. Big demonstrations do tip the political zeitgeist a bit toward the left. And publicity can spread some of the contagion of dissent. But playing to the media is a horribly inefficient strategy, creating, with rare exceptions, way more heat than light — and most often just plain disappointing.

If only progressives could take a lesson from their political opposites. The far Right figured out 40 years ago that the most effective political organizing involves focusing on the prosaic mechanics of victory, struggling not to influence power but to seize it — the Tea Party being the most recent example. Sure, their activities generated publicity, but the real point was getting control of key races, not getting exposure in the press. Of course, the right wing’s advantages include generous funding, vast religious networks, the sympathy of the already powerful, and the ability to dispense in good conscience with democratic process. Those are indeed formidable, but that doesn’t mean the only choice left for the Left is to panhandle attention from journalists by way of media stunts.

I’ll acknowledge again that I’m in no moral position to pass judgment, however, and I never was. After all, my cynical reaction last month when I heard protesters chant “the people united will never be defeated” was the same as when I first encountered it at demonstrations when I was 20: wishful thinking.

The first computer I ever seriously used was an Apple II plus. It was also the first computer (other than the typesetters) acquired by the little weekly newspaper where I worked in Santa Barbara, CA. We agonized a bit between the Apple and the first-generation IBM PC. But a comparably equipped Apple was a bit cheaper and, for an alternative newspaper, more culturally appropriate than an IBM device. Plus, we could get VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, which was available only on the Apple.

I spent ungodly amounts of time with that computer, first setting up some basic financial reports for the paper and then creating — and personally populating — a historical content index using a primitive database program called DBmaster. Considering that I was probably the only person who ever used that index, it was something of a boondoggle, but I learned a lot, and pack rat that I am found it deeply satisfying to go through and document years of back issues.

Computingwise, my next weekly newspaper job was a step up. They were actually using computers rather than typewriters to compose and edit stories. We were equipped with Apple IIes, some even with dual five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives. That meant we could stop swapping in the Word Juggler program disk to run the program and a separate disk to save files. (At some point we acquired AppleWorks, the first office software suite I encountered, but Word Juggler offered superior word processing functionality.)

During this period I bought the first computer I personally owned, an Apple IIc. This was a portable evolution from the IIe, albeit with some enhanced features, including more memory (at least 128k) and better graphics. Unlike most personal computers of the time, this one actually looked like it had been designed. And the box was truly portable, even by later laptop standards, though that was because it had no built-in battery or display. The monitor was relatively transportable, but still a schlep to haul. I got the company to buy an extra one so I could have one display at work and one at home. The IIc came with one built-in floppy, and I added the external floppy drive to avoid the dreaded disk swap.

Not long after I bought it, the paper’s finance guy invited me into his office to show off his new, first-generation Macintosh. It was of course like no other computer I’d seen, not just because of the graphical UI, but also because it was the first (and ultimately one of the only) computers equipped with a keyboard that lacked arrow keys. That’s a usability faux pas we can lay personally on Steve Jobs, who believed people should use the mouse and not the keyboard to navigate. Of course it reflected his admirable – if in this case misguided – attention to detail. He eventually relented on the cursor keys, but as all Mac users know, to this day the company has bullheadedly refused to incorporate a standard delete key.

(I’d argue that Jobs’ genius lay most of all in his ability to make good choices across an overwhelming range of details. Most people in senior management eventually give up micromanaging both because of the resentment it breeds among colleagues and simple inability to keep up. It takes incredible focus, fabulous memory, and instincts that prove right nearly all the time, to sustain the kind of involvement that Jobs is credited with. Most of us surrender; he didn’t.)

Just a couple of years later, I left the Apple world for a long time to come. I acquired my first x86 computer, an IBM PC-XT hand-me-down from my brother equipped with a hard drive, all of 10 megabytes. I’m pleased to say that mostly I ran an early x86 variant of UNIX on that computer, only rarely booting DOS from a floppy.

I progressed to running DOS and later Windows, but when Jobs released a version of his Nextstep system ported to the x86 platform in 1993, I was excited. My brother had a Next cube so I had some idea of how well this UNIX-derived computer worked. Nextstep became my primary environment for the next year or so, including an MS Windows emulation application that wasn’t all that clunkier than current Parallels and VMware implementations. And just like a family trip to Hong Kong when I was 16 made it impossible for me to ever find a decent Chinese restaurant in the U.S., Nextstep for years made every graphical user interface seem woefully lacking. Its elegance, utility, and UNIX-based stability were far ahead of just about any 20th Century version of MS Windows. It was also clearly ahead of the old Mac OS, which sapped my motivation to switch back to Apple (along with the Mac’s second-tier software and driver support, apart from graphics and desktop publishing).

Unfortunately, Nextstep was a commercial dead-end and I fell squarely back into the PC camp. I did go through some iPods, however. Then, with the 2006 release of the MacBook Pro, I returned to the Apple fold, regretting only that I bought a travel-unfriendly 17” version. Since OS X was built on the foundation of Nextstep, I could finally have my cake and eat it too. The user interface remained way superior to Windows XP and Vista — more elegant, more empowering to the user, and simply more efficient.

I’m now on my second MacBook Pro, a 15” version. We still use the 17” in my house, and we also have what is certainly the nicest computer I’ve ever used, a Macbook Air, which dislodged my first IBM Thinkpad laptop as the computer I’ve come closest to loving. The Air is light, incredibly fast and lovely to behold. My next personal laptop will be the 13” Air; I’m just trying to hold out for a bigger solid-state drive.

Meanwhile, we also have three iPhones and two iPads, the second one being a unit I won in a trade-show raffle. I still have a pair of aging Windows PCs, and I’m not sure I’m prepared to live 100% Windows free. It would be like going entirely without network TV — it’s mostly dross, but I kind of want to keep in touch a little with that world. Plus, my work machine is a Windows notebook. And every time I touch a keyboard I’d rather be using a Mac, for which I can, of course, thank the late Mr. Jobs.

Saw Midnight in Paris last night. (The next youngest person in the theater was probably three times my daughter’s age, at least.) It was a good one — Owen Wilson did a creditable job as Woody Allen’s mouthpiece, and the modernist name dropping worked well. But more than anything the movie, especially the present-day sequences, reminded me that Allen’s most enduring concern — more than his neuroses or intellectual/anti-intellectual pretensions, urbanophilia, May-September romanticism or even humor — is illustrating the lifestyles of the very rich. That first struck me with Hannah and Her Sisters, but with each movie, good, bad or indifferent, it has become clearer and clearer. There’s a vicarious pleasure in watching people have such wonderful lives so effortlessly, be it their admirable New York apartments or their ability to roam Paris freely. What the characters screw up in his plots is typically something other than the underlying lifestyle. What I’ve never tried to investigate is whether it’s self-conscious or if he truly can only make movies about himself and his circle. I used to believe the latter, but Allen’s particular form of self-absorbed introspection makes it hard to believe it’s not intentional.

Here are some more masterpieces of prosaic art from around the world.

Art Chicago is an orgy of fast art. Scores of galleries haul out scads of work so visitors can plow up and down endless aisles burdened with art regressing toward the mean. The work, mostly by living artists, is mostly a blur. Occasionally something lends a booth enough gravity to slow you down, more often than not modernist paintings that you’ll never see in a museum since they’re privately owned (and not necessarily museum-quality pieces even if they’re museum-quality artists). This year the highlights for me were Chicago Imagist pieces of relatively recent vintage – works by Karl Wirsum, Gladys Nillson, Ed Paschke, Roger Brown and others across a smattering of local galleries.

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A sampling of wonderful vistas that line — or in some cases used to line — the roadside coast to coast.

John Margolies, Roadside America, edited by Jim Heimann, with contributions by Phil Patton, C. Ford Peatross and photos by John Margolies. Taschen, 288 pages, about 400 color photos, 2010. ISBN: 978-3-8365-1173-5. Hard cover $39.99.

The enthusiasm for vernacular expression that began flowering in the United States in the 1970s never quite gelled into a unified movement. Yet a new generation did learn to value the work of self-taught artists and a sizable coterie of writers, photographers, architects and others discovered an exterior landscape whose aesthetic dimension was almost entirely accidental, but all the more striking for it.
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