Author: admin

Recently a friend told me about an experience a friend of his had had while visiting Sweden for work. While he was there, the company assigned a Swedish colleague to watch out for him. Every day the Swedish colleague would drive him to the office fairly early, while the parking lot was still pretty much empty.

The first day, he was puzzled to notice that in spite of the cold weather, his colleague parked the car at the far end of the parking lot, so that they needed to walk the entire length of the lot to get to the door. This happened day after day. Each day they arrived at a near empty lot, and each day they would park far away from the entrance and walk through the cold to get inside.

Finally my friend’s friend asked why they didn’t just park the car near the entrance. The Swedish colleague explained that some employees, for various reasons, could not arrive early. Those who could generally arrive early would park far away from the entrance. This made it possible for those who came later – who might be in danger of being late for a meeting unless they could get inside quickly – to find a spot close to the door.

I could be wrong, but somehow I suspect that this would never happen in the United States.

Yesterday a close friend of mine told me that a young woman, a friend of his, had telephoned to tell him that her brother had just been killed in action in Afghanistan. On hearing this, I felt an overwhelming sense of tragedy at a young life gone.

The war is so abstract for most of us, something we’ve been reading about in newspapers for so many years now that for many it has taken on a surreal quality. And yet people die. They die day after day after day, and every once in a while we have a personal connection to one of those people.

I know that we all have different politics, different opinions about the meaning of the war, its goals, its methods. But I think we all can agree that whatever other meanings there are here, that the loss of a young person – with their unique thoughts and hopes and dreams for the future, all now gone forever – is an event of overwhelming sadness.

When I draw pictures – a pasttime I enjoy very much – I usually go into a kind of zone, very attentive to what I’m doing in the moment, but not at all self-conscious. The general feeling is that another part of my mind is taking over, one that is quite different from the part of me that has conversations over dinner, or participates in meetings at work.

Something similar – yet somehow different – happens when I improvise on the piano, solve a crossword puzzle, or develop computer programs. In each case I generally lose explicit awareness of conscious being, and instead go into a kind of flow state. Decisions are clearly being made each moment, but most of those decisions are not made by the conscious “me” that my friends have come to know. It seems that these pasttimes allow me to access some other part of myself, a part that doesn’t so much “think” of things, but simply “does” things.

Today I’ve just spent a very pleasant afternoon working on a computer drawing program, then spending some time making some drawings – going back and forth between these two activities, two different kinds of flow state. Which afforded me a rare opportunity to compare two such flow states, one beside the other.

And now the question comes up in my mind, am I accessing the same part of myself when I do all of these activities, or have I developed a separate inner self for each? Is the music-improvising part of my being connected to the drawing-pictures part? Do either of these relate to the computer-programming or puzzle-solving parts of me? Or are these all completely disconnected, separate selves developed independently over the years in response to separate challenges?

It would be great to get all of these aesthetic components of one’s self into a room together, introduce them to each other and get them talking, comparing notes on their likes and dislikes. Unfortunately that might be easier said than done. In my experience, none of these aspects of my self, for all of their expressiveness, is very big on conversation.

The other day I spent about six hours in Rio de Janeiro, just enough time to pay a long overdue visit on some wonderful old friends, to catch up over lunch and cafezinho. I was surprised at how much joy I felt simply to once again walk along those streets. I didn’t even go to the beach, although a friend’s apartment balcony offered a lovely sight of the Lagoa with its little boats framed by the mountains beyond.

Rio, like New York, is a walking city. Its life is found on foot, in linked neighborhoods that flow easily one into the other. It is not merely the immense natural beauty that calls out to you, there is also the ruined grandeur of the architecture – so many heartbreakingly lovely old buildings, many in disrepair, proud beauties from another time.

I realize that much of the romance of any city is inside our own heads, entwined with our personal histories, the people we’ve met on its avenues and in its restaurants, the way those encounters have changed our lives and made us who we are. For me Rio de Janeiro is such a place. When I walk its streets, and take in the lilting rhythm of its daily life, I cannot help but hear, somewhere within my soul, the immortal music of Antonio Carlos Jobim.

While visiting Sao Paulo this past week, I was talking with a friend there about the fact that there are very few all-night places to eat in that city. Sao Paulo has some of the finest restaurants in the world, but like most cities, at some point in the evening the food options pretty much shut down.

My hometown of New York, New York is of course famous for being “the city that never sleeps”, in the immortal words of Fred Ebb. Not that restaurants in Manhattan generally stay open all night, by any means. Most restaurants close their doors by 10:30 or 11pm, with a few staying open an hour or two more. But all-night places indeed abound. If you know your way around town, you need never lack for a meal at three in the morning. And of course there is an all-night deli within a few blocks of pretty much anywhere, if you just want to pick up something to go.

While we were on the subject, I told my friend about an all-night restaurant in Manhattan I used to frequent years ago. My pals and I always seemed to end up there after long nights out on the town. Just thinking about the place filled me with wistful nostalgia, and I told my Brazilian friend it was great because “it was always open, 24 hours a day. But it closed”.

To my surprise, my friend started laughing. It took me a moment to understand what he was laughing at, until I played back in my mind what I had just told him. Then I started laughing too, quite pleased that I had just had a genuine Yogi Berra moment.

As strange as it may seem, I take it as a given that religious rituals are as bizarre and inexplicable as they are because this is the most effective way to transmit culture from one generation to another. And I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad thing, considering their purpose. I’ll explain.

If you have a sensible religious ritual – one that is based on common sense, reason, some connection to our higher brain function – then your religion will quickly die out. When your children grow up they will find it easy to ignore the rites and rituals of your particular spiritual group.

But if you have strange rituals – dietary restrictions, days of the week when you’re not allowed to work, eating fish on Fridays, snacking on little wafers that transform in your mouth into the flesh of a human god who died two thousand years ago (you might think I’m making that last one up, but it turns out there’s a major religion that actually works this way), then your children will become transfixed.

Your kids’ little brains will go on overload from the stimulus of ostensibly insane rituals that their parents seem to take seriously. By the time they are, say, five years old, their ability to reason logically about this stuff will be completely gone, and they may well be ready to Jihad at a moment’s notice.

In a sense, religious rituals are like the Dada art movement. The entire idea is to surprise people, to wake them up at an early age by engaging in something that appears so insane that they will have no choice, as their brains develop, but to embrace it.

In a world with religion, perhaps Dada is redundant. What is a mere ironic urinal by “R. Mutt”, compared with the Holy Ghost? Admit it, Marcel Duchamp was way behind the curve on this one.

He appears to hesitate before knocking, but only for a moment. The door opens soon, perhaps too soon, and for a few seconds he looks startled, almost disoriented. She gestures, silently, for him to enter. They go into the living room and sit side by side on the couch, not touching, just looking at each other. Neither looks at the teapot on the coffee table before them. After a few moments she stares at the pot, as though seeing it for the first time, picks it up by its white porcelain handle and pours, first his cup, then her own.

After this she does not make any move to drink her tea, but simply stares into his eyes, her gaze unwavering. He looks down at the two teacups, a thoughtful expression on his face. After a moment he takes a sip from the cup before him, then another, holding it delicately with the fingers of one large hand, holding the saucer carefully in his other hand. When he has finished his tea he puts down both cup and saucer and rests both his hands, face down, side by side on the coffee table.

She continues to look at him, shrugs, shakes her head slightly. Slowly she reaches out with one hand, placing it lightly upon his knee. He looks down at her hand, so small and delicate. He removes her hand from his knee and holds it to his face, touching her slender fingers lightly to his cheek.

Then he plants a single kiss upon her palm and rests her hand gently down upon the table, palm up. She stares intently at the place upon her palm where it has just been kissed. He abruptly stands up, carries his teacup to the kitchen, places it carefully on the counter, and walks to the door.

Her gaze never wavers from her upturned hand, still lying open on the table where he had placed it. Only after she hears the door close does she lift her own cup, and slowly begin to sip her tea.

I was having a conversation today with a friend about the mystery of banks. We were both curious about the strange and dysfunctional dynamic between banks and bank customers.

Walking into a bank is often a bit like walking into a sacred place – a church perhaps. There are stern guards in uniforms to make sure you behave properly, and officious people behind little windows that you need to wait in line to see. The ceilings are often tall, as though you are in some sort of cathedral, and a sombre atmosphere pervades.

The whole feeling of waiting for a teller is a lot like going into a government office to ask for a visa or passport. There is the same sense of supplication, of being in the presence of something important, of needing to seek permission from those in authority.

The curious thing about this situation is that the transactions involved generally involve your own money. You’ve put your savings into the hands of these people, and they are supposed to be looking out for it on your behalf. On a fundamental level they are not all that different from your doorman or housekeeper – people who are performing some useful service for your benefit. People who are in your employ.

So why the power reversal? One theory is that there is a strange aura attached to having lots of money – even other people’s money. In a sense a banker is someone who stares all day at a big pile of money on his living room table – lots and lots and lots of money. Millions of dollars of money.

Yes, he knows that it’s not his money – it’s actually an amalgam of bits and pieces of the wealth of others – but nonetheless, he’s got it, ownership be damned. After all he can see it – it’s in his vault, in his computer, in crisp hundred dollar bills at the fingertips of people who work for him. Who cares who actually owns it?

You, on the other hand, only possess title to this money, perhaps a measly tens of thousands of it, or perhaps even hundreds of thousands. Whatever. You are merely the puny and insignificant figure in this vast fiducial drama who happens to legally own the money.

The banker is a giant striding upon the earth, a god descended from Olympus to trample across the vast stage of history upon a cushion of millions of dollars of borrowed wealth. But you? Poor poor little you. You are a simply contributor to this magnificent drama, a bit player, a working stiff with a paycheck. How dare you presume to breath the same air as a banker?

One day we might all realize how much of a scam this is. And then the sense of entitlement of people who watch our money for us will melt away, and we will gain our rightful place at the table as owners of our own hard-earned wealth.

You never know, it could happen. But I wouldn’t bank on it. 😉

Today somebody explained to me the marketing strategy behind Harley Davidson custom motorcycles, or “Choppers” as they are affectionately called. This was information relayed to my friend from someone who works in Harley’s marketing department. It seems that these aggressive looking vehicles, most often associated with the Hells Angels and Peter Fonda driving down the highway in the 1969 film “Easy Rider”, are marketed very specifically.

According to the marketing guy from Harley, the target customer is a somewhat older guy, often bearded and almost always somewhat overweight, who has a good high paying job. These guys like to dress up aggressively in leather outfits on weekends, get on their choppers and roar through the countryside, making lots of noise, looking agressive and generally disturbing the peace of one neighborhood after another.

Which is not illegal. And that is precisely the point. Apparently the police know the score, and leave these guys alone. The cops see the Harleys and realize that it’s all fake. Even if the procession looks, to the untrained eye, like a gang of marauding criminals, it’s actually just a kind of acting out by respectable guys with good jobs who pay taxes.

To me, there are two remarkable things going on here. One is that Harley Davidson builds an entire brand around this interesting variety of collective theatre. The is that their marketing people would be perfectly happy to lift the veil off the fantasy. Clearly they are confident that their target customer will keep buying.

I guess this makes sense. Makers of sports shoes don’t really expect their customers to believe themselves to be the equal of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan – however much those icons of acheivement are used in product marketing. Knowing that you will never sink an eagle like Tiger or dunk like Jordan clearly doesn’t stop you from buying the shoe.

Similarly, it might not be so bad to know that you are buying that Harley merely to play out a ritual of pretending to be “Captain America” cruising to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras on a chopper loaded with drug money, while “Born to be Wild” plays on the soundtrack. Honestly, getting to play-act the part of countercultural outlaw is a lot better than actually being “Captain America” in “Easy Rider” – things didn’t really work out too well for him.

Train stations have really tall ceilings. But why? Trains themselves are just not that high. And people certainly aren’t. Bus stations don’t have tall ceilings, so why trains?

A little research reveals that it’s because of the steam. If a steam powered train were to pull into a station with low ceilings, all of that scalding hot vapor could have very serious consequences for any unfortunate humans in the immediate vicinity. Very bad for business – to say nothing of the insurance costs.

“Wait a minute,” you might be thinking. “Steam engines?? There are no steam engines!”

Exactly. Steam engines were replaced, largely by diesel engines, over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. By around fifty years ago, the steam locomotive had essentially disappeared from the scene, except as a novelty.

And yet, many train stations are still built with extremely tall ceilings. Not because there’s any real reason for it, but because they are supposed to have tall ceilings. People like the tall ceilings, the majesty of them, the “train station-ness” of them. So much nicer than crawling into a dingy little low-ceilinged bus terminal, like an ant into an anthill.

And I think it’s great. As the world around gets progressively more cyber, it’s lovely that we hold on to these little Victorian flourishes, from the computer-driven electric motor in your car’s steering wheel that simulates the feel of force from the road, to the ringing sound you hear when you pick up a telephone – decades after the last electromechanical clapper fell into disuse in this country.

Perhaps it is a sign of the immaturity of today’s computer interfaces that they do not yet have more of the subtle quality of pencil and paper, that they lack the texture and sensuous response we derive so easily from more ancient information technologies.

We are, after all, physical creatures, with brains that evolved over a vast span of time to connect in a particular way to our muscles and our senses. It is possible that the Steam Punk movement, with its strange fetishes, is responding – however incoherently – to a real need. Perhaps our computer interfaces will only truly reach maturity when they permit a sense of majesty and freedom akin to a stroll beneath those tall ceilings of our lovely train stations.

Perhaps the computer interface will have achieved maturity only when it manages to melt away seamlessly into the physical world around us, its immense added power transposed back into desk and book and paper.