Processed

Water and Health

The New York Academy of Sciences recently published a multimedia report on a meeting they hosted with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health focusing on a range of issues at the intersection of water quality and health. Talks spanned global social, economic, and political trends, all the way down to the individual human cell. Topics discussed included the role of climate change in exacerbating cholera epidemics, threats to the U.S. water supply, high- and low-tech inventions for water treatment, and the implications of water shortages for economic development worldwide.

Perhaps the most gripping talk came from Erik Peterson at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC. His refrain throughout his talk was “In effect, we are on countdown.” As population rises, water reserves dry up, climate change proceeds, and progress on sanitation is slow in many parts of the world, all signs point to a crisis in many places in this century. This is not only a humanitarian issue, but could affect political stability, as populations will increasingly have few choices but to pursue water access aggressively. Currently, he argued, insufficient attention is being given to this issue at the policy level, either in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world. And these issues will not go away.

The eBriefing is now available on the New York Academy of Sciences website. I wrote the meeting summary, and you can also see a video interview I conducted with Peter Agre, in which he talks about several troubling examples of problems around the world related to water access. Audio and slides are also available from all of the talks, including Peterson's. It's really worth a look. See the eBriefing here.

Building a Smarter Building

This week the New York Academy of Sciences published a meeting report I wrote and produced covering a recent symposium on "smart" buildings. You can see it here. 

The basic idea behind smart buildings is that sensing devices such as photosensors, thermostats, and other more sophisticated gadgets are converging with increasingly powerful information technology, making it possible to use software to monitor a building's performance in realtime, diagnose problems, and ideally find ways to improve it. The idea is becoming increasingly attractive not just for economic reasons, but also within the context of green building. Because buildings consume a huge amount of the energy we use, finding ways to improve their efficiency is seen as an attractive way to work toward meeting carbon emissions goals.

One big concept that came up repeatedly over the course of the meeting was the importance of thinking about building systems holistically. As automated building management systems improve, they are becoming increasingly able to integrate discreet parts of the building's operation (heating, lighting, security, etc.) into a single comprehensive picture. Such approaches offer potential ways to deal with the proverbial New York City apartment that is so overheated in the wintertime a tenant has to open the windows, to take a crude example. It could also help to identify whether a malfunction in one part of a single system really has any effect on the system as a whole.

I was particularly interested in Gregory Provan's talk. Provan is a mathematician at University College Cork in Ireland, and uses mathematical models and machine learning approaches to glean insight into how well a building is performing. In an approach called "continuous commissioning" he begins modeling the building's performance parameters during its design. Later, as the structure is built, occupied, and renovated, data are recorded on an ongoing basis, and compared with the original projections to see when it isn't meeting those goals. Already machine learning algorithms can identify faults within a building when they spot fluctuations in the data. The future is in using this iterative approach to figure out ways to automate the process of improving how the building performs as a system, such that a computer could recommend solutions to inefficiencies in the way the building as a whole was planned.

There's also a very interesting talk from Stephen Samouhos, a graduate student at MIT. He comes from a family that owns a construction business, and so has an insider's perspective on how building owners, builders, and operators think. His basic message is that the technology is great and will become even better, but it won't become scalable until the folks in these parts of the industry can be convinced of the economic and practical value of more expensive, more-complicated-to-run systems. 

Jane Snowdon of IBM also gave a very nice overview of how some of the world's most powerful computers work, and how they could help managing individual buildings, but whole cities. She also touches on a very interesting point about information technology and its role in climate change. Although most of us don't think about it, computing consumes huge amounts of energy to enable us to do our Christmas shopping online. Finding ways to improve this requirement is something that the machines themselves are helping to do.

The eBriefing includes a more detailed  writeup, as well as multimedia of the speakers' lectures. Check it out.

The Glass Bees Featured in Sheepshead Bay Blog

Thank you to Samantha LoSapio and all of the folks at Sheepshead Bites for this review! This gives me increased confidence that we're onto something here. See the full article.

If you thought traffic was bad at the Sheepshead Bay Road bus stop, teeming with Kingsborough students late for their 9 a.m. class and exasperated espresso fiends tweeting about their frustration, wait until you have to push your way off the back of a gondola.

Oh, you heard right; we said gondola.

New York City’s own Atlantean harbingers in their own right, Christopher Williams and Jason Das of experimental musical project known as the Glass Bees, recently embarked on a morning-long acquisition of a variety of media taken or inspired by the southeastern coast of Brooklyn, including our very own Sheepshead Bay, to form a multimedia experience called Venice, Brooklyn...> Read more.

Also, as a side note, the New York Academy of Sciences has announced that they will be holding an event on December 2 looking at the findings of the New York Panel on Climate Change. Modeled on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NPCC is looking closely at the potential implications of climate change for New York City and the region. The report will also be published as a volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Some Thoughts on Venice, Brooklyn

Venice, Brooklyn was a shotgun multimedia improvisation assembled and performed by the Glass Bees on September 20, 2009. Early that morning, Jason Das and I traveled to areas along the Atlantic coastline in southern Brooklyn, specifically visiting neighborhoods and marshland that scientists have predicted to be vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the coming decades. We visited Dead Horse Bay, Floyd Bennett Field, Gerritsen Beach, and Sheepshead Bay, documenting them with sound recorders, photographs, watercolor sketches, and video, and collecting objects we found there. Later that day, we presented an improvised performance in the front vestibule of Envoy Enterprises, a gallery in Chinatown, New York City. Our field recordings, visual footage, and physical detritus became the raw material for a sound collage and temporary installation. Amplified sound was broadcast into the street, and visitors were invited into the gallery to listen more closely on headphones. All materials and sounds we presented were gathered, created, displayed, performed, and disassembled within an 11-hour period.

In a formal sense, Venice, Brooklyn was a significant stage in the ongoing evolution of the Glass Bees. From our inception, a core goal has been to adapt and respond to the situations in which we find ourselves, improvising with the materials we have at hand. But although we first formed as a purely musical project, our approach to improvisation is increasingly open to experimentation in other registers. In this case, our perambulations early in the day were conducted in the spirit of the Situationist dérive. Our motions were an attempt to actively engage with the city, getting lost while discovering corners previously unknown to us, paying close attention to things typically unobserved, exposing hidden histories, and finding utility in objects that have no use. Although we set out that morning with a general sense of what we were looking for, what we returned with was largely accidental. Our installation in a gallery in Chinatown constituted an improvised, impressionistic remix of what we had experienced earlier in the day.

We developed this project in response to a call for proposals issued by the Conflux Festival. Conflux is a New York City-wide gathering of visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers, and the public, created to “investigate everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological, and social practice.” Our interest in climate change and its potential effects on the city came out of my work as a science editor. It’s been difficult to avoid thinking about this profoundly depressing issue, and our inability, at all levels of society, to properly reckon with it. For centuries, people up and down the Atlantic seashore have built their lives, their communities, their very dreams on the assumption that land is land, and sea is sea. But the line demarcating these two worlds is slowly crawling uphill, making the precautions we have engineered increasingly insufficient. It is now conceivable that someday the locations we visited could suffer a similar fate as New Orleans, or Venice, or Bangladesh, all of which are in the process of being submerged. What would be lost if these areas were inundated, we wondered, and how are people preparing?

 

Like the haul of some anachronistic anthropological excavation, the evidence we gathered in our fieldwork was largely quotidian, but often telling. The sounds we used during our performance at Envoy were sampled from field recordings of what we encountered—antique bottles washed up on the shore, dumped in the bay decades ago but mysteriously resurfaced as litter once again; a bristle-less hairbrush, corroded clean by the brackish water; a watchdog protecting its owner’s property; a young girl pulling a wagon; shortwave weather reports; and interviews with people we met along the way.  The photographs we took and the watercolors Jason painted were snapshots of life in these places—a row of houses and the canal in Gerritsen, advertisements for new harborfront condominiums at Sheepshead, a path through the marshland, a table of trophies, a pinwheel, a dilapidated barn.

An elderly woman who took interest in Jason’s sketching explained to us that Gerritsen Beach was initially developed as a small community of summer cottages, inaccessible in the winter and occupied during the hot weather. That people have since built out these cabins into larger, more permanent houses just a few feet above sea level suggests an indomitable impulse to claim the coast and its watery pleasures. It also speaks to what Columbia University climatologists Klaus Jacob, Vivien Gornitz, and Cynthia Rosenzweig once described, in a study of the potential effects of climate change for New York, as "littoral environments … caught between the twin pressures of development and increasing coastal hazards." Like the nearby Whitney Mill that years ago served as an industrial focal point of the area, this unique and charming neighborhood of narrow streets, short blocks, and dense housing could someday be abandoned, this time badly flooded or even swallowed by the ocean.

That day we also passed through coastal areas that remain sparsely developed, a buffer zone to mitigate the consequences of storms for the city’s inland settlements. Home to abandoned barracks and functional U.S. Marine and Coast Guard installations, these isolated areas also offer open spaces psychically far removed from the congestion just a few miles up Flatbush Avenue. At Floyd Bennett Field we found a miniature formula 1 race course for remote control car enthusiasts. When we approached holding our audio recorder, the organizer introduced himself, explaining that he’d been afraid we were from the Parks Department, recording decibel levels as evidence for a complaint against him. After reassuring him that we had no intention of causing problems, he told us about the troubles his club faces in finding a permanent place to enjoy their hobby. They’d been evicted form the Aviator Club when the former aircraft hangar was turned into a sports complex, and now made the best they could of an uneven patch of tarmack they’d claimed. As the cars hurtled around the course at startlingly high speeds, his story was one of displacement, of a small but enthusiastic community forced to relocate due to forces beyond their control.

With flood prediction maps in hand, it was not difficult to see that in the long term, the built environment around us was similarly provisional, temporary, and in the process of migration. Scientists now know that certain effects of climate change are irreversible and unavoidable, and governments and individuals will be forced to adapt to a new reality. If they don’t, places around the world including these outlying regions of New York will be endangered, and their residents will be uprooted for higher ground. Many of those places will have an even harder time coping.

In Manhattan, concrete and glass high-rises belie the fact that millions of people live here on islands, and that their settlements rest just feet above sea level. To us it seemed provocative, then, to bring peripheral areas into dialogue with Downtown. Models of the potential effects of severe storms in Manhattan predict that neighborhoods not far from the Envoy Enterprises storefront could also be inundated. Even moderate storms will have the power to render the city’s infrastructure useless, as occurred one morning in the summer of 2007, when an early morning downpour incapacitated the city’s subway system, leaving thousands of commuters with no choice but to hike miles to work. How are we preparing for a potentially far worse sequel? Could we do anything about it if we wanted to?

Fundamentally, the question of what investments and sacrifices we are willing to make to cope with the effects of climate change is a complicated calculus of risk assessment. With so much competing information and so many unknowns about the extent of climate change’s effects, how do we define a reasonable level of preparedness? Such questions are not new, and evidence of the ways in which we have answered them fill the space around us. This is a theme that the Glass Bees have explored before, and in this sense we see Venice, Brooklyn as part of an ongoing project begun in a July 2009 performance we held at Monkeytown, a venue in Brooklyn. There, we (along with sound artist Andrea Williams) improvised a soundtrack to a two-channel video projection created from footage gathered at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Although today it is primarily a destination for weekend getaways to the beach, Sandy Hook has a long and rich military history, dating back to the nineteenth century, when bunkers were dug into the dunes to protect New York Harbor. The fortifications developed as technology evolved, eventually including a Nike missile installation erected in the 1950s to shield the city from Soviet bombers. All of these defenses eventually became obsolete and were abandoned.

No attack ever came against New York, but does that mean that these precautions were foolhardy? We will never know. Because the fossils of this era sit on a sandbar just a few hundred feet wide at some points, however, we might expect that nature’s invasion of the same terrain will have dramatic effects, and strategies against it will become increasingly difficult to devise. Can we live with this? How are we preparing for these changes? The very week that Venice, Brooklyn took place, world leaders met in the United Nations General Assembly, once again averring that something must be done to address climate change, but refusing to make concrete proposals about the measures everyone knows are needed. With a major climate change conference coming up in Copenhagen later this year, prospects are looking increasingly slim that the essential consensus needed to address this complicated, global issue will materialize.

In a small way, Venice, Brooklyn was an attempt to focus on the material reality of what is at risk. Data and statistics can seem abstract to the nonscientist, and it won’t be until people’s lives are impacted in concrete, physical ways that the full extent of the phenomenon will be understood.

Although the trends are clear, climatologists admit that the specific effects of climate change are difficult to predict. New York City will have no alternative but to improvise, to adapt to the changing environment in which we find ourselves...  perhaps not unlike a certain, transitory multimedia installation presented on a stoop in Chinatown.

Visit the Glass Bees for audio and video from this performance.

The Data Know

Another sign of the hidden untapped powers of the web surfaced last week. The New York Times reported that Google is developing methods of analyzing search data to track regional outbreaks of the flu. From the Times:

There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.

The report was another symptom of what is becoming a much bigger story. In June, Wired editor Chris Anderson published a controversial polemic (more here) defining what he called the "Petabyte Age." He wrote:

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The lesson is that raw, digital data, of which there is now an overwhelming overabundance, contains information. The challenge is how to recognize and interpret the patterns hidden within it. Anderson's argument is that this approach could signal the end of the scientific method, which relies on hypothesis, testing, and reproducibility. In the Petabyte Age, he says, researchers are moving away from understanding things in a mechanistic way, and turning to statistics to provide models of how they work, even if the details remain inscrutable.

Reading the Times story reminded me of a conversation I recently had with Tony Jebara, a computer scientist at Columbia University who specializes in machine learning. (We'll be posting video of the interview on the redesigned New York Academy of Sciences' website, eventually.) His academic work has focused on computer vision and facial recognition, though in his extracurricular activities, he is also chief scientist and co-founder of Sense Networks.

Sense has developed a platform that collects data from GPS, WiFi positioning, cell phones, and RFID in real time. It then analyzes this information to predict things like consumer movements in shopping districts over the course of a day, or which bars in a city are most active on a particular night. The application could become a powerful tool for analyzing how communities function, purely on the basis of some very basic, anonymous information.

Such work provides a glimpse of the unique opportunities this new kind of science, made possible by the networks the web has created, could offer. The computer scientists behind Google Flu Trends beat epidemiologists to the punch with a search engine, based on the assumption that patterns that emerge from individuals' simplest activities mean something. And where questions about how communities behave would once have been answered by an anthropologist, we now have evidence of how automated algorithms can reveal group dynamics, based on the simple facts of people's most mundane, day-to-day actions.

Hello, Things.

Thank you to the good soul at thingsmagazine.net who posted a link to Processed as part of their Friday round-up. The site was a real inspiration when Processed first began, and remains a favorite portal for discovering hidden riches of the Web. Hello, too, to Things readers who may be discovering Processed for the first time. Please stay in touch.

The Glass Bees at Monkeytown - October 10

If you're in New York City on October 10, come to Monkeytown and hear the Glass Bees. We will be improvising live sound for video projections by artist Peter Shapiro Guillaume Clave. This will take place as an installment of the Forward Motion Theater's EyeWash series. Monkeytown is a very special venue, with comfortable seating and four huge video screens. We're very excited and hope you will be too.

Also on the bill:

MOSTRA + Nico Mazet
VBLANK + AUTO DA FE
VJ Pixalot

Monkeytown
58 N. 3rd St. (btw. Kent & Wythe)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
$5 + $10 food/drink minimum
Reservations recommended.
718-384-1369 or monkeytownhq@aol.com

Go to http://glassbees.com for lots of sound and a new documentary film collaboration with filmmaker Nerina Penzhorn. Thanks to my co-Bee Jason Das for the flyer.

Feed Me With Your Hiss

With such high expectations for My Bloody Valentine’s first performances in over 15 years, how could they help but disappoint? Since fading into obscurity following the release of their monumental 1991 LP Loveless, their gauzy, tremolo-drenched sunshine has spawned whole genres of imitators. The sound was ubiquitous in the East Coast indie rock scene of the 1990s (see The Swirlies, Velocity Girl, The Lilys, Mercury Rev), and continues to feed inspiration to various subgenres of contemporary fringe popular music (see Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, Ulrich Schnauss, Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series). Loveless and its legacy continue to feel relevant, even if the initial shock has faded through the intervening years. How would the band, so loved despite the lengthy separation from its adoring audience, rise above being a mere novelty act?

Reviews of MBV’s UK shows this summer inevitably remarked on the massive volume of their sound system, and their September 22 appearance at New York’s Roseland Ballroom more than fulfilled the promise. Security guards at the club entrance offered earplugs, while signs warned of the noise to come. The Valentines’ set WAS loud, very loud, and video projections and strobe bursts were designed to disorient. The delicately layered arrangements that make Loveless such a rich listening experience became absorbed in a relentless haze of overdriven Marshall 4x12s. Less “dreamy” selections like “Feed Me With Your Kiss” were washed out but for the body blows of Debbie Googe’s bass. And when the crowd hunkered down for the forecasted 15-plus minute squall of “You Made Me Realise,” the air became viscous. Audience members raised their hands in the air not in salute, but to bathe in the shock waves emanating from the stage. The band’s gambit to justify its resurrection was to deliver an overwhelming dose of shock and awe.

MBV has been a contender for the title of “world’s loudest band,” and the concert seemed a determined attempt to lay claim to the title. But why this mission? For someone so notoriously exacting in his studio production, why would Kevin Shields & Co. approach this live display with such blunt instruments? And if the audience came to pledge its love, what did it receive in return?

Critics have remarked on the sexually ambiguous sensuality of MBV’s late releases, which emerges from the lazy beauty of the production and the near interchangeability of Shields’s and guitarist Belinda Butcher’s voices. Songs like “Come In Alone” seem to invite us to recline in a soft, melancholy bed, but what might await us there is not always clear. Though we overhear snatches of romantic negotiations, linguistic meaning ultimately fades into pure, abstract sound.

What keeps the songs from becoming simple sentimental escapism is the storm just outside the bedroom, the overdrive that blurs the lines separating the melodic hook from the white noise threatening to dissolve the song into abstraction. What astonishes about the recorded MBV is how well Shields navigates this line between sweetness and blinding light. The music seems to embrace, but one can’t help but be aware that the love on offer will deliver neither comfort nor protection.

In performance, the thunder at the edges of the song overwhelmed the melody. Like the explicitly noise-based music that has had its ascendancy in recent years, MBV’s concerts are exercises in extremity. They are orchestrated both to mesmerize and to repel the listener, and if love was in the air, so was a clear power relationship. In response to its adoration of its heroes, the crowd was given pain, quite literally in the case of at least one UK-based fan. Listening became a physically masochistic act, as all risked permanent physical damage to be in the presence of an improbable reunion.

Under such an overwhelming barrage, the only choice was to fill in the melodic gaps mentally, to imagine that the subtleties present on the record were actually being played in the concert hall. It was an act of remembering a long lost love, all these years later, for which subjecting oneself to the violence latent in the band’s recordings was worth the struggle. It was characteristic of the entire My Bloody Valentine experience. With rumors circulating about the possibility of a new record in the future, one can’t help but wonder if this is another tease. But if we went home battered, we will savor the experience for a long, long time.

A Covey of Credos

A good friend wrote to me recently to point me toward the website for Credo, a wireless expansion of the Working Assets telephone program. Credo sets aside a percentage of all of its fees to support nonprofit organizations of its customers’ choosing. According to its website, Credo gives you an opportunity to “choose the mobile company that supports your beliefs.” At the same time, “You’ll get competitive rates, nationwide all-digital coverage, helpful customer service, great phones, and a variety of plans to choose from.” This best of all possible worlds has undoubtedly produced significant support for some worthy progressive organizations, and is a fine example of good corporate citizenship, I thought. Still, I wondered, how much can something like this actually accomplish?

The problem with this type of political action began to come into focus the next day as I read Lawrence Weschler’s absolutely wonderful book Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences. The collection grew from a regular column the author contributed to McSweeney’s Quarterly, and from other publications, in which he traces provocative connections between iconic images from the history of visual culture. Many of Weschler’s convergences begin with playful observations about similar compositional approaches in painting, graphic design, photography, television, and advertising, and grow in layers of resonance through the power of his imagination, some startling research, and his will to extract and articulate meaning from these seeming coincidences.

In Weschler’s world, however, little is pure coincidence. If Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic seem to share a similarly sculpted doughy visage, it becomes an occasion to contemplate the “fundamentalist, cynical, and manipulative” similarities between the Contract With America and the regime that launched ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko begin to share a sublime sense of human insignificance within the vast cosmological and metaphysical void that surrounds us when seen in the context of images of galaxies and moonscapes published in magazines during the years of their greatest productivity. And the chance fact that Vaclav Havel was photographed wearing a jacket created for the film Awakenings brings an uncanny authority to Weschler’s reading of Oliver Sacks’s tale of “frozen” patients in a Bronx hospital; they become more than allegory for Eastern Europe under Soviet communism, sharing a podium at the prow of a revolution. Weschler’s insights are often startling, and invite a more careful attention to the images surrounding us than we typically maintain.

His speculations also begin to become practical tools in essays like one near the middle of the collection (also published previously here) in which he considers the graphic design of the Solidarity movement in 1980-1981. Solidarity’s posters were an integral part of a potent propaganda campaign to rally Polish nationalist sentiment behind a difficult and often bloody struggle for workers’ rights under Soviet occupation. Weschler points out that the simplicity of images like this one were packed with latent meaning, drawing on a rich trove of images and other materials from national history while making oblique references to contemporary popular culture. He points out that it was often enough for Solidarity’s graphic activists simply to juxtapose bold images with dates of important uprisings in the Polish struggle for self-determination, because supporters of the movement would immediately recognize them. They were willfully cryptic, though not for the sake of obfuscation, and successful because of the issues at stake for Solidarity and the public’s investment in the movement, witnessed in the hunger they endured to support it.

Weschler contrasts the vitality of the Polish images with American political graphic design in the same era, and finds at least one example—for a 1981 march on Washington for labor rights—to be sorely lacking in comparison. Though titled Solidarity Day, the poster projects a mishmash of vague agendas, reflecting a lack of cohesion and determination in the movement itself in the blank stares of the citizens looking out of the poster. In Weschler’s analysis, the posters of Solidarity were not successful only because they relied on a pastiche approach to recycling images and identified with a relevant history, but because there was a clear goal and a strong movement behind them.

Though the essay was written in 1983, what Weschler says could just as easily apply—perhaps even more so—to the situation in which left-spectrum Americans find ourselves now. Weschler’s reading reminded me of a gathering in Washington Square Park held on the occasion of the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center—one of the few dates that actually has resonance for Americans today (although this past year witnessed the stirrings of a purposeful forgetting). Organized by the coalition Not In Our Name, the ostensible purpose was to remember the victims of the disaster and to protest the Bush administration’s already apparent agenda of using it to manipulate public opinion. Over the course of the event, however, we heard speeches protesting American imperialism, meddling in Central America, and failure to support the Palestinian cause. Important problems all, and probably even related to the big picture of which 9/11 and its aftermath form the foreground, but I left confused and wishing that someone with a clear vision and the authority to articulate a limited set of pressing demands had been in charge.

An article that ran in Adbusters last year hit the nail on the head in its parody:

Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal—the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.

The diffuseness of the movement would seep into view again and again. A radio report on a February 2003 protest that ran on NPR during the run-up to the Iraq war featured a chorus of women singing John Lennon’s mantra, “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” as if this articulated any kind of relevant agenda. A March 2004 protest march in New York City trickled out once again into Washington Square Park, with the most audible statements coming from a small group of communists who had seized a patch of pavement near the fountain. Whether you agree with their historical analysis or not is not the issue; it was beside the point of the gathering. The numbers of people who turned out for the event made it clear that there were large segments of the public who opposed the war, but there was still no clear catalyst that could synthesize and channel this expression into any coherent tangible action. The Democrats ignored it until much too late, and even the New York Times, which has been otherwise commendable in its recording of the Bush administration’s failures, has seemed content to report on public protests at arm’s length, a symptom of the inability of the march’s leaders to articulate a lasting vision that sticks.

The final chapter of Everything that Rises can offer a way to think about why public opposition has been ineffective in opposing an obviously and astonishingly inept government in the past many years. In an essay (perhaps in another sign of the Weschler-ness of experience) also titled “Credo,” the author posits his method as a negotiation between two kinds of seeing.

The history of thinking about vision is in fact a history of a continual rejiggering of the relative importance of those two vectors: is it that light rays enter the eye through the corneal lens (whereupon they get sprayed onto a sort of tabula rasa screen at the back of the eye)—or rather, in some sense, that the brain’s or the mind’s, or anyway the self’s attention courses out to the world through that lens (actively grasping and even shaping what it sees, or rather looks at, or rather chooses to tend to)?

For Weschler, seeing what is in front of us and creating a compelling narrative that gives a form to the world are intertwined activities, though it is the latter that makes his writing so compelling. It is his creative repurposing of the raw material on which his essays are based that brings a focus to our sense of things we might otherwise ignore, and that might even suggest a method of extracting a meaning from history. Such is perhaps the case in any good critical writing, but Weschler’s “credo” also hints at a way of existing in the world; it is a philosophy of a creative life.

A hypothesis: Credo as phone company, at least as professed in its undoubtedly focus-group generated promotional copy, is the opposite of this. As effective as it might be in raising funds for organizations worth supporting, such an automated form of feel-good, multifaceted (and therefore utterly without focus), ersatz activism will never engage participants to the point of feeling truly invested in the causes they believe in. Although it helps fund activists who are dedicated and working to effect change, for the broader public this is politics as unconscious abstraction, as convenience, as reduction to fundraising campaigns. It serves as an umbrella to an overstocked supermarket of “causes” that showcases the competing fight for the attention of the left-of-center electorate. It is a sign that, unlike Solidarity, many feel alienated even from the agendas they support, and of the desperate need for a more persuasive lens to focus the public’s attention.

Update on Recent Projects

Occupied with various vacations, home renovations, and childrearing duties I been delinquent in maintaining Processed. Here are some things I have been working on, though.

In an earlier post I briefly summarized a program on recent developments in neuroscience held in conjunction with the Aspen Ideas Festival. I recently completed production of the New York Academy of Sciences eBriefing on the event, and it’s available with open access at www.nyas.org/brain. In addition to some fine reporting by my colleague (and a gifted science writer) Alan Dove, we also posted complete slides/audio/video of the event, as well as a set of video interviews with the speakers and a printable e-book composed of transcripts edited for home consumption by yours truly. I’m thrilled with how it turned out, and you should visit to learn more about how to teach monkeys to play video games, why your brain waves are like an iceberg, and why that lesion in your prefrontal cortex is unlikely to keep you out of jail should you choose to murder your irritating neighbor.

My musical project, The Glass Bees, has been running for a bit over a year now, and continues to be very productive. To date we’ve posted 21 tracks for a total of approximately 120 minutes on our website, and Jason Das and I are quite happy with how things are going. Jason also just completed some housekeeping on the website to make it more attractive and to give you the chance to create a Glass Bees mastermix. You can also subscribe to our podcast to hear the latest tracks as soon as they are posted. If you need advice on where to start listening, try these recent favorites: Preface Introduction, Triumph, Thunder on the Prairie, I Shot the Serif, and Guitar Solo. All tracks are improvised live to a single stereo microphone and digital recorder. There are no overdubs and we try to edit as minimally as possible.

Until now The Glass Bees has been purely a studio/web project, with very little effort to actively cultivate an audience. We are slowly beginning to think that the time might be coming to go public. There is work to be done to set up a show, and maybe even to compile the recordings on CD. If you have a party coming up that will be attended by the types of people who can tolerate drones, loops, feedback, and unusual instruments, or if you know someone who organizes such affairs, drop us a line.

I’m also in the process adding a couple of blogrolls to the right column with links to recommended reading and listening, should you be interested. Please stay tuned.