You wouldn't ordinarily go to a newspaper's letters to the editor column if you were looking for a multimedia work of art, but one showed up this morning in The New York Times. From the headline – "In the Old Balducci's, a Hollywood Sighting" – to the writer's signature – Michael Tilson Thomas – the presentation was distinguished. It was a unique story, with provenance, sentiment, surprise, erudition, humor, whimsy, affection, correct writing, and stunningly illustrated – yes, a letter to the editor with an illustration – and, for complete enjoyment, requesting of the reader a degree of cultural awareness.
Balducci's was a Manhattan gourmet food shop, founded by an Italian immigrant in 1946, expanding from a single shop into a chain. Last week, its corporate owners (since 1999) shut down Balducci's Manhattan locations. Michael Tilson Thomas was one of thousands of New Yorkers, in New York and around the world, who read the news "with regret." At the end of the letter, Thomas is identified as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony and artistic director of the New World Symphony.
In his letter, Thomas recalled a Christmas Eve morning in the 1980s when he went to Balducci's for some Christmas dinner fixings. It was early, before opening time, "but if you were there a few minutes early and they knew you, there was never any problem." In the deserted store, Thomas saw a woman, in fur coat and hat and oversized sunglasses. Thomas artfully describes how he recognized her – Greta Garbo – and honored her space when she recognized his recognition. She resumed her conversation with a Balducci's meat man.
Then, Thomas wrote, "At a certain moment, she turned toward me and said, 'It must be a fine old bird to make strong soup for a sick friend – at least five pounds!' " She got her chicken, paid, and left the store. When he got home, Thomas said he called his parents and told them he had had "an ultimate Jewish show business experience! I saw Garbo buy a chicken!" And then, with understatement and class, Thomas simply signed off: "I'll always be grateful to Balducci's for fresh food and lasting memories."
Above the letter and below the headline was the illustration, by Louise Fili and Jessica Hische: a caricature of Garbo, in an art nouveau style, one eye and famously arched brow, and a brush of hair, and in cursive script these words: "I vant to buy a chicken." Perfect. You can see it, with the entire letter, here.
It blew me away. Maybe I am overeager in a search for signs that newspapers should not, cannot, be abandoned. The new argument says don't worry about newspapers, it's not newspapers, but journalism, that must be preserved. Of course that is correct. The true battle for the future of the democracy is to move journalism online at as high a professional level as it has enjoyed in newspapers. But what about the future of casually turning a page and, in the midst of the journalism, discovering a short letter that has been recognized as a work of art, and presented in that way? You cannot link to discoveries, of art or anything else unique.
And the complete enjoyment of this art depended not on anything new or searchable, but on the individual reader's awareness that Greta Garbo was sensitive about her space, and she knew her chickens. It does in fact take a fine old bird – at least five pounds – to make a strong soup. I am beginning to think it's that reader awareness that I am really going to miss, after newspapers are gone. I wonder if that has become part of the editors' thinking, at least those who treated us to this art, in The New York Times.
May 04, 2009
Media Literacy: The Gutenberg Singularity
In physics and mathematics, a “singularity” is a point or an event where the rules break down: nothing makes sense anymore. Thus, nothing about the future can be predicted. There is no way to “describe” the singularity or the world on the other side of it. It’s a world we can’t see, because we have no system for looking at it.
It’s a fascinating problem for scientists. They know such worlds exist on the other side of black holes, which (with the “Big Bang”) are the most famous singularities in physics. And they know that in the other world, laws apply. But they are laws with no apparent relationship to the laws on this side.
It is as if the singularity constitutes a total division of meaning, that the only way to understand the world beyond is to go live in it.
In this way, the phenomenon of singularities resembles history. The atomic bomb is a good example. It was reasonable for those scientists in the 1940s to wonder if they shouldn’t hold back from that brink, from stepping across the splitting atom like godless landlords and slinging an entire world tenancy into a future that nobody could see, or escape.
Step and sling they did, and it changed our social, scientific and emotional landscape completely. Someone living in this world would be hard-pressed to explain it to someone living in 1940. The act also changed history completely out of proportion with the event. The scientists only wanted a bomb; instead, they created an age.
That’s another curiosity of singularities: their effect is never singular. Singularities always create entire new worlds, from which there is no return to the old. At the time, there is no way to describe the event, or the laws on the other side. Like the Los Alamos scientists, Johann Gutenberg, in the middle of the 15th century, only knew his means of reproducing information using moveable type was unprecedented in its power. From his world, he could not see the other side and what different world this power might create.
In his world, before the year 1450, information was transmitted by a “scribal culture,” whose system extended three thousand years back toward the dawn of human communications. In that scribal culture, information was recorded and reproduced in handwriting. Each copy of a book or script took as long to create as the last. Information was reproduced at the rate of a scribe, working with feather quills, an inkpot, and paper sheets, copying one page at a time.
The scribal system was very slow, and very expensive. To imagine the relative expense, consider a modern textbook or a reference such as “The World Almanac” restricted to scribal reproduction. How many scribes could a publisher reasonably pay? One thousand? How long would it take 1,000 scribes working a 40-hour week at journeyman wages (they were, after all, professionals) to produce 1,000 copies of “The World Almanac”? What kind of market would be created by 50,000 consumers each wanting a copy? What effect on culture and intellect would be created by such a shortage of reference material?
Information in the scribal culture was scarce and exclusive and thus an instrument of power and privilege. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, the famed “feudal masses” of the Middle Ages had little or no access to information. Because they didn’t read, they couldn’t read. It was the way of that world, absolutely normal, the status quo. No one, not even the powerful and privileged, who controlled the information, had given much thought to a world of reading masses, of what might happen to ignorance and feudal docility in an age of common literacy. There was no reason for such thoughts, no way to describe so bizarre a fantasy world.
Such imaginings certainly didn’t interest Johann Gutenberg, an Austrian entrepreneur depressed by misfortune. He had had bad luck, or no luck at all, in his get-rich-quick schemes in the 1440s, including a mirror that was supposed to capture spirits, and he was deep in debt. Now, in 1450, he had a new scheme to copy books better and faster than anyone ever had. Some of the technology was old, going back to China, but his application was brand-new, and he was sure it would make money. He guarded his new business plan closely until he felt it was ready to take public.
Then all Johann Gutenberg needed was the right title. If the title was big enough, it would draw attention to the technology, which was his real product. He chose the Bible.
You have to agree, for a book with a good set of media codes, the Bible can’t be beat. There was the first line, no other like it before or since: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And it was non-fiction! There were the plots and sub-plots rife with good and evil, and the promise and delivery (via immaculate conception) of a Messiah, a son of God on Earth, who performed miracles and in the end got crucified. And then came back to life! Talk about a potential page-turner, in the hands of a mass audience. It was a great story, with a dedicated, widespread audience. It had its passionate critics, too, which was always good for business.
After all his disappointments, Johann Gutenberg had hit upon the perfect marketing tool for the world’s first commercial printing-press technology. The Bible and the printing press was a marketing marriage made in heaven. All it did was:
1. Create the book industry;
2. Create the book industry’s original and all-time No. 1 best-seller;
3. Create shared media codes, which we call "broadcast media;"
4. Create mass media.
He couldn’t know that; couldn’t see it. Gutenberg only knew that his technology would work. And so the first singularity passed unanticipated, at some precise moment in history when Gutenberg peeled back the first sheet, eyeballed it, spread down another sheet over the wet type, pressed it against the type, lifted it off, and then a third, printed and laid side-by-side on the printer’s table with the first two, all three identical, the printer in two minutes’ time precisely reproducing information that would have taken a careful scribe (in the interest of faithful reproduction) several days or weeks and great care.
Standing there, in his Mainz print shop that day, staring at the three pages that created the first singularity in media history, he could not have foreseen common literacy, the Age of Mass Media, The New York Times, or Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton? The Bible begat Paris Hilton? Well, it took awhile, but yes. Played backward, all the laws of the media world would fetch back from the four corners, over the 550-odd years, called in from the branches of science and art and thought, converging and then hurtling as the mass collapsed upon itself toward Mainz and then vanished, a universe disappearing in a blink through a point defined in space and time by three identical pages, and the scent of drying ink, in Johann Gutenberg's shop. Imagine the thunder, in the silence of a singularity un-created.
Curiously, a researched history of the first media singularity, and of new laws starting to be created in its wake, did not appear until 1979, when University of Michigan historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein published “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.” The title is typical of the historian’s reserve. Eisenstein does not come right out and say that Gutenberg with his moveable type blew away the scribal culture without a trace and blew away the old social structures as well.
Eisenstein carefully declares that the printing press was in fact only one agent of the changes under way in early modern Europe. There also had to be present a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Newton, a Columbus, a Martin Luther. She develops a thesis, however, that the ability to reproduce accurate information in volume, with the resulting wide access, is the single theme that can unify the historic discussions of that remarkable era, and that that theme - printing - was the true revolution. Martin Luther in Germany, empowered to circulate his church reform views in volume, so alarmed Henry VIII that the English king “nationalized” all print functions on the isle, the first modern example of prior restraint.
So the singularity created by Gutenberg was volume. Reform, research and exploration were only specific and historic uses of this information volume that was naturally starting to spread out across flat ground. Printers quickly realized a general market for their new product. Imagine a bookshop scene in Paris, London, or Rome, in 1455 or 1460, as the first pages off Gutenberg’s press began to arrive.
“What good is this?” says an alderman, holding up the page. “It looks so . . . so artificial.”
“Yes,” concedes the stationer, as the booksellers were called in those days. “Such work will never equal the art of a friar with his parchment and quills. But this new ‘printing’ is fast, and cheap. For the first time, information is readily available to the masses.”
“But,” protests the alderman, “95 percent of the population can’t read.”
The stationer shrugs. “They will,” he says.
The stationer’s words heralded the dawn of broadcast. The word “broadcast,” incidentally, did not originate with media. It’s originally an agricultural verb, meaning to scatter, or sow, in all directions. If you have ever scattered grass seed or granular fertilizer across a lawn, then you have broadcast. Watering a lawn from a hose is essentially broadcasting water. On the early morning “farm reports” on midwestern radio stations, feed and fertilizer manufacturers advertise “broadcast” products.
Volume was information’s water hose. The volume singularity created by Gutenberg’s press made it possible to broadcast information in all directions, across an entire field of people. People felt this strange rain, looked up at it, licked it, liked it, started to drink it in, felt intellect sprout and start to take root. How must it have felt, to a literate 50-year-old in the year 1500, to look back and try to imagine the world before print?
Books were the first form of broadcast, as printers took classics from the scribal culture and mass-produced them.
Soon another type of communication emerged. Instead of reproducing old information, some printers saw merit in recording new information, that, because of media code, was of interest to a general audience, and distributing it on a regular basis. It wasn’t long before merchants picked up on the new system as a good way to reach people with word of their products; so good, in fact, they paid the printer to carry their ads.
In terms of media history, newspapers were clearly the most far-reaching result of the first singularity. They were the crucible for all the broadcast realm that was to follow. In that crucible, after the volume singularity, new laws started to form. Imagine the local excitement in the 1500s when people started receiving pages that weren’t all about God, but all about them. It started with books, but the greatest change to flow from Gutenberg’s creation into the everyday lives of people, measured by actual revenue over the last five centuries, was the newspaper. At the end of the 20th century, the newspaper was still the No. 1 moneymaker of all the media businesses, even television.
Like a water hose, the newspaper distributed information out to a general audience from a central point. This was revolutionary, because it not only turned the direction of information around 180 degrees, it disconnected the information from real time. Before newspapers, people had to go to a central place – churches were popular – to hear a speaker deliver the news, and they had to be there when the speaker was there. Newspapers brought the speaker(s) to the people, and let them read the news when they wanted to. An unbelievable development.
Embedded in the pages were many of the same media codes that pull us into the pages today. Remember, these first newspapers didn’t invent the media codes. The codes had always been there, and people had always responded to them. But the response had always been direct, and personal. Something happened, and people who saw it, or heard it, or experienced it, reacted to it, according to the codes – the original reaction codes – that they associated with the event.
Now the newly forming media took those codes and turned them into a business. Natural codes became media codes, that could be shared by many people, across great distances. People loved it. No newspapers? How did we survive? This is what it was like: when you finish this paragraph, close this blog and your computer. For three days from this moment, avoid all media. No reading, no books, newspapers, or magazines, no television, no radio, no CDs, no iPod, no Internet – not even email – no movies, no ads, no commercials, no billboards. For 72 hours, you are to do nothing but experience life as it happens around you.
That was the life of the average human being in the 15th century. The media codes will still be there; you will react to events as they happen around you. And because the codes are still there, you will understand perfectly how the 15th-century Europeans felt, when the first newspapers started to appear. Once humans saw they could share these codes, through a media, there was no turning back.
It’s a fascinating problem for scientists. They know such worlds exist on the other side of black holes, which (with the “Big Bang”) are the most famous singularities in physics. And they know that in the other world, laws apply. But they are laws with no apparent relationship to the laws on this side.
It is as if the singularity constitutes a total division of meaning, that the only way to understand the world beyond is to go live in it.
In this way, the phenomenon of singularities resembles history. The atomic bomb is a good example. It was reasonable for those scientists in the 1940s to wonder if they shouldn’t hold back from that brink, from stepping across the splitting atom like godless landlords and slinging an entire world tenancy into a future that nobody could see, or escape.
Step and sling they did, and it changed our social, scientific and emotional landscape completely. Someone living in this world would be hard-pressed to explain it to someone living in 1940. The act also changed history completely out of proportion with the event. The scientists only wanted a bomb; instead, they created an age.
That’s another curiosity of singularities: their effect is never singular. Singularities always create entire new worlds, from which there is no return to the old. At the time, there is no way to describe the event, or the laws on the other side. Like the Los Alamos scientists, Johann Gutenberg, in the middle of the 15th century, only knew his means of reproducing information using moveable type was unprecedented in its power. From his world, he could not see the other side and what different world this power might create.
In his world, before the year 1450, information was transmitted by a “scribal culture,” whose system extended three thousand years back toward the dawn of human communications. In that scribal culture, information was recorded and reproduced in handwriting. Each copy of a book or script took as long to create as the last. Information was reproduced at the rate of a scribe, working with feather quills, an inkpot, and paper sheets, copying one page at a time.
The scribal system was very slow, and very expensive. To imagine the relative expense, consider a modern textbook or a reference such as “The World Almanac” restricted to scribal reproduction. How many scribes could a publisher reasonably pay? One thousand? How long would it take 1,000 scribes working a 40-hour week at journeyman wages (they were, after all, professionals) to produce 1,000 copies of “The World Almanac”? What kind of market would be created by 50,000 consumers each wanting a copy? What effect on culture and intellect would be created by such a shortage of reference material?
Information in the scribal culture was scarce and exclusive and thus an instrument of power and privilege. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, the famed “feudal masses” of the Middle Ages had little or no access to information. Because they didn’t read, they couldn’t read. It was the way of that world, absolutely normal, the status quo. No one, not even the powerful and privileged, who controlled the information, had given much thought to a world of reading masses, of what might happen to ignorance and feudal docility in an age of common literacy. There was no reason for such thoughts, no way to describe so bizarre a fantasy world.
Such imaginings certainly didn’t interest Johann Gutenberg, an Austrian entrepreneur depressed by misfortune. He had had bad luck, or no luck at all, in his get-rich-quick schemes in the 1440s, including a mirror that was supposed to capture spirits, and he was deep in debt. Now, in 1450, he had a new scheme to copy books better and faster than anyone ever had. Some of the technology was old, going back to China, but his application was brand-new, and he was sure it would make money. He guarded his new business plan closely until he felt it was ready to take public.
Then all Johann Gutenberg needed was the right title. If the title was big enough, it would draw attention to the technology, which was his real product. He chose the Bible.
You have to agree, for a book with a good set of media codes, the Bible can’t be beat. There was the first line, no other like it before or since: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And it was non-fiction! There were the plots and sub-plots rife with good and evil, and the promise and delivery (via immaculate conception) of a Messiah, a son of God on Earth, who performed miracles and in the end got crucified. And then came back to life! Talk about a potential page-turner, in the hands of a mass audience. It was a great story, with a dedicated, widespread audience. It had its passionate critics, too, which was always good for business.
After all his disappointments, Johann Gutenberg had hit upon the perfect marketing tool for the world’s first commercial printing-press technology. The Bible and the printing press was a marketing marriage made in heaven. All it did was:
1. Create the book industry;
2. Create the book industry’s original and all-time No. 1 best-seller;
3. Create shared media codes, which we call "broadcast media;"
4. Create mass media.
He couldn’t know that; couldn’t see it. Gutenberg only knew that his technology would work. And so the first singularity passed unanticipated, at some precise moment in history when Gutenberg peeled back the first sheet, eyeballed it, spread down another sheet over the wet type, pressed it against the type, lifted it off, and then a third, printed and laid side-by-side on the printer’s table with the first two, all three identical, the printer in two minutes’ time precisely reproducing information that would have taken a careful scribe (in the interest of faithful reproduction) several days or weeks and great care.
Standing there, in his Mainz print shop that day, staring at the three pages that created the first singularity in media history, he could not have foreseen common literacy, the Age of Mass Media, The New York Times, or Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton? The Bible begat Paris Hilton? Well, it took awhile, but yes. Played backward, all the laws of the media world would fetch back from the four corners, over the 550-odd years, called in from the branches of science and art and thought, converging and then hurtling as the mass collapsed upon itself toward Mainz and then vanished, a universe disappearing in a blink through a point defined in space and time by three identical pages, and the scent of drying ink, in Johann Gutenberg's shop. Imagine the thunder, in the silence of a singularity un-created.
Curiously, a researched history of the first media singularity, and of new laws starting to be created in its wake, did not appear until 1979, when University of Michigan historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein published “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.” The title is typical of the historian’s reserve. Eisenstein does not come right out and say that Gutenberg with his moveable type blew away the scribal culture without a trace and blew away the old social structures as well.
Eisenstein carefully declares that the printing press was in fact only one agent of the changes under way in early modern Europe. There also had to be present a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Newton, a Columbus, a Martin Luther. She develops a thesis, however, that the ability to reproduce accurate information in volume, with the resulting wide access, is the single theme that can unify the historic discussions of that remarkable era, and that that theme - printing - was the true revolution. Martin Luther in Germany, empowered to circulate his church reform views in volume, so alarmed Henry VIII that the English king “nationalized” all print functions on the isle, the first modern example of prior restraint.
So the singularity created by Gutenberg was volume. Reform, research and exploration were only specific and historic uses of this information volume that was naturally starting to spread out across flat ground. Printers quickly realized a general market for their new product. Imagine a bookshop scene in Paris, London, or Rome, in 1455 or 1460, as the first pages off Gutenberg’s press began to arrive.
“What good is this?” says an alderman, holding up the page. “It looks so . . . so artificial.”
“Yes,” concedes the stationer, as the booksellers were called in those days. “Such work will never equal the art of a friar with his parchment and quills. But this new ‘printing’ is fast, and cheap. For the first time, information is readily available to the masses.”
“But,” protests the alderman, “95 percent of the population can’t read.”
The stationer shrugs. “They will,” he says.
The stationer’s words heralded the dawn of broadcast. The word “broadcast,” incidentally, did not originate with media. It’s originally an agricultural verb, meaning to scatter, or sow, in all directions. If you have ever scattered grass seed or granular fertilizer across a lawn, then you have broadcast. Watering a lawn from a hose is essentially broadcasting water. On the early morning “farm reports” on midwestern radio stations, feed and fertilizer manufacturers advertise “broadcast” products.
Volume was information’s water hose. The volume singularity created by Gutenberg’s press made it possible to broadcast information in all directions, across an entire field of people. People felt this strange rain, looked up at it, licked it, liked it, started to drink it in, felt intellect sprout and start to take root. How must it have felt, to a literate 50-year-old in the year 1500, to look back and try to imagine the world before print?
Books were the first form of broadcast, as printers took classics from the scribal culture and mass-produced them.
Soon another type of communication emerged. Instead of reproducing old information, some printers saw merit in recording new information, that, because of media code, was of interest to a general audience, and distributing it on a regular basis. It wasn’t long before merchants picked up on the new system as a good way to reach people with word of their products; so good, in fact, they paid the printer to carry their ads.
In terms of media history, newspapers were clearly the most far-reaching result of the first singularity. They were the crucible for all the broadcast realm that was to follow. In that crucible, after the volume singularity, new laws started to form. Imagine the local excitement in the 1500s when people started receiving pages that weren’t all about God, but all about them. It started with books, but the greatest change to flow from Gutenberg’s creation into the everyday lives of people, measured by actual revenue over the last five centuries, was the newspaper. At the end of the 20th century, the newspaper was still the No. 1 moneymaker of all the media businesses, even television.
Like a water hose, the newspaper distributed information out to a general audience from a central point. This was revolutionary, because it not only turned the direction of information around 180 degrees, it disconnected the information from real time. Before newspapers, people had to go to a central place – churches were popular – to hear a speaker deliver the news, and they had to be there when the speaker was there. Newspapers brought the speaker(s) to the people, and let them read the news when they wanted to. An unbelievable development.
Embedded in the pages were many of the same media codes that pull us into the pages today. Remember, these first newspapers didn’t invent the media codes. The codes had always been there, and people had always responded to them. But the response had always been direct, and personal. Something happened, and people who saw it, or heard it, or experienced it, reacted to it, according to the codes – the original reaction codes – that they associated with the event.
Now the newly forming media took those codes and turned them into a business. Natural codes became media codes, that could be shared by many people, across great distances. People loved it. No newspapers? How did we survive? This is what it was like: when you finish this paragraph, close this blog and your computer. For three days from this moment, avoid all media. No reading, no books, newspapers, or magazines, no television, no radio, no CDs, no iPod, no Internet – not even email – no movies, no ads, no commercials, no billboards. For 72 hours, you are to do nothing but experience life as it happens around you.
That was the life of the average human being in the 15th century. The media codes will still be there; you will react to events as they happen around you. And because the codes are still there, you will understand perfectly how the 15th-century Europeans felt, when the first newspapers started to appear. Once humans saw they could share these codes, through a media, there was no turning back.
May 01, 2009
Archives: Thinking on Freeways - June, 1988
After giving it some thought, I have decided to pass up my opportunity to become a subscriber to the “Great Thinkers on Cassette” series.
The subscription material said these cassettes were designed to make your driving time more rewarding. As I commuted to work, I could punch in the “Giants of Philosophy” cassette and hear the narrated works of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and the others. Or, I could punch in, “Giants of Political Thought,” and hear Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Hobbes, Thoreau, and so forth. If economics were my mood, I could punch in that tape and hear the essays of Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes.
Naturally I declined. A freeway in Southern California is no place for great thinkers. I tried to imagine Soren Kierkegaard, driving along in the Los Angeles rush hour, thinking the thoughts he did, and I thought how quickly Kierkegaard would become completely uninsurable, assuming he survived at all.
Sure, I let my mind wander on the freeway. I don’t concentrate 100 percent on the pickups, SUVs and gravel trucks thundering by. But when you think about the concentration levels required of Machiavelli’s discussion of the Florentine Politic, I start to feel uncomfortable. I feel even more uncomfortable thinking about the driver of the black Hummer with oversized tires, who has become completely immersed in the thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas, on Scholasticism.
I wondered what the great thinkers would think about this. I saw us on the freeway. I was driving. Thomas Jefferson was in the back seat, along with John Stuart Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre. Plato was riding shotgun. Jefferson didn’t say anything. He just sat and rolled the power window up and down. John Stuart Mill sat with his head down, thinking. Then he looked up and spoke:
“Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest,” he said.
“That’s profound,” I said. “Why, just in the last presidential campaign . . .”
Sartre, in a sour voice, interrupted me and said, “Keep your eyes on the road.” Ah! Divided opinions, I thought: Mill for great thinking on freeways, Sartre opposed.
Then Plato spoke: “There is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink.”
“Oh, shut up,” growled Sartre. I glanced approvingly at him.
“How quickly you pick up our clichés, I said.
“Well,” Sartre said, “we are great thinkers, aren’t we?”
Plato shrugged. “Until philosophers are kings,” he said, “cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”
I looked at Plato. “It would mean the end of freeways as we know them,” I said, just as we rear-ended a Toyota Tacoma.
“What in the hell were you doing?” said the Toyota’s driver.
“Talking to Plato,” I said.
“Tell it to your insurance company,” he said. I wondered what John Maynard Keynes would think about that.
The subscription material said these cassettes were designed to make your driving time more rewarding. As I commuted to work, I could punch in the “Giants of Philosophy” cassette and hear the narrated works of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and the others. Or, I could punch in, “Giants of Political Thought,” and hear Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Hobbes, Thoreau, and so forth. If economics were my mood, I could punch in that tape and hear the essays of Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes.
Naturally I declined. A freeway in Southern California is no place for great thinkers. I tried to imagine Soren Kierkegaard, driving along in the Los Angeles rush hour, thinking the thoughts he did, and I thought how quickly Kierkegaard would become completely uninsurable, assuming he survived at all.
Sure, I let my mind wander on the freeway. I don’t concentrate 100 percent on the pickups, SUVs and gravel trucks thundering by. But when you think about the concentration levels required of Machiavelli’s discussion of the Florentine Politic, I start to feel uncomfortable. I feel even more uncomfortable thinking about the driver of the black Hummer with oversized tires, who has become completely immersed in the thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas, on Scholasticism.
I wondered what the great thinkers would think about this. I saw us on the freeway. I was driving. Thomas Jefferson was in the back seat, along with John Stuart Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre. Plato was riding shotgun. Jefferson didn’t say anything. He just sat and rolled the power window up and down. John Stuart Mill sat with his head down, thinking. Then he looked up and spoke:
“Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest,” he said.
“That’s profound,” I said. “Why, just in the last presidential campaign . . .”
Sartre, in a sour voice, interrupted me and said, “Keep your eyes on the road.” Ah! Divided opinions, I thought: Mill for great thinking on freeways, Sartre opposed.
Then Plato spoke: “There is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink.”
“Oh, shut up,” growled Sartre. I glanced approvingly at him.
“How quickly you pick up our clichés, I said.
“Well,” Sartre said, “we are great thinkers, aren’t we?”
Plato shrugged. “Until philosophers are kings,” he said, “cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”
I looked at Plato. “It would mean the end of freeways as we know them,” I said, just as we rear-ended a Toyota Tacoma.
“What in the hell were you doing?” said the Toyota’s driver.
“Talking to Plato,” I said.
“Tell it to your insurance company,” he said. I wondered what John Maynard Keynes would think about that.
April 30, 2009
Stretch Cooking: M. Grant's Chili No. LXXVIII
Before chili became a culture unto itself, it was a stretch-cooking technique for making meat go farther, and for preserving the meat longer.
I have never made two batches of chili exactly the same way. Chili has only two constants: it never stops evolving, and you never put beans in it. You can put beans in it, but it changes the flavor of the chili, and of the beans, and that is something that a fan of chili, and of beans, would never want to do.
The basic chili recipe that follows originated with an assignment, in the 1980s, to write about chili for the food section of my newspaper. The food editor stood at my desk, brow furrowed in thought, and said, “New wave. Write a story about new-wave chili.”
Thus did “Bouillabaise Chili” come into being. More about that recipe another time. What it contributes to this recipe is the idea of broiling the peppers, peeling off the blackened skins, and pureeing the flesh in a blender or processor. It worked so well in the Bouillabaise Chili that I brought it into a new evolution of the basic chili recipe. Here it goes:
2 T whole cumin seeds
2 pounds chuck roast, on the lean side
2 pounds pork loin ($1.79/lb., in the bag at CostCo)
2 green bell peppers
2 red bell peppers
2 fresh Anaheim chiles
2 fresh jalapeno chiles (optional)
2 medium to large onions, chopped
1 T oregano
3/4 cup good chili powder (I like Eagle Brand)
1 T salt
Pepper to taste, about 1 t.
5 or 6 garlic cloves, chopped
1 8-oz. can tomato sauce
2 11-oz. cans diced tomatoes
In a small, dry skillet, toast the cumin seeds until lightly browned and fragrant. Put aside to cool. Crush the cooled seeds with a pestle or rolling pin, or whirl them in an electric coffee grinder.
With a large, sharp knife, remove excess fat and cut the beef and pork into small dice. This is an onerous chore, but so was the mixing of the paints for the Sistine Chapel.
Broil the peppers and chiles in the oven or, even better, over a hot mesquite-charcoal fire on the Weber. When the skins are blackened, close the peppers into a brown paper bag and let steam 5 minutes. Peel off the skins and seed them. On the blender’s lowest speed, reduce them to pulp. (When you are cooking with any hot peppers, such as jalapenos, remember to keep your fingers away from your eyes, or any other sensitive parts, for that matter. When working with quantities of chiles, wear rubber gloves.)
Render the fat trimmings in an 8-quart dutch oven, adding a little olive oil if necessary. Brown the meat a pound at a time over medium-high heat. Set the meat aside, add a little oil to the pot if necessary, and add the onions and seasonings and cook, stirring frequently, over medium-high heat until a brown glaze forms on the bottom of the pot. Add the chopped garlic and cook, stirring, another 30 seconds (don’t burn the garlic). If you have a cup of leftover coffee, add it to the pot and scrape up the bottom glaze (this is called de-glazing). If you don’t have coffee, use water. As I always say, this glaze is flavor gold.
Add the meat, pepper pulp and tomatoes to the pot. Add water, if necessary, to not quite cover the meat.
Simmer over low heat 3 hours, stirring occasionally. Makes 2 ½- 3 quarts. Freezes well.
I have never made two batches of chili exactly the same way. Chili has only two constants: it never stops evolving, and you never put beans in it. You can put beans in it, but it changes the flavor of the chili, and of the beans, and that is something that a fan of chili, and of beans, would never want to do.
The basic chili recipe that follows originated with an assignment, in the 1980s, to write about chili for the food section of my newspaper. The food editor stood at my desk, brow furrowed in thought, and said, “New wave. Write a story about new-wave chili.”
Thus did “Bouillabaise Chili” come into being. More about that recipe another time. What it contributes to this recipe is the idea of broiling the peppers, peeling off the blackened skins, and pureeing the flesh in a blender or processor. It worked so well in the Bouillabaise Chili that I brought it into a new evolution of the basic chili recipe. Here it goes:
2 T whole cumin seeds
2 pounds chuck roast, on the lean side
2 pounds pork loin ($1.79/lb., in the bag at CostCo)
2 green bell peppers
2 red bell peppers
2 fresh Anaheim chiles
2 fresh jalapeno chiles (optional)
2 medium to large onions, chopped
1 T oregano
3/4 cup good chili powder (I like Eagle Brand)
1 T salt
Pepper to taste, about 1 t.
5 or 6 garlic cloves, chopped
1 8-oz. can tomato sauce
2 11-oz. cans diced tomatoes
In a small, dry skillet, toast the cumin seeds until lightly browned and fragrant. Put aside to cool. Crush the cooled seeds with a pestle or rolling pin, or whirl them in an electric coffee grinder.
With a large, sharp knife, remove excess fat and cut the beef and pork into small dice. This is an onerous chore, but so was the mixing of the paints for the Sistine Chapel.
Broil the peppers and chiles in the oven or, even better, over a hot mesquite-charcoal fire on the Weber. When the skins are blackened, close the peppers into a brown paper bag and let steam 5 minutes. Peel off the skins and seed them. On the blender’s lowest speed, reduce them to pulp. (When you are cooking with any hot peppers, such as jalapenos, remember to keep your fingers away from your eyes, or any other sensitive parts, for that matter. When working with quantities of chiles, wear rubber gloves.)
Render the fat trimmings in an 8-quart dutch oven, adding a little olive oil if necessary. Brown the meat a pound at a time over medium-high heat. Set the meat aside, add a little oil to the pot if necessary, and add the onions and seasonings and cook, stirring frequently, over medium-high heat until a brown glaze forms on the bottom of the pot. Add the chopped garlic and cook, stirring, another 30 seconds (don’t burn the garlic). If you have a cup of leftover coffee, add it to the pot and scrape up the bottom glaze (this is called de-glazing). If you don’t have coffee, use water. As I always say, this glaze is flavor gold.
Add the meat, pepper pulp and tomatoes to the pot. Add water, if necessary, to not quite cover the meat.
Simmer over low heat 3 hours, stirring occasionally. Makes 2 ½- 3 quarts. Freezes well.
Media Literacy Extra: seeing thru flu coverage
On Wednesday, The New York Times published a story about the public becoming panicked by media coverage of the swine flu pandemic.
“Without the news media,” the story said, “the public would be dangerously unaware of the swine flu outbreak, but perhaps without saturation coverage on cable news networks and the velocity of information on the Internet, the public would not be so hysterical, medical professionals said.”
Protecting the public from saturation coverage may be one way to prevent hysteria. A far better way would be to provide the public with the power of media literacy. If the public knew how the media worked, in providing both essential and saturation coverage, they could rely not on protection, but their own understanding of media, in dealing with the coverage of a huge story. They would be empowered to receive essential information and non-essential information, be able to tell the two apart, and know how to react to it. How powerful an improvement would that be?
Here is a definition, used daily by media professionals, that makes the swine flu story so big. It is the definition of news: News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo, or the way things are. The epidemic has begun and spread to a global level, which is a terrific change to the status quo. But look at the second part of the definition, the threat to the status quo. In the swine flu story, no one, from global leaders to heads of households, knows what is going to happen. This threat to the status quo – not knowing what is going to happen – truly makes the story as big as it is, both to media professionals and in the public mind.
So that is the way the story is reported: here’s where we are, but what happens next? This is not the media trying to scare people; it is the media reporting how scary things are, because of the threat. People have a total right to be scared, when a virus with original, unknown properties threatens to break free and roam the earth. Movies are made about such circumstances. Speaking of which, this very day, dozens of writers and producers, believe me, are busily collecting swine flu material, with just such a project in mind.
Is this cynical, or unethical? If it is, then why was there such mourning at the loss of Michael Crichton, a master at fictionalizing the threat to the status quo? In fact Americans love the threat to the status quo, which drives almost exclusively two of the leading media businesses, sports and weather. The threat also drives most novels, movies, soap operas and sitcoms consumed by Americans.
The threat is also a strong temptation to cable news producers battling for viewership in a cutthroat-competitive 24/7 television world. So Fox News Channel, to promote its newscast, airs a commercial saying “swine flu plagues the nation.” Of course Fox shouldn’t be doing this, but the only party with any control over such manipulation is the public. Media literacy would empower the public to recognize the line not as a call to alarm, but as a marketing hook, giving people a better chance to make the viewing choice they would feel good about.
As ever, the ultimate irony inherent in this kind of discussion is the origin of the definition of news, and the other values and definitions that media professionals use in their work, whether it’s news, entertainment or advertising. The media didn’t create these values and definitions; the people did. They don’t realize it, and should be made aware of it starting in, say, third grade. You’d be amazed how much media literacy people can acquire in a single semester, if only educators decided to teach it to them.
“Without the news media,” the story said, “the public would be dangerously unaware of the swine flu outbreak, but perhaps without saturation coverage on cable news networks and the velocity of information on the Internet, the public would not be so hysterical, medical professionals said.”
Protecting the public from saturation coverage may be one way to prevent hysteria. A far better way would be to provide the public with the power of media literacy. If the public knew how the media worked, in providing both essential and saturation coverage, they could rely not on protection, but their own understanding of media, in dealing with the coverage of a huge story. They would be empowered to receive essential information and non-essential information, be able to tell the two apart, and know how to react to it. How powerful an improvement would that be?
Here is a definition, used daily by media professionals, that makes the swine flu story so big. It is the definition of news: News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo, or the way things are. The epidemic has begun and spread to a global level, which is a terrific change to the status quo. But look at the second part of the definition, the threat to the status quo. In the swine flu story, no one, from global leaders to heads of households, knows what is going to happen. This threat to the status quo – not knowing what is going to happen – truly makes the story as big as it is, both to media professionals and in the public mind.
So that is the way the story is reported: here’s where we are, but what happens next? This is not the media trying to scare people; it is the media reporting how scary things are, because of the threat. People have a total right to be scared, when a virus with original, unknown properties threatens to break free and roam the earth. Movies are made about such circumstances. Speaking of which, this very day, dozens of writers and producers, believe me, are busily collecting swine flu material, with just such a project in mind.
Is this cynical, or unethical? If it is, then why was there such mourning at the loss of Michael Crichton, a master at fictionalizing the threat to the status quo? In fact Americans love the threat to the status quo, which drives almost exclusively two of the leading media businesses, sports and weather. The threat also drives most novels, movies, soap operas and sitcoms consumed by Americans.
The threat is also a strong temptation to cable news producers battling for viewership in a cutthroat-competitive 24/7 television world. So Fox News Channel, to promote its newscast, airs a commercial saying “swine flu plagues the nation.” Of course Fox shouldn’t be doing this, but the only party with any control over such manipulation is the public. Media literacy would empower the public to recognize the line not as a call to alarm, but as a marketing hook, giving people a better chance to make the viewing choice they would feel good about.
As ever, the ultimate irony inherent in this kind of discussion is the origin of the definition of news, and the other values and definitions that media professionals use in their work, whether it’s news, entertainment or advertising. The media didn’t create these values and definitions; the people did. They don’t realize it, and should be made aware of it starting in, say, third grade. You’d be amazed how much media literacy people can acquire in a single semester, if only educators decided to teach it to them.
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