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How Slow Can You Go?

This Wall Street Journal article uses an example I’ve brought up before to say that guilt is the route to greener behavior. No, it isn’t.

Washington, D.C., imposed a five-cent tax on every disposable bag, paper or plastic, handed out at any retail outlet in the city that sells food, candy or liquor, effective Jan 1. But more important than the extra cost was something more subtle: No one got bags automatically anymore. Instead, shoppers had to ask for them—right in front of their fellow customers.

The result? Retail outlets that typically use 68 million disposable bags per quarter handed out 11 million bags in the first quarter of this year and fewer than 13 million bags in the second quarter, according to the district’s Office of Tax and Revenue. That may help explain why volunteers for the city’s annual Potomac River Watershed Cleanup day in mid-April pulled 66% fewer plastic bags from the Anacostia River than they did last year.

District Councilman Tommy Wells doesn’t believe it is the nominal cost that’s keeping shoppers from using bags, but rather the expectation—made clear in a very public way in every transaction—that they could make do without. “It’s more important,” he concludes, “to get in their heads than in their pocketbooks.”

This is a decent example that draws the wrong conclusions. Yes, there are measurable returns from using pricing to effect behavior – and we definitely should use them. But the green aspect of this is about as lame as you can possibly expect. Using guilt isn’t the best way to get anyone to do anything and so should be given no quarter here. Peer pressure is perhaps a different story. But invoking guilt makes this just another marketing campaign destined to lose steam after a while – or worse, avail people of a work around. Because we will find ways to feel good about who we are and what we do, even if denial is one of them. And this is a far more powerful force than any guilt that can be summoned to make you use less, walk more, take a train, turn someone instead of something on at night.

Here is our greatest possibility. We’re interested in sexy and are powerless before it. So when slow is sexy (deja, already!), and the two get connect (Hook up!*) in people’s minds, we’ve got a renewable hold on being green. We just don’t yet think about it that way.

But, take your time, fer chrissakes. With everything.

* Good grief – the  bus and billboard campaigns literally write themselves – a young man, a nipple: “Turn it off – and Turn her On!”

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Getting Perspective

Sometimes we might loose sight of the fact that what’s most wrong with what’s been done here is the misappropriation of a color, a thing that has already long been devoted to other purposes. As a reminder, this is part of an essay from the painter-turned-art historian James Elkins, called Why Art and Science Should be Allowed to Go Their Separate Ways:

The Grande Jatte Problem: What Is Science When It Is Immersed in Art?

Masaccio’s Trinità, as every textbook proclaims, is the first surviving painting in linear perspective. Does that mean, to draw the standard im- plication, that mathematics and painting were allied at that moment? Seurat’s La Grande Jatte was made with color theory in mind: But does that mean late nineteenth-century color theory and postimpressionism were linked? These aren’t straightforward questions, because on one level the answer is yes to both, but in another sense some violence is done to both color science and mathematics when they are said to be present in the paintings. It’s a longer argument than can be accommodated here; my example will be La Grande Jatte.

Even after more than one hundred years, La Grande Jatte resists those who claim to see everything in it. The painting puts up formidable obstacles to any interpretation. To begin with, it is not always easy to know what Seurat knew: The most frequently cited sources for Seurat’s scientism are near-contemporaries Félix Fénéon and Paul Signac, and Seurat is not on record unambiguously agreeing with either one.8 In addi- tion, Seurat was an uneven reader of science—some things he studied hard; others, offhandedly, and there are examples of willful misunder- standing and selective reading. It is clear that he misunderstood a great deal, and some of the theorists he misunderstood were themselves mistak- en.9 Assessing that kind of error involves studying twentieth-century color theory, which is itself a difficult subject. And aside from each of these problems, the painting itself seems unreliable, since its colors have faded unmeasurably and unevenly over time.

Even so, these are only preliminary obstacles. They allow us to say—and this is the emerging consensus in recent scholarship—that Seurat was a poor scientist, confused even in comparison to the popular science writers of his day, so that La Grande Jatte is not, in this respect, “a definitive formulation of the technique, method, and theory of Neo- Impressionism.”10 It may be true that Seurat’s “earnest convictions . . . provided both the justification and motivation for artistic projects more ambitious than he might otherwise have undertaken,” but that does not explain what the projects were.11 If pseudoscience was a catalyst to Seurat’s creation, what did it allow him to get on with?

It needs to be said clearly that Seurat had no reason to paint any of the color effects he had been studying, because if they were accurate rec- ords of our subjective experience, they would be produced for us by any painting or natural scene. There is no reason to paint the world in dots in order to simulate the surfaces of the world, and there is no reason to paint simultaneous contrast, halos, iridescence or Mach bands, chiaroscuro, gradation, or any of the other phenomena since they would be reproduced in the act of perception. That is the fundamental stumbling block to call- ing Seurat “scientific,” and it is striking that Seurat himself copied a warn- ing to this effect directly from Michel Eugenè Chevreul.12 Seurat read Chevreul fairly loosely, and it is at least possible that his interest in depict- ing simultaneous contrast was sparked by the fact that Chevreul had a large color illustration of it printed in his book.13 On the other hand Her- mann von Helmholtz’s essay on painting and science, which Seurat appar- ently did not read, would have given him a reason to reproduce certain effects. When pigments cannot match the intensities of outdoor lighting, Helmholtz says, then painters might resort to subjective phenomena in

order to remind viewers of the original conditions. But even if Seurat had seen that essay, it would not have any bearing on his project in La Grande Jatte, because the phenomena he studied are also effects of less intense illumination.14

Seurat’s “science” mixes empiricism and idealism in a manner that is at once specific and opaque to any single explanation: To adapt a phrase of Martin Kemp’s, it is neither science, pseudoscience, nonscience, nor non- sense. It is not entirely “specious in its theoretical formulation . . . applied with an indifference to any critical appraisal,” but neither is it “a definitive formulation of the technique, method, and theory of Neo-Impressionism.”15 The problem is initially a matter of finding out how Seurat conceived sci- ence, empiricism, logic, and self-consistency; but ultimately, the difficulty is finding any way to construct a responsible account of the picture. No matter which scientific theories we may decide to accept and which rules of application or irrelevancy we may adopt, the painting refuses to play along. La Grande Jatte is not an example of any theory, mistaken or otherwise.

As we know from Seurat’s writings and from his friends, theory is what got his pictures started: He imagined theories as their underpin- nings, their raisons d’être, and their necessary and sufficient explanations. But his imagining was flawed. Science and painting do not get along in the La Grande Jatte—they do not speak for one another, and they do not exemplify or signify one another. Their mutual disregard is uneven and sometimes—as in the “dots” that Joris-Karl Huysmans so brilliantly called “running fleas”—destructive.

John Gage concluded that Seurat was indeed “scientific,” because of his “experimentalism,”16 and years before Robert Herbert had said the same thing. To Herbert, Seurat was scientific because he studied ephem- eral phenomena of vision.17 “Science” in Herbert’s and Gage’s texts is an activity involving hypothesis, experiment, and falsification, and those are efficient and common characterizations of the scientific project. But two things stand in the way of enlisting Seurat’s painting as science, as thus defined. First it would have to be shown how La Grande Jatte is an in- stance of any experiment, or a consistent application of some coherent hypothesis. But then, even if La Grande Jatte embodies an experiment, it would have to be shown that the experiment had relevance to contempo- rary color science. To say his work is “experimentalist” is to say it borrows the idea of experiment from science, not that it is an example of a scientific

experiment. It engages popular notions of science and translates them, unscientifically, into paint.

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Transformational Means

Also known as Getting Green(tm), or the means to transform the way a region (or country, or planet) is powered:

WASHINGTON — Google and a New York financial firm have each agreed to invest heavily in a proposed $5 billion transmission backbone for future offshore wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard that could ultimately transform the region’s electrical map.

The 350-mile underwater spine, which could remove some critical obstacles to wind power development, has stirred excitement among investors, government officials and environmentalists who have been briefed on it.

Google and Good Energies, an investment firm specializing in renewable energy, have each agreed to take 37.5 percent of the equity portion of the project. They are likely to bring in additional investors, which would reduce their stakes.

So, in the span of a week PK writes about the non-existent stimulus spending, and the tunnel that won’t be built (not in a day, not in a year or 10) and so we should begin to get a genuine idea of what a lack of progress looks like by now – with more where that came from. But the problem is one of perception and purposeful misunderstanding. We’re basically using money as prism but seeing all the wrong things through it. Yes: projects are expensive. But they put people to work and we have no other choice but to constantly improve and fine-tune our physical infrastructure anyway. And while it’s easy to demagogue supposedly high-dollar fiascos like the financial bailout of last year, how about recognizing the fact that it will actually cost $0? Why, you ask? Now you’re getting green.

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Squaring the War Circle

Hippies:

With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuel.

Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.

What’s next, less wars? I guess there are worse things – the Defense department did build the internet, even if it was just for Al Gore at first. So now they’ll scale up a renewable energy package in record time for the greatest fighting machine the world has ever known. Maybe, in the land hopeful unintended consequences, they’ll realize they/we don’t need to spend that much on armaments after all. That dropping bombs on people continually is not the path to their hearts and minds – well, not in a good way. But will we make the connection of our ways to our means through a transformation of our might?

Reminds me of that Churchill quote.

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The New Train Hold-up

Authentic frontier gibberish leadership:

In his State of the Union address this year, the president called for building high-speed rail, and backed up his words with $8 billion in stimulus money, distributed to various states, for rail projects.

But Republican candidates for governor in some of the states that won the biggest stimulus rail awards are reaching for the emergency brake.

In Wisconsin, which got more than $810 million in federal stimulus money to build a train line between Milwaukee and Madison, Scott Walker, the Milwaukee County executive and Republican candidate for governor, has made his opposition to the project central to his campaign.

Makes you proud to be a North American. Among many, one question is whether some non-trivial number of voters already believe this is the way to go or are these guys – and these are mostly guys – able to convince them. I mean, what’s the appeal of thumbing your nose at hundreds of millions of dollars coming to your state for infrastructure upgrades and expanded capabilities also known as huge quality of life improvements? Sure, running against the black socialist president might poll well, but c’mon man. A huge country full of big cities connected only by interstates and airports. How far does resentment toward fancy European transportation systems actually take you? Maybe the real question is, how long does it take to get there?

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“Good People of Leadville”

From a localized opera theme this morning, this following is from American Opera: The Sublimation of Ordinariness by Derek Mills, concerned primarily with Douglas Moore’s “The Ballad of Baby Doe.”

“What, then, is the American, this new man?”, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

asked over two centuries ago. It is with the response to this familiar defining

question that American national opera–just as American national painting or

American national fiction–must necessarily be concerned.

Certainly the quip that “American national opera is an oxymoron” is not

without justification. The repertoire has a long enough history, but its enduring

successes have been comparatively few. Nevertheless, an interesting body of

such work has emerged that treats American themes and American

experience, that wrestles with the essential question of the meaning of being

American. And on any short list of those operas would be Douglas Moore’s

The Ballad of Baby Doe.

The leitmotif of Moore’s operatic output, from the singspiel Devil and Daniel

Webster that he wrote with playwright Stephen Vincent Benet in 1939 to his

final opera about the prohibitionist Carry Nation in 1966, was Americana. In a

sense, Moore is the Vaughan Williams of America music, or, to change the

figure, a musical stylist much as Graham Greene or Anne Tyler are literary

ones. His work is comparatively simple and accessible, with familiar melodic

ideas and a ready theatrical sense. Indeed, Moore’s music, while neither

complex nor cerebral, has an “authenticity” that, as the composer Yehudi

Wyner comments, causes a listener “mysteriously, to grow increasingly fond

of it.”

One of Baby Doe’s greatest strengths is John Latouche’s inspired libretto.

Latouche, who had a remarkable ear for the American idiom, assembled here

our vernacular in a manner at once poetic and natural. Whole scenes are

written using collections of cleverly captured clichés and oral rhythms woven

together musically; they have an ease which makes them seem more a part of

a play than of an opera. It is recitative that ripples with reality.

The story is quintessentially American as well. It chronicles an actual incident

in nineteenth century history that involved common folk-ordinary Americans

trying to survive, succeed, find love and fortune and meaning in a world of

rapidly shifting values and mores. It’s a love triangle involving Colorado’s

silver king, Horace Tabor, his puritanical wife Augusta, and Elizabeth “Baby”

Doe, the “miners’ sweetheart” who would become the classic “other woman.”

It’s a story with political, social, and fiscal implications redolent of daily life

even now–indeed, with the Clinton-Lewinsky affair prominent in the press,

one of the lines, “another administration scandal,” broke up the Boston

audience during a recent matinee!

Baby Doe has acquired an orthodox performance canon over the years,

shaped to a large degree by the recording with Beverly Sills in the title role and

Emerson Buckley conducting. But recent productions–in Hartford,

Washington, D.C. and Kansas City–have shown some experimentation in

both staging and directing, and January’s Boston mounting offered powerful

new insights that may contribute to a revised performance tradition.

Boston brought together the rare combination of a woman as director and a

woman as conductor, rendered even rarer by the fact that both are former

sopranos (and one, director Sharon Daniels, have been a well-regarded Baby

Doe). Daniels seems to sense the essence of this opera to be relationship, and

thus emphasized not only the usual political and social aspects of its use of

Americana, but also its preoccupation with “moving west” as a personal

journey, and with the reinvention urge that seems to overcome so many of us

at mid-life.

…

This is an epic tale, to be sure, but it’s an epic of dailiness. The Tabor were

real people, and their quest was homely rather than heroic–or heroic because

it was homely. It’s an epic for the America of Studs Terkel, not for the Greece

of Homer. And it is precisely this dailiness, this ordinariness, this “folks like

us” quality that suffuses American opera as a genre. This is what we see, for

instance, in Porgy’s enduring optimism, in the unintended tragedy of the

Maurrants in Weill’s Street Scene, in John Proctor’s all-too-human nobility in

Ward’s Crucible, in Susan B. Anthony’s pensive reflection on the meaning of

her own “long life” which concludes Thomson’s Mother of Us All.

And perhaps that finally is what makes American national opera significant–its

ability to capture the essence of how we live, of the relationships we choose

and the frontiers we conquer and the messes we make, of how our lives have

become an enduring historical answer to de Crevecoeur’s question. This “new

man, this American”–flawed, fumbling and free–is at the center of America’s

national operas, and is quintessentially depicted in The Ballad of Baby Doe.

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Nothing to See Here

So just move along. Yesterday in L.A.:

Meteorologist Jeff Masters notes “a station in the foothills at 1260? elevation near Beverly Hills owned by the Los Angeles Fire Department hit 119°F yesterday–the hottest temperature ever measured in the Los Angeles area, tying the 119°F reading from Woodland Hills on July 22, 2006.”

Weather historian Christopher C. Burt has a great post at Weather Underground, “The Remarkable Summer of 2010,” which concludes, “it is probable that no warmer summer in the Northern Hemisphere has ever been experienced by so many people in world history.”

Some further encroaching news in the continuing story of how ‘Obama is the greatest danger to our way of life’ brought to you by your friends at Shell, BP, NewsCorp and the Southern Company.

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Objective Annihilation

As objective annihilation passes into more or less likely scenarios dependent on what actions we take – vs. other scenarios (Cold War) which had to take into account the actions others might take against us, we begin to look for signals about how the culture is handling the ‘actions we take’ thing. In the round, it’s largely what this blog is, or should be, about.

Certainly, many now say that terrorists belong to the later scenario outlined above. But their actions have done nothing if not emphasize their belief in the former as the best way to bring western society to its knees.

But whether we’re taking measures to change things, and whether these even measures matter, becomes a matter of great concern, locally but especially to corporate business interests highly invested in selling us things. The perceptions of either might even be considered more important than the answer on both, at least to these larger, multi-tentacled entities.

Which is all to ask, what do people believe about corporate attempts/postures on ‘going green’? Even that term is still evolving, slower than we’d like, of course – we want to see change in 140 characters or we’re convinced it isn’t happening. But it is, maybe becoming more plain and tangible or more insidious, depending on how you brew your cynicism.

But is it still growing, or was it just a fashion and have we seen the zenith of eco-concern? (Annihilation vogue?) This is a real question, pointing to perception beyond the actual events. The hockey stick has been re-confirmed again, for example, but the constant badgering of the fossil fuel confederate right wing has an affect. Most Republicans now believe the president is a Muslim, after all.

The question of ‘do you think it’s working’ confers a much more nefarious kind of survey.

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Ornare Ultricies Amet

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