Fans, Freedom, and Frustration

Over on her blog, Kelley Eskridge has a video of a "Bono Moment" in which you see two distinct types of fans interacting with U2's lead singer. Check it out and come back here. Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation. he may be being a fan, but he hasn't lost his mind. The female is being...a groupie, I guess. Though the groupies I've met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it. In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things. The fan reaction---mindless adulation bordering on deification---looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion. Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant. You can see the same thing in politics. To a lesser degree with less public personalities---writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there's a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies...) and other creative types---but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives. I've never had this happen to me. I'm not sure if I'm grateful or resentful---having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don't know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing. But it's appealing the same way porn is---something most people, if they're at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over. I know I would not find it very attractive now. When I was twenty-five? You betcha. Bring 'em on. But if I'd had that then I think I'm fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly. I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person---emphasis on Person---and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after. (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can't provide.) But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art. The two are inextricably linked. Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating. The notion that the talent "arrives" and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it's not one I'm particularly in sympathy with---it all happens in my brain, it's definitely mine---but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true. Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work. There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it's done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being. To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising. For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that. But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner. A prisoner of other people's expectations. Those expectations always play a part in anyone's life, but certain aspects---the most artificial ones---get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration. Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female. No, he doesn't stop being Bono, but it's almost as if he says "Oh, it's time to do this sort of thing now" as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk. Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she's feeling right then is her's and to claim it is artificial is wrong. Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she's In The Moment, the emotions are real. If he'd ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan's part. [more . . . ]

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Court reporters and multitasking

If you are one of those people who finds it difficult to multitask (I am one of those), you might appreciate this story involving court reporters. I work as a lawyer during the day, and quite often I need to take depositions, which are reported in real time by court reporters who use a special keyboard to take down every word of the deposition. The best court reporters are truly incredible to watch. To be a court reporter, you need to take down at least 200 words per minute without mistakes. You would think that trying to take down every word spoken by everyone in a room would completely occupy your working memory, but good court reporters can do their work proficiently with mental processing capacity to spare. Last week I spent an entire day taking depositions. After the depositions were finished, I asked the court reporter what she was daydreaming about. She smiled, because she knows that experienced court reporters are perfectly capable of daydreaming about such things as grocery shopping or going to the beach at the same time that they are taking down every syllable of every word spoken in the room. I asked this particular court reporter how often she has to go back and look at her transcript to see what was being said, because she was thinking about something else at the time she was taking down the testimony. She told me that she was once working for a judge who was going to sentence a man convicted of murder. The big question that day was whether the man would be put to death or whether he would get a life sentence. This court reporter was assigned to preserve all of the court proceedings regarding this momentous sentencing. After she was done taking down the testimony, and after she left the courtroom, someone asked her whether the judge sentenced the accused to death. This woman hesitated before replying that she did not know, even though she was a court reporter. To find out, she went back to her tape (the strip of paper on which the court reporter's keyboard prints out the testimony), and looked for the critical part. She found out that the judge had actually sentenced the man to death, but she had no memory of this. I asked her whether she is ever asked to read back testimony during a court proceeding or deposition at a time where she became nervous that she might not have been accurately taking down the testimony. She stated that this never happens, and that she is always confident that she's taking down the testimony accurately. If something starts going wrong, her full consciousness kicks in and she deals with the unusual situation fully aware. She has never been caught not taking down the testimony accurately. I find it pretty amazing that someone could have their working memory so thoroughly occupied in the linguistic sense, and yet be able to think about other things. It's even more amazing that when the court reporters daydream or think, they are often doubly-employing their linguistic abilities. It just seems like this would be impossible, but it's commonplace. Most of the court reporters today use a special stenographic keyboard, but there are a few who speak into something that looks like a muzzle. They hear the testimony in the courtroom with their own ears and simultaneously speak those words into this muzzle-device which is recorded by a tape recorder. In short, they "shadow" the testimony with their own voice. Later, someone types out that the court reporter's words into a transcript. I've spoken to some of these muzzle-device court reporters over the years, and they to tell me that they are able to think about other things were daydream while they are taking down the testimony. If you are wondering why we even have court reporters, that would be a good question. The main advantage is that when you have a court reporter, you have a person who is in a position to swear to the accuracy of the transcript, indicating who said exactly what. A tape recorder would simply record the sounds, and might not accurately pick up the exact words that were being spoken (for instance, because someone is mumbling or gesturing). When these sorts of things happen at a deposition, human court reporters ask the witness to speak up or to state their testimony in words rather than gesturing. This makes for a more accurate and more readable transcript. That said, some courtrooms are now employing tape recorders in lieu of court reporters.

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Dylan Ratigan asks why Tim Geithner still has a job

In a succinct and powerful video, Dylan Ratigan wonders why Tim Geithner still is our Treasury Secretary. Senator Maria Cantwell, who makes an appearance on this video, wonders this too, calling Geithner's job performance "appalling." I agree. It's time for Obama to start fresh while we are not in crisis mode. He can do this without starting a panic by saying something like, "We thank Mr. Geithner for his service getting us through this crisis." But then, by all means, throw the bum out and let's pick an honest outsider (not another Goldman Sachs alum) to lead the way. Am I being harsh when I say "bum"? Nope . . . I'm being restrained. Geithner should be taking the time to use the mass media to teach common people what went wrong, how we can avoid it happening again, and explaining exactly where our public tax dollars have gone. Because he refuses to do any of this, and he refuses to be an powerful advocate for taxpayers, he should step aside. It is clear that he doesn't understand who he is supposed to represent. If I were to speak more bluntly, I would say that Tim Geithner is committing a fraud on the U.S. public. Here are the words of Robert Johnson, former economist at the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Budget Committee

[Geithner] speaks as though they’re doing very comprehensive reform. Unfortunately, in the United States, one of the reasons we had the bubble and the crisis was because we have a broken political system, where campaign money, lobbying influence of the financial sector is enormous, and it created bad regulations, bad laws. I’m going back into the Reagan period, Bush the senior, particularly the Clinton era. We’ve made a mess, and now we come back from a crisis where the population knows darn well what a mess we’ve made. But the problem is, at this point, the people in power, the moneyed interests are still in power. And a large portion of these reforms are either cosmetic or designed by the industry and quite ineffective. . . Ground Zero, the San Andreas Fault of our financial system, where it blew up last time, was in the intersection between “too big to fail” firms and over-the-counter derivatives and that these derivatives need to be put on exchanges, because they’re too complex, and when they’re combined with the “too big to fail” firms, which have a 95 percent market share in OTC derivatives, five banks, that it can create a situation, like we were talking about moments ago, where Citibank could not be restructured. The spider web of positions in derivatives is so complex and so entangled that it deters policy officials from being able to put them through restructuring, because they’re afraid of what kind of spin-offs and consequences will happen. I spoke about the credit default swap market and the illusion of safety that those credit default swap contracts created when they’re unregulated, because everybody thought AIG was going to be able to pay the bill, but they weren’t, and then the taxpayer got to provide that capital.
It's also time for Cantwell and her Senate colleagues to quit blaming Treasury for failing to lead the way. Congress has the power to make laws; it should should pass the necessary laws to close the "loopholes" she finds so appalling.

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Halloween: Whence the pursuit of horror?

Some of the neighborhoods near my house in St. Louis have already celebrated Halloween. For instance, my street celebrates Halloween on the Sunday afternoon prior to Halloween. Celebrating in the daylight makes it easier for us to visit with little neighborhood children and their parents. The nearby Compton Heights neighborhood celebrates Halloween on the Saturday night prior to Halloween. Our family was invited to venture over to Compton Heights a few nights ago, and we weren’t disappointed. head Amidst all of the traditional candy-giving, we stumbled upon one particular house where the family had put together its own haunted house. The family owns a big old house, but also owns a separate large two-story carriage house in the back. They hired an electrician to wire up the carriage house with sophisticated lighting and they assembled a team of 20 friends and family to pose as various types of dead people inside the house. Not typical dead people, mind you. Dead people who stand still in the dim lighting and come alive just when you are convinced that they are mannequins (and there were quite a few mannequins too, some of them dismembered). When selected dead people came alive, they yelped, or they screamed; some of them reached out and grabbed you. There were ghouls and ghosts, a vampire, a mummy, floating bones, a guy with a “chainsaw,” and a beheaded guy who suddenly moaned, all of this horror looking rather real and all of these characters lurking carefully amidst the dim lighting as we toured this incredible house. front-of-haunted-houseEach of the photos in this post is from this house. Note that it’s not always easy to take photos in a darkly lit haunted house. While I was taking a photo of a decapitated head on a table, for instance, a dead man reached out and tugged on my sleeve, smudging the long exposure. How good was it? I stood outside for 30 minutes after I toured the haunted house, and every ten minutes or so, I saw a panicky grown child running from the haunted house crying. Bravo! I then learned that the haunted house family has been putting on this magnificent show, for free, for 15 years. Double Bravo! But as I walked away from the haunted house, I wondered two things.

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