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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The problem with lobbyists

Jeffrey Sachs talks about the problem with lobbyists:

Lobbyists for powerful corporations are crawling over every piece of pending legislation- from health care, to banking regulation, to climate change -- keeping a chokehold on deep reforms. Jankowsky says that lobbying is transparent. . . . Special interests have already spent $2.5 billion dollars this year on 13,000 lobbyists like Mr. Jankowsky and his colleagues at the firm Akin Gump, with many contributing their expertise to gutting financial oversight of Wall Street, delaying control of greenhouse gas emissions, and preventing real controls on health insurance costs.

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The beliefs of Scientologists

What do Scientologists believe? What follows is an excerpt from ABC's documentary on Scientology. You'll learn about the "purification rundown." You'll also learn a bit about Scientology's confidential scriptures--meant only for those who have reached the highest levels of Scientology--including the teachings about the Intergalactic emperor named Xenu, who allegedly brought the spirits of his people to Earth 75 million years ago and buried them in volcanoes. These people were supposedly alive quadrillions of years ago (this is far older than the big bang). One Scientologist who appears in this video claims that it is against his religious beliefs to discuss his religious beliefs, leading to an entertaining ending, at least for those of us who don't believe in Xenu.

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Gagging the experts when discussing the war on drugs

Jim Webb introduced a bill to "create a blue-ribbon commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom." How shall we proceed? A recent amendment to Webb's bill by Republican Senator Charles Grassley would bar the commission from "considering" "legalization" of presently controlled substances. See also, this post by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Rolling Stone reports in more detail:

Enter unreconstructed drug warrior Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has released the text of an amendment that would ensure the commission not reach any conclusions that threaten 40 years of failure. The commission would be prohibited, thanks to Grassley, from examining any “policies that favor decriminalization of violations of the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substances.”

Here's the text of Grassley's proposed gag rule:

SEC. ll. RESTRICTIONS ON AUTHORITY. The Commission shall have no authority to make findings related to current Federal, State, and local criminal justice policies and practices or reform recommendations that involve, support, or otherwise discuss the decriminalization of any offense under the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substance listed under the Controlled Substances Act. Therefore . . . let's figure out how to revamp our criminal justice system but let's not discuss the elephant in the room: the fact that the "war on drugs" that has ruined more lives than drugs ever could have ruined. It's important to keep in mind that some conservatives see the light on the "drug war."

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