Stupid Machine Tricks

It’s been a mantra since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution­—machines produce goods and services more cheaply, more efficiently, and of higher quality. They also do things that people don’t want to do. That’s so true that it’s become an article of faith that’s never questioned. Too bad, because it’s not always the case.

How many machines doe it take to fix a sidewalk?

As I was strolling through town a few days ago, I saw four examples of how we’ve become so tied to industrial gear that we’ve made simple tasks expensive, inefficient, and environmentally unsound. The first and second of these involved the use of a riding mower. I take it as a given that no power mower is energy efficient but, in the same way that I think a rancher or plumber might actually have a need for a low-mileage pick-up truck, so too do I think that people who live in the country, grounds crews, and lawn maintenance companies make their jobs much easier by using such machines. I have to say, though, when you use a rider mower in spaces so small that you have to reverse out of them, efficiency bleeds into stupidity.

I saw that. There is a row of three down-market apartment buildings on West Street in Northampton whose frontage is devoted to macadam parking lots. The buildings are separated from each other by strips of land about the width of a desk and a depth of about twenty-five feet. There’s no lawn; not much grows in the shadows. Still, leaves blow into the spaces, which was what the mower was picking up. The space was so narrow and required so many reversals that it took about three times as long as it would have taken with a rake.

Speaking of rakes, it’s a shame about the rake shortage, isn’t it?  Of all the inventions of the late 20^th century, leaf blowers may be among the dumbest. They are loud, smoke-belching fuel hogs, but my main beef with them is that they’re very inefficient unless one is seeking to dislodge leaves from bushes, gutters, or garden beds. Here’s what I observed on the Smith campus—grounds crew personnel walking up and down blowing leafs into central piles. First, they could have done all of this with rakes and gotten some aerobic benefit that wouldn’t have made all that noise at 7 in the morning. Second, those piles took a half hour to make but only 10 minutes to rake. Third, another machine—a riding mower with a bag—came by to collect the piles. If you’re going to run the mower/bagger anyhow, why bother with the stupid blowers? Insofar as I can see the main purpose of leaf blowers is to scatter all the mulch that was carefully put down in the spring.

Still, those two projects were practically models of economy compared with a small project on a town road. Crews needed to get into a section of the water lines via an entry point (which we used to call manhole covers). In the old days, this would have meant some burly person with a jackhammer chiseled away the macadam enough so the cover could be prised up. After the job was done, another one or two people would have come by to restore a hot tar sealant to the cover. Not anymore! No! It now requires a mammoth vehicle that’s about the size of a water driller to pulverize the road surface so that one guy can open the cover. The drill takes out about four feet of the road. When the job is done, another truck arrives and several people throw some crushed stone into the hole and place a red cone over it until it can be resurfaced. That, of course, requires a paving machine, and then a steamroller. Good grief! No wonder the average road cost is now a million bucks a mile!

Don’t get me started on how inefficient and overly expensive it was to replace a section of a downtown cracked sidewalk. My dad used to do this with a sledge, 2 x 4 forms, some fresh gravel, Sakrete that he and another guy mixed in a wheelbarrow, and a pair of trowels. Now we’re talking one machine to break the pavement, another with gravel, a small backhoe  to level the gravel, and a cement mixer. They’ve not yet figured out how to replace the trowels. They have figured out how to write huge invoices.

Maybe a good way to restore health to the US economy and rebuild its infrastructure is to stop spending so much money on toys and more on labor. I’m no Luddite—machines can do wonderful things. But they don’t always make sense.   

Birdman: Best of 2014?

BIRDMAN (2014)

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Fox Searchlight, 119 minutes, R (language)

* * * * *

Wrap the Oscars for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and perhaps Best Supporting Actress as well. Not since Synecdoche, New York (2008) have I seen a film this intelligent, provocative, and gloriously weird. At last––a film that's both playful and has a triple-digit IQ! See this one with friends as you'll be debating and discussing it for weeks to come.

The set up is deceptively simple: ageing actor Riggan Thomson(Michael Keaton) is directing a Broadway revival of a play based upon a Raymond Carver short story collection, What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Love. Riggan wants to change his image as the public knows him for one thing and one thing only: his blockbuster role as Birdman, a comic book superhero brought to the silver screen. Here we get a glimpse of what director Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Amores perroes) intends to do. This film is everything thing a summer blockbuster isn't: complicated, reflective, ambiguous, and magical in ways that originate in the mind, not in computer-generated f/x. Don't look for simple good guy/bad guy scenarios in Birdman, and pay no attention to promo labels such as "black comedy," as there's way more going on here.

Riggan needs a hit for more than his career–he's bombed in his marriage to his soul mate (Amy Ryan), has been a lousy father to daughter Sam (Emma Stone), is in the process of driving away girlfriend Laura (Andrea Riseborough), drinks too much, and is slowly either going insane or being overwhelmed by real superpowers. If you needed a play for the Apocalypse, his adaptation of Raymond Carver would be it. Especially when his lead actor suffers an accident (or did he make it happen?) and Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) arrives the day before dress rehearsal. Mike might be a tortured genius, a total jerk, or Beelzebub. His creative destruction might be pushing Riggan to confront his demons, urge him to surrender to them, or push the poor sap over the edge. Similarly, Mike might be exactly what Sam needs to make her lose her self-destructive attitude, or he might be providing the ammunition for her to lock and load. He could be the force that turns Lesley (Naomi Watts) into a real actress, or he might just be a perverse satyr who can only get it up when he's on stage. He might be a font of wisdom, or maybe just a fountain of egoistic bullshit.

That's the thing about this film. It evokes Fight Club in the ways it subverts what we see. Or is it what we think we see? There's a sign on Riggan's dressing room mirror that says, "A thing is a thing, not what is said of the thing." Maybe. Watch Keaton's barroom dustup with Broadway critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan) and get back to me. Check out Riggan's dialogues with his Birdman alter ego (or is it Carver?) and let me know. Can Riggan fly, or does he crash and burn? Can he act, or is he really just the hack he thinks he is. When he stands on the stage and says, "I don't exist," does he? 

This is a beautifully written film (Iñárritu, Nicholás Giacobone, Armando Bo, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr.) and Iñárritu's direction is more imaginative than any superhero film you've ever seen. Michael Keaton is a tour de force who must simultaneously assume the roles of possessed director, failed lover, ineffectual parent, tyrant, shaman, charlatan, and wounded self-doubter. (It's hard not to muse upon Robin Williams as we watch him.) Edward Norton is always wonderful and he's at his incendiary best in Birdman. Iñárritu chose well for a film framed around comic book superheroes. Keaton, of course, was Batman and he reduxes that voice for some of the film's creepier sequences. Norton, on the other hand, was Hulk and co-starred in Fight Club. Emma Stone also has a breakout performance in Birdman in a role that might well be titled Millennial Forced to Grow Up. In a stunning departure from usual American movie fare, all of the secondary actors are strong: Watts, Duncan, Ryan, Riseborough, and Zach Galifianakis as Jake, who might be Riggan's best friend or might be just another sycophant hoping to cash in.

Is a thing just a thing? You'll be arguing over this film's ending for quite some time—one that I confess originally left me dissatisfied until having lunch with three other people, one of whom had an interpretation I find compelling. Yes, it's that kind of film. It's already been honored at Venice, where it carried off several major awards, including the Golden Lion. I'm ready to anoint the film, Iñárritu, Keaton, Norton, and Stone.  

Rob Weir

Restore Democracy Locally

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Last Tuesday was a very bad day for progressives nationally, but it wasn't so bad locally. No, I don't mean gun control bills or approval of recreational marijuana use. I was cheered by something that happened in Northampton, Massachusetts–the City Council approved step one of Mayor David Narkewicz's plan to reorganize city government. The mayor's first target was the much-despised Department of Public Works, a body viewed by many locals as an arrogant, unregulated fiefdom.

Northampton strikes back!

Before November 6, the DPW got a budget from the city that, in turn, had very little say in how the money was spent. The DPW took its marching orders from the Board of Public Works, which had the power to set local water rates, sign contracts with private firms, set DPW policy, and determine which projects it would take on and the scope of those projects. Got that? An unelected body headed by an unelected director took orders from an unelected advisory board. I cast no aspersions at any current official, but let's just say that there's high potential for abuses within such a non-democratic, idiosyncratic structure. Mayor Narkewicz put DPW under direct city control and one only hopes that all city boards will be similarly stripped of independence.

It's important to know how boards across America attained such autonomy in the first place. It's not the fault of any living person–unless there's a retired city official of about 120 years of age somewhere. Autonomous bodies were the brainchild of Progressive Era (roughly 1901-17) reformers. Lots of useful regulations were passed in the Progressive Era, the first of three major government-directed reform periods in American history. (The other two are the New Deal in the 1930s and the Great Society in the 1960s.) Progressives had numerous blind spots, though; among them a worshipful trust in experts and an abiding fear of socialism.

Progressives wanted to streamline government and make it more "efficient." Efficiency is a good thing, right? Well, not always; efficiency is most quickly achieved autocratically. Let's face it, democracy takes time and that's inefficient. Moreover, The People–a group elected officials tend to distrust mightily even as they wax poetic about them–often have different ideas about how things should work. Sparked partly by wishing to counter the corruption that permeated late 19^th century city government and partly by blind trust, many Progressive Era municipal reformers turned to what is known as commission-style government. That's what most places have these days–a mayor and a small board or city council that acts as a small Congress for the municipality. So far, so good. But what happened next wasn't so good. Progressives trusted "experts" so much that they allowed them to reorganize major parts of city government into independent and semi-autonomous boards. After all, wouldn't you want a civil engineer to run your water works? No–you wouldn't! You want that person's expertise, but you do not want him or her assuming political power.

Commission governments often become shadow governments inside of the elected bodies; in some cases, they are the real government in terms of wielding actual decision-making power. Elected officials often like this. After all, if the "experts" make the hard decisions and the electorate is angry about those actions, elected officials are insulated from voter wrath. (That's why, by the way, Congress set up an 'independent' commission to determine military base closings. They never have to go on the record and vote on them!) Fine, but we don't elect city councilors and mayors to pass the proverbial and literal buck. If your town has a passel of independent boards, it means you as a citizen have little input into their decisions. In many ways, it hardly matters who is on the town council as their only real power is to vote upon the budget of boards such as DPW. 

Nor was commission government entirely about efficiency. Between 1912 and 1991, 340 American cities elected socialist mayors, councilors, and other officials. In many cases, these socialists spearheaded the municipalization of city services such as water, sewer, electricity, power, transportation, and landfills. That is, they went from being private enterprises to being city-owned. Imagine a world in which the city regulated the power rates, not a group of investors. That happened and is still around in many places. Most of the time rates are lower in city-owned enterprises. Forget efficiency, you sure can get better rates when you remove profit from the equation. That's why so many cities are now looking into things such as their own Internet and cable services. (I dream of the day I can say sayonara to Comcast!)

I could cite numerous ways in which social democracy is superior to for-profit enterprises, but let me emphasize the democracy side of things. It's simply undemocratic to allow boards serving the public to act autonomously from that public. Moreover, it's an abrogation of duty for councils and mayors to allow this. It is, if I may be so blunt, their job to tell city boards what to do, not vice versa. Kudos to Mayor Narkewicz.

I'd also like to suggest that those of you who live elsewhere should put the heat to local government to follow Northampton's lead. Do it for democracy's sake. Maybe we can restore some sanity to America one town at a time!  

Sandcastle Girls a Good Way to Start Thinking of Armenian Massacre

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THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS (2012)

By Chris Bohjalian

Random House, 299 pp.

* * *

Not the most effective cover art (or title)

Call it unplanned synchronicity. Just as I was getting ready to prepare a lecture for my immigration class that included the Armenian genocide, I picked up a copy of The Sandcastle Girls. In all honesty, I didn't know its subject matter; I only knew I needed a novel to read and that I liked some of Chris Bohjalian's other books. In fact, the title and cover art nearly led me elsewhere as each suggested a teen coming-of-age-at-the-beach book. It's not; it's a harrowing fictionalized treatments of the 1915 murder of 1.5 Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

Bohjalian calls it "The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About," and so it is. The Turks would prefer you call it "Self-Defense Against Internal Traitors and Terrorists," but that's sheer rubbish–unless you think small children and their mothers took up arms against a defenseless Ottoman Empire. Actually, Turks would prefer you don't know about how they butchered Armenians like roasting chickens. If you know about that one, you might start asking questions about how they treated Azerbaijanis, Greeks, and Kurds as well. But back to the novel.

It's set in 1915, the year of the massacre and the early days of World War One. (If you need another history lesson, the United States will, in 1917, enter the war on the side of Britain and France against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turks.) Boston Brahmin and recent Mt. Holyoke grad Elizabeth Endicott decides to accompany her father to Aleppo, Syria, where he will coordinate the regional efforts of the Friends of Armenia. The FOA is a do-good but totally ineffectual relief agency that the Turks brazenly lie to and ignore, and which even the U.S. consulate thinks is just in the way. Elizabeth, though, is undeterred and resolute in her desire to do some good. She may be naïve, but she's not blind and she knows not to trust the Turks when they say they are 'relocating' women and children to keep them out of harm's way (as in a mass grave). Her efforts eventually lead her to take into her household an Armenian woman named Nevart, and a small girl named Hatoun who doesn't say much and is prone to disappearing. As it turns out Hatoun doesn't say much because she witnessed the Turks behead her mother; she latched onto Nevart in a refugee camp. Elizabeth will also eventually meet and fall in love with Armen Petroisan, an engineer who once believed in the Ottoman Empire–until the racists took over and, he is forced to conclude, murdered his daughter and wife.

The novel plays out Elizabeth and Armen's relationship against a backdrop of war and murder–think Dr. Zhivago without the ice palace. There are some fine plot twists, including the unlikely but true story of how the Armenian holocaust was documented through the efforts of two German soldier/photographers who got their images smuggled out the region. There are also harrowing tales from the infamous Battle of Gallipoli bloodbath, peeks inside orphanages, and suggestions that the U.S. pandered when it should have pushed. Elizabeth is also a nice mix of a Braham and the New Woman.

The novel is strongest for what it tells us about "The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About." In telling it, Bohjalian uses a device of which I'm not overly fond–using a present-day narrator/snoop to uncover the secrets of the past. In this case, it's Elizabeth's granddaughter and novelist, Laura Petrosian, who recalled her grandmother's "Ottoman Annex" home in Pelham, Massachusetts, but not much about her grandparents. Laura's character and story feel contrived. There are a few too many coincidences and, let's face it, a novelist character from the hands of a novelist feels pretentious. The book's central metaphor, the sandcastle, is itself built upon loose ground, a small incident in the book that you could easily miss if reading late at night.  I also couldn't help think of Eleni, which uses the deep, dark family secret trope more effectively. But when we are in Turkey in 1915, the story tells itself. This book won't win style points, but give Bohjalian props for blowing the lid off Turkish silence. If you know little about the Armenian genocide–and that would be most people–this is a good place to start your own snooping into an atrocity whose hundredth birthday we shall soon commemorate. 

Rob Weir

Welcome to the (Brain) Deado-cratic Party

Brian Schatz: OMG! He's liberal and wins!

Here’s what happened on November 4: the Democrats got their proverbial clocks cleaned. It was a GOP rout—an old-fashioned, ass-kicking, beat-down, barnyard whupping.  Here’s what should happen next: the Democratic Party should reinvent itself and jettison the pandering centrists whose shrill voices signify nothing. Here’s what will happen: the party bigwigs will talk about the need to move more to the center to attract the “middle class.” (That group of Americans was pretty much rendered defunct by class warfare in the 1980s.)  In other words, let’s have more Hillary Clinton and less Elizabeth Warren.

If there is a less imaginative group of people than the Democratic National Committee please don’t tell me about them. There is great handwringing over the Democratic “loss” of the U.S. Senate, a load of hooey as the Democrats didn’t control that body on November 3. That “control” rested on a handful of Republicans masquerading as Democrats. In 2014, they lost to actual Republicans. Don’t take my word for it, look at the data.

As you might expect, conservative think tanks keep track of the most liberal members of Congress. Check out the voting records compiled by the National Journal, which counts the Heritage Foundation among its supporters. Now compare them to Tuesday’s results. Using their data from 2013, here are a list of incumbent “Democrats” that lost on Tuesday; the percentage following their names represents their support for conservative issues as interpreted by the National Journal: Mark Pyror (Arkansas, 54%), Max Baucus (Montana, retired when polls went south, 42%); Mark Begich (Alaska, 45%), Kay Hagan (North Carolina, 51%), and Mark Udall (Colorado, 30%). Come Louisiana’s run-off you can add Mary Landrieu (42%) to the list. The only person on this list that could remotely considered liberal was Mark Udall, who simply didn’t get out the Hispanic vote needed to keep his seat.

Now let’s look at who did win and how often they supported conservative issues:

               

                Brian Schatz (Hawaii, 11.8%) –reelected with 70% of the vote

                Al Franken (Minnesota, 14%)

                Jack Reed (Rhode Island, 16%)

                Tom Udall (New Mexico, 28%)

                Chris Coons (Delaware, 30%)

                Jeff Merkley (Oregon, 32%)

                Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire, 33%)

The numbers are pretty clear­—Democrats who had principles won; with the exception of Mark Udall, those who acted like Republicans lost. Want more evidence of why it would be suicide for Democrats to move to the middle? The National Journal also ranks the “most moderate” members of the US Senate. Guess who was smack dab in the middle, the very model of non-partisanship? Soon-to-be ex-Senator Kay Hagan.

Will the Democrats get the message? Of course they won’t! They’ll continue to tell us of how Barack Obama was misunderstood or stymied at every step by evil Republicans. (It couldn’t be because he’s an empty suit devoid of leadership skills, could it?) They’ll wax nostalgic for the greatest “Democratic” Republican of all time: Bill Clinton. They’ll salivate when Wal-Mart Hillary stops her endless political striptease and announces she’s running in 2016. She might actually win, given that the current GOP presumptives are crazier than an asylum during a Thorazine shortage.

Democratic voices will be shrill and they will signify nothing. Will they speak on behalf of working people? Heaven forbid! They’d be accused of fomenting “class warfare.” Funny, Bernie Sanders always says the real class warfare is that perpetuated by Wall Street upon American workers and the only way the GOP will ever get his seat is when he shuffles off this mortal coil. Will Democrats go into black and Hispanic communities and tell them that the GOP is racist? Shudder! That would lose the “middle class” vote—read suburban white bigots. Will they talk about the free trade fraud that steals American jobs and saddles American children with crippling national debt? Nope—they’ll talk about the need for Social Security reform instead. Will they ask why the hell American kids are dying in places populated by Islamic lunatics that we ought to allow to rot in their own rubbish? Oh no, mustn’t offend our “military families.”

And the only Democrats that will excite anyone are the Elizabeth Warren types. Who can blame voters for ignoring the incumbents who lost? If act like a Republican, why not vote for a real one? If you take a path down the middle like Hagan, you’re just not paying enough attention to warrant it from voters. Remember what Bob Dylan wrote: “You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.” But first you have to open the window!

               

               

Standard Time is Substandard in My Book

Monday November 3, 2014: It’s 7:30 am and a beautiful sunny morning in New England. The sun is glinting off the hillside burnishing autumn’s fading glories with rusty red and yellowy brown hues. And I’m grumpy as I drive to work.

Take a good look New Englanders. 

No, I’m not in a foul mood because it’s Monday or because I’m going to work. I love my job, which means Monday is another opportunity to spend amidst smart, energetic young people. I’m seeing bright red (instead of fading red) because yesterday was my least favorite day in the calendar, the day we move the clocks ahead and lose an hour of late afternoon sunlight. In my view, Standard Time is a fraud perpetuated by energy companies to boost household consumption.

I hear people tell me they love the fall back clock adjustment because “I get an extra hour of sleep.” Really? Show of hands and be honest. How many of you actually slept an extra hour because the clock turned back an hour? Look, if you have little ones at home, clock time is irrelevant. If you don’t and if you work in anywhere other than a 24-hour convenience store, your body is operating on automatic rhythms and you probably got up yesterday after sleeping  as many hours as you usually do. Don’t believe me? Ask my cat, Minou. She was hungry at clock time 5 am and 4 pm, which her body told her was normal feeding time. I suppose an extra hour of sleep means nothing to a beastie that normally sleeps two-thirds of the day, but you’ve been sold a load of hooey if you think your one hour once a year means much to you. The clock changes at 2 am Sunday morning. How many of you actually changed your clocks before you went to bed? Plus, the next morning is Sunday and most of us can sleep in any damn Sunday we want.  

I do not need an extra hour of sunlight in the morning. I’m on my way to work and if I have turn on my headlights for the first part of my half hour commute, so be it. As I said, I love my job, but once I trudge from the parking lot to my office, I’ll be inside except when walking to and from my classes, and the sun is always up by then anyhow.  Later today I’ll be attending a lecture before going home. The event starts at 4:30 pm and I’d normally dawdle a bit to arrive after all the thanking of sponsors and longwinded introduction of a speaker whose bio I know or I wouldn’t be there in the first place. Not today, though. I’ll hustle a bit because the sun sets at 4:39 pm. By the time I get out, it will be pitch dark. Spare me all the public safety crap about morning light. Want to feel creeped out? Wander into a dark, remote UMass parking lot when the sun is down and get back to me.

Places such as Arizona and Hawaii never go on Daylight Savings Time. I don’t begrudge them that—they have more sunlight than they know what to do with. But I live in New England and before we start getting back a few precious seconds of light beginning December 22, our sun will set at 4:11 pm. For most of us, we’ll get up, get a peek at the sun on our work commute, and the Old Sol will bugger off to desert  and tropical climes before we get another look the next morning. Light-deprived depression is a very real thing up this way. It even has a name: Seasonal Affect Disorder.

So I say, no more Standard Time.  If Arizona can thumb its nose at the clock, so can New Englanders. Need an extra hour of sleep? Easily fixed—go to be an hour earlier! As for the rest of us, raise those hands, wave them about, and join in the chorus, “Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the suunnn  shine in.”