The Casual Blog

Category: art

March 11, 2011

Artificial intelligence, vanishing legal jobs, and art

Is technology rendering humans obsolete? The answer is, as to some activities, yes. But could it help us better understand our true nature? It could.

Last week the NY Times reported that new computer programs were able to do legal review of electronic documents more accurately and much cheaper than human lawyers. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?scp=1&sq=computer%20legal%20document%20review&st=cse This is a milestone in technology, and one with big implications for the legal profession, and other professions, too.

In my professional capacity at Red Hat as a purchaser of legal services, I’m happy to consider using these money-saving tools. And having as a young lawyer spent hours doing dreary document review, I’m happy to think that humans may be able to hand such drudgery off to computers and do more stimulating things with themselves. But lots of law firms survive and thrive by selling document review services. Automating such work will cause painful dislocations, as many legal jobs go down the tubes.

It’s strange to think of part of lawyering going the way of the gas station attendant. As computer-driven technology replace partially or completely entire categories of work, such as huge swathes of manufacturing, educated professionals have assumed that they were immune. But that is clearly wrong. The triumph of Watson on Jeopardy a couple of weeks ago and the success of legal document review programs shows that more change is on the way.

This is somewhat frightening. But it also forces us to confront the interesting question of what we can usefully do, other than the logic-driven work that computers are now taking over. Since Peraclesian Athens, we’ve assumed that human reasoning was the crowning glory of creation, but we need to revisit that understanding of nature, and human nature.

A few months back I read The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner, which offers some interesting thinking on the inherent flaws in human rationality. Gardner focuses on how we systematically underestimate some risks, like the risk of highway accidents, and overestimate others, such as the risk of terrorism and violent crime. Our journalism establishment is heavily invested in promulgating scare stories on such subjects, and we seem in general to like such stories, or at least eat them up. Gardner discusses the psychological basis of this odd characteristic, and the possibility that with more quantitative analysis we could work around the problem. I’m in favor of more careful quantitative analysis of problems, but I doubt that will much affect how human minds work.

David Brooks wrote a surprisingly thoughtful (especially for a conservative) column in the Times this week about human nature. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08brooks.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage He posited that various kinds of scientists are coming to think of humans are fundamentally social, and that it’s a mistake to think of them as isolated individuals. He also emphasized that our unconscious, emotional capacities are more important than our reasoning. In other words, the way our minds work is mostly non-rational. We aren’t just poorly fashioned reasoning machines, but a different kind of being.

This is worth a lot more exploring. There are various things that humans do that are non-rational, but not unintelligent. Artistic activity is a prime example. When we sing or dance, we’re connecting to our selves and others in a way that is richly human. Telling stories in various media is a constant of our lives. These are things that we as a species are really good at, and we enjoy. They aren’t peripheral to our lives and culture — they’re central. Our computers may get at making art, but they can’t replace us in those activities, because we realize ourselves in them.

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December 12, 2010

A note on corporations and on a Porsche museum

Last week the Red Hat senior management team met for two days in Raleigh. We’re an international company with management that’s widely distributed, and so there were a few team members that I had not met before, and others I got to know better. They were for the most part lively and interesting.

So what is a corporation? In our meetings we spent some time discussing public ownership and shareholder value. But the profit motive is generic. Just as every human has to eat, every corporation has to make money. There are many ways to do those things. There are also many attitudes and activities that make a corporation, or a person, distinctive. The reason the workers get excited about coming to work (if they do) is something other than the excitement of enriching investors.

Red Hat has a lot of people who are passionate about their work, in part because of the exciting technological challenges, and in part because of a set of widely shared values. Our open source products grow out of values and customs that include transparency and collaboration. This is one of the things about the company that I find distinctive and inspiring, but it also presents challenges. In acting as an attorney, there are obvious limits to transparency, because attorneys must take account of and honor competing values, including confidentiality. There’s a built in tension in the value sets that’s challenging.

A special treat of the meeting was dinner at the Ingram collection in downtown in Durham. It’s a semi-secret institution that turned out to be a proper museum devoted to my favorite automobile, the Porsche. It had some 35 vintage and rare Porsches along with a couple of stray but also gorgeous new Ferraris. The Porsches included several historic 356’s, many variations of the 911 (though they didn’t have anything to line up with my particular 911s (Clara)) a Carrera GT supercar and a recent GT3. Some of the examples took years to obtain. They were all lovingly restored and displayed. One could trace the stylistic touches through the years that connected the designs organically, like DNA.

The Ingram collection could be viewed as conspicuous consumption that takes the category to a whole new level of wretched excess. But it felt more like the Rodin sculptures at the NC Museum, or the Frick collection in NYC. Frick’s former house, a mansion facing Central Park, contains a collection of old master and Impressionist art that is pound for pound one of the best in the world. I presume, without having studied the issue, that Mr. Frick was a robber baron with the worst of them. But whatever his personal failings, his collecting became itself a creative act. And so has Mr. Ingram created a sort of collective work.

It was interesting that the collection not only discourages photographs, but goes so far as to impound cameras from its guests. I can understand the need to be security conscious, but I wondered if anything else was going on. It did occur to me that if class warfare ever breaks out, the mobs with pitchforks might show up in a state of dangerously high excitement. But they might settle for a Porsche.

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December 5, 2010

Winter’s Bone, a beautiful, powerful meth movie

Some years back I developed the view that the age of written fiction was almost over and being replaced by the age of cinema fiction. Would people continue to take on the hard work of reading a book if they could have same experience without so much effort? The experiences aren’t perfect substitutes, of course, but there’s overlap. I’m not so worried now about written fiction, which is diminished as a cultural force but still around. But it does worry me that cinema seems less vital and ambitious in recent times. Could the age of cinema be ending? What comes next? The age of YouTube? At any rate, I haven’t been tempted to go out to many movies this year, and haven’t seen many new ones that I really cared about on the small screen.

Winter’s Bone is a notable exception. We saw it on DVD Friday night, and it was great. The subject matter didn’t sound particularly promising — hardscrabble life in rural Missouri — but the movie manages to combine gritty realism with a dreamlike quality. Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is an understated tour de force. She plays Ree, a 17-year-old whose father has disappeared, whose mother has advanced dementia, and whose younger brother and sister are completely dependent on her. Then she is informed that their cabin will be foreclosed on because her father jumped bail, and sets out to find him.

The land and culture reminded me of my own ancestral roots in southern Appalachia. Just as in southwestern Virginia, along with the poverty, there were aspects of the Ozarks countryside that were beautiful and touching. The scene where working people gathered in a home to make traditional music with guitars, fiddle and banjo reminded me of sounds I heard in bits and pieces as a child when we visited grandparents. The music reaffirmed that the possibility of community still exists.

But a central part of the story of Winter’s Bone is about the breakdown of community and the tragic social effects of methamphetamine. Ree’s father was a cooker, and everyone connected with him is also connected directly or indirectly to the meth business. Most of them are angry, paranoid, depressed, violent people. Their family lives are unhappy, and their communities are fractured. But they have not lost all dignity.

The depiction of meth culture seemed realistic and unsensational, and consistent with a book I read a few months back, Nick Reding’s Methland, a non-fiction account of the effects of meth in small town America. Reding makes the case that meth has devastated parts of rural and small town America. He does a good job tying together the sociology with the biology, history, and economics, and tells some good, and sad, stories. Although the successive waves of official and popular drug scare stories (such as the dangers of marijuana, which never killed anyone) might make one skeptical that meth is exceptionally dangerous, Reding has evidence that it is, both to individual addicts and to communities.

Winter’s Bone tends to confirm that view, but it isn’t making an argument. It’s like other great fiction, in that it reveals a side of life that we couldn’t learn about through any other medium, and one that changes, at least a little, how we look at the world around us.

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December 1, 2010

Thanksgiving in New York

There’s just something electric about New York City! Flying in last Wednesday, I passed close to the Statue of Liberty. Liberty! Then the splendid dense verticality lower Manhattan, and the gleaming skyscraping icons of midtown. It’s Oz!

The original plan for the Tiller clan to meet up for an urban Thanksgiving got off to a rocky start because Stuart, our dog, appeared to be dying. He threw up all over the apartment for a couple of days, and then spent several days in the animal hospital unable to eat. Exploratory abdominal surgery failed to yield a clear diagnosis, but made him weaker still. The day before we were scheduled to leave for NYC, Sally declared she couldn’t stand the thought of his being miserable and alone at the end. He’d been a beloved friend to us for eight years. So she decided to bring him home for hospice care. She urged me to proceed with the plan to meet the kids, who were already there, and so I headed north, with mixed feelings. (P.S. Stuart started improving the day after Sally brought him home and is still with us, frail but looking perkier every day.)

Wednesday afternoon I rendezvoused with Gabe and Jocelyn at the Hotel @ Times Square, a modestly priced (by NYC standards) but clean establishment at a great midtown location. Jocelyn was just back from two months backpacking in Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru, and I was delighted and relieved to see her. Not a day went by during her trip when I didn’t worry about her being kidnapped or worse. She seemed very chipper and glad to be back to the land of flush toilets and hot showers. Gabe came in from Colorado looking handsome, hale and hearty.

I was so glad to see them, and so glad to be back in NYC! When I lived there in my twenties, I could ordinarily not afford taxis, and it was satisfying to take many cab rides with the kids to share some of my favorite places. We went to the Metropolitan Museum and I introduced them to some of my favorite paintings, including the Vermeers. We checked out the amazing holiday windows in the shops on Fifth Avenue, and maneuvered through the mobs of people at Times Square.

On Thanksgiving morning, we’d planned to go to the Macy’s parade, which was passing just a block and a half to the west, but Jocelyn’s left eye was hurting badly, possibly from an infection. We watched a couple of big balloons (including Horton) go by, and then we went looking for medical care. With my iPhone I located an urgent care clinic close by, but it was closed, and the next one we tried was closed as well. We ended up in the emergency room of NYU Bellevue. I expected an endless wait, but it was not so bad. They got us in and out in a couple of hours, and Jocelyn started to feel better soon after.

For Thanksgiving dinner, we went to the upper west side and shared a fine meal with Sally’s brother Bill, his wife Mary Jane, and their daughter Carmen. Everyone was in high spirits, and I was most grateful that they provided delicious non-meat food. Bill was eager to hear more of Jocelyn’s South American journey, and she had some good stories of jungle adventures with snakes and spiders and marathon bus rides. Carmen, now thirteen, seemed amazingly grown up and well spoken. She’d just applied to an arts high school for both acting and piano performance, and played her audition piece, a Haydn sonata.

On Friday, we got a personal tour of the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and ate lunch in Chinatown. Late that afternoon, Gabe and I went to the Museum of Modern Art. Gabe was interested in Picasso and Van Gogh, and I never get tired of them. I also spent some time with the J. Pollocks. The big big drip painting finally clicked for me (goose bumps). We met Jocelyn and her friend Pam at a little Italian restaurant on the east side. Pam is an art world person and aspiring critic, and amazingly articulate, warm, and friendly. Gabe mentioned Andy Warhol, and it turned out Pam had some dense but fascinating ideas about him.

On Saturday afternoon, I took the kids to their first live opera at the Met, where we saw Carmen with Elina Garanca in the title role. She was smoking hot! Everything was truly wonderful — singing, sets, costumes, orchestra. And the story is still a bloody shocker. I was a little worried beforehand that the kids might not like it, which, especially in view of the ticket prices, would have been a bummer, but was not — they enjoyed it.

Gabe and Jocelyn had an early flight to Colorado on Sunday, so I was on my own for the last day. I went back to the Met in the morning and spent some time with the Greek and Roman antiquities, looked in on an exhibit of the work of Jan Gossart (Dutch Renaissance), and looked in again at the beloved Vermeers. Then I went to Lincoln Center to see the City Ballet’s Nutcracker.

After many Nutcrackers, I thought I was pretty much nutcrackered out for life, but it turned out not. Somehow it hit the sweet spot of pure joy and wonder. The dancing was delightful, the stagecraft was impressive, and the orchestra sounded great. The child dancers had more-than-usual charisma. Jennifer Ringer as the Sugarplum Fairy seemed a little flat at first, but was gorgeous in the pas de deux. Ashley Bouder was an exquisite Dew Drop. A few weeks earlier I’d ordered a piano version of the Tchaikovsky score and played through parts of it for fun, so I was particularly attentive to the music. It is a masterpiece.

After the ballet, I took a cab to 46th and 12th and visited the aircraft carrier Intrepid, the submarine Growler, and the Concorde. Impressive machines! The Intrepid is a proud veteran of WWII that played a significant role in the Pacific theater and survived some kamikaze hits. The sun was setting at the end of my tour, and the view of Manhattan was beautiful.

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November 14, 2010

Accessing a delightful comic opera

On Saturday I went to my first live opera in a movie theatre: Don Pasquale, transmitted live in HD from the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center to Raleigh’s North Hills Shopping Center (among hundreds of other theatres around the globe). When I lived in New York, I sometimes bought the best tickets I could afford for the Met, which were for standing room. There were always people who left after act one, so it was usually possible to get a good orchestra seat for the rest of the show. And so I learned that the Met is a magical place, with some of the most incredible singing on the planet, and also some of the most astonishing stagecraft. It was great to be back.

I put my interest in opera on the back burner after leaving New York for law school, and with the normal pressures of career and parenthood it fell off the priority list. I’ve come back to it recently with fresh enthusiasm. Part of the reason was my passion for the piano music of Chopin. He enjoyed what we know as the bel canto repertory (Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini), and I started listening to that music to better understand his musical thinking. It’s a kind of time travel, a visit to another culture that’s both submerged and still alive. A lot of bel canto music is not particularly deep, but it is charming and at times brilliant.

Sally took her tennis team to the state finals in Winston-Salem this week, and so was not able to go to Don Pasquale. Diane, Sally’s mom, is a big opera buff, and we went to the show together. I sent an email to the Red Hat local employees’ list offering her ticket for free, and Roger H. accepted. I had not reckoned on how difficult it would be to find parking at North Hills, and we ended up running late. Roger came to the rescue. As we circled the parking lot, he called my cell, and said he was saving good seats for us.

James Levine conducted. The camera faced him as he did the overture. He was very expressive, at times smiling, at times heroic, and full of enthusiasm. He’s had many health problems recently, and I felt privileged to see him, especially in this revealing aspect. He’s a national treasure.

Don Pasquale, which was new to me and to others I talked to, is the 64th of Donizetti’s 66 operas, first produced in 1843 (when Chopin was 33). It’s a comedy that concerns young lovers’ efforts to overcome the aged don, who fancies himself a young lover, and unite. The plot is not especially intricate or elegant, but the main characters are funny and lively, and the music is a masterpiece of the tuneful bel canto genre. Anna Netrebko was fabulous as Norina — flirtatious and sexy, even if she had put on a few pounds, and with an amazingly powerful and flexible voice. Barry Banks was Ernesto, her lover, and though his character was less interesting, his singing was very musical. John Del Carlo was hilarious as the Don. The photography was skillful, with varied angles and close-ups, and the sound quality was good. There were English subtitles. The music was delightful throughout.

Between scenes, the broadcast showed the work backstage on scene changes. I love backstage views, and getting a close up of how the magic works at this state-of-the-art theatre was fascinating. There were also good-natured interviews by Susan Graham with the principals. We also had a chance to get to know Roger, who grew up in Hong Kong, and briefed us on the music scene there. He said he really enjoyed the show.

Opera is an acquired taste. Once acquired, it’s incredibly enjoyable, but initially, it can seem mannered, strange, or boring. The audience for opera has always been limited, partly because it’s been so difficult to try it out and get accustomed to its conventions. It’s wonderful that the Met is using HD simulcasts of high quality to multiply by orders of magnitude the opportunities to experience this great art. I expect there will be many who try it and like it. I’m looking forward to seeing many more.

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October 3, 2010

Young lives lost, and a note on homophobia

One of the things I like about my morning newspaper is the obituaries. I paid no attention to them in my younger days, and thought it odd that older people read them. Then, somehow, I got older, and became sort of a fan. Many are pro forma statements, but as a group, they give some clues as to how people manage grief. Every now and again, there is an account of someone who apparently lived a life that enriched the lives of those surviving, and those cheer me up.

But the obits I tend to focus on are those involving young people. Old people are supposed to die eventually, but not young people, so there’s always an element of tragedy. Every now and again, I get a sobering dose of pain, as when a death looks like it could have been a child of my own. There was one such this week — a young woman named Grace White from Cary (like use, until recently), who’d just graduated from N.C. State (like my dear Jocelyn), worked in Hemlock Bluffs Nature Center (where I’ve been many times), who died in a wakeboarding accident on Harris Lake. Apparently she hit her head hard in a fall and had a fatal brain injury. Her dad is speaking out on the dangers of wakeboarding without a helmet. I am so very sorry for his loss.

This week the suicide of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old violinist at Rutgers University, became a national story that also seemed close to home. Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson after his roommate posted a video on the internet of him kissing another male. Much of the commentary has focussed on the effects of bullying and the power of the web. But the story is surely in part about homophobia. The reluctance of the mainstream press to treat this aspect of tragedy directly is dispiriting.

I keep thinking we may have turned the corner on homophobia, but Clementi’s death is a reminder that it’s alive and well. The resistance to gay marriage has weakened, but a major segment of the population is still fearful of gays, and there are still politicians (including gay ones) who exploit this fear. One of the hardy perennial fear narratives is conflating gay sex between consenting adults with deviants who prey on children. I think such myths are gradually losing their power as more people realize that gays are normal people with normal ethics who pose no special threat. Everyone knows and gets along with gay people, whether they know it or not. But there are still minds that need to be changed. The Clementi tragedy reminds us that this is an urgent matter, because some lives are at risk.

One aspect of the story that made it more personal for me was the fact that Clementi apparently was a talented music student. In my time as music student at N.C. School of the Arts and Oberlin Conservatory, I knew many gay students, and came to understand that gays are major contributors to our artistic life. Just as gay friends have enriched my life, gays have made our society richer.

I have a theory as to why gays are so important in the arts. Artistic expression involves emotional exposure that runs counter to male stereotypes. Stereotypical American males don’t say much about their inner feelings. Art goes against this grain, since it involves exposing feelings. You don’t have to be gay to be an artist, and plainly being gay will not make you an artist. But the willingness to reject stereotypes is something gays almost have to have, and that type of courage is helpful for an artist.

I’d guess that Clementi had not worked through and accepted his sexuality, and so he was probably particularly vulnerable to cruel homophobic gibes. That sort of behavior, and homophobic thinking, has got to stop. It could help to speak up on the issue, and invite others to examine their prejudices. I’ll say it, though it probably rules out any chance of elected office: gays are good for our society. Or to put it in bumperstickerese: gay is good.

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August 29, 2010

Ebooks and charity ideas

This week I went to Dallas and back twice. I will not complain, except to note that long periods confined in small seats do not get easier as the hours pass. I sat next to a fifteen year old kid on the way back, who, by the end of the flight, was writhing in discomfort, and I remembered how this was even tougher when I was younger.

I spent some of the seat time reading my first ebooks on my iPad. As a confirmed bibliophile, I doubted I would really like ebooks, but my compulsion to have handy several books when I travel has created problems with weight limits, and pushed me towards trying this lightweight solution. Using the Kindle software, it took me just a few minutes to fall in love with the format. I like the typeface and type size, the ability to highlight and annotate, and the light weight.

My first ebook was Against Intellectual Monopoly, by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, an against-the-grain discussion of the problems with our patent and copyright systems. I was gratified to see a discussion of Red Hat as a primary example of why patents don’t achieve anything close to their intended purpose in the software area.

It’s interesting how ideas can seem particularly interesting during cross-country flights, and how frequently new ones pop up. I found myself thinking about an NPR story from last week about individuals who commission new pieces of music or plays. The point of the story was that the cost could be shared with others and spread over time, so that being a patron and bringing a new piece of art into the world could be more affordable than you’d think.

I really liked the idea of contributing in a direct and immediate way to new art. If I can’t be a composer, perhaps I could help in the creation of music by funding one. So, how about a web site to allow composers, choreographers, or others to propose commission-worthy projects, and donors likewise to seek suitable artists? Sort of an arts-funding Craigslist. Sure, it could be there’s just not sufficient interest, but then, not so long ago Craigslist sounded like a fantasy.

The web today is a big part of my life, and of the lives of most people I know. In almost no time it’s gone from a novelty to a utility, and now I take it for granted much like the interstate highway system. Yet we may have just begun to scratch the surface of what it can do — things that go way beyond shopping and entertainment. Facebook and Twitter haven’t really inspired me, but they point in the direction of more immediate and wide-ranging connections that have more human meaning. It could reduce the barriers to charitable giving by making needs and resources easier to see and connect.

For example, it’s hard for me to visualize the enormous suffering from the current flooding in Pakistan, and hard to feel like there’s much I can personally do about it. But if I could connect with a person who’s lost everything and understand their story using web multimedia, it could help me, and I suspect others to open their hearts and wallets. People who’ve lost everything can’t easily get online, of course, but the tools that could get them there already exist. It would take some thought and energy. This could be an open source project.

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August 19, 2010

Robert Frost and my new iPad

I’ve finally managed to memorize The Wood Pile, by Robert Frost. http://tiny.cc/zlasu It’s a strange, bleak poem, about walking through a frozen swamp and not seeing very much, except snow, trees, a bird and a decaying wood pile. Just as the narrator doesn’t really know why he keeps walking deeper into a frozen swamp, I’m hard put to explain why I went to the considerable trouble of memorizing this poem. It’s difficult to picture an ordinary situation in which anyone would voluntarily listen to a recitation with pleasure. But memorizing it entailed many many readings with close examination of every word, and through that process the poem gradually revealed a stark startling beauty.

At the end of the poem, the narrator wonders at the isolated decaying wood pile, and remarks that the person who made it must be “someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks” so as to “forget his handiwork on which he spent himself, the labor of his ax.” It may be that the laboriously created, carefully measured, woodpile is one of Frost’s poems, and that Frost is pointing up the minor tragedy of art that fails to reach its audience. He also seems to be saying that remembering can be harder than creating. It isn’t hard to see that we all constantly live in eagerly turning to fresh tasks and also, without realizing it, forgetting other valuable things.

Yesterday I turned to the fresh task of learning how to work my new iPad. It is a very pleasing little device both in form and function — light, sleek, quick, uncomplicated, but sophisticated. I got it mainly to use as a reader and a web surfer, though it may turn out that other functions, like the video viewer or some game, will turn out to be useful to me. To get started, I put some of my favorite poetry on the Kindle reader, including W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Frost, thinking it would be a comfort to have them along in my travels. I also felt it would be worthwhile to always have handy some Proust, and downloaded Swann’s Way.

Within a few minutes I’d figured out how to make the Kindle reader application do some interesting things, like go to the table of contents, jump to a given page, highlight text, make a note on the text, and change the typeface of the work. This was mainly a matter of touching the screen in various ways, some of which were not immediately obvious. Experimenting with it was fun.

It’s remarkable how learning how to work new devices (sometimes hardware, but most often software) is now a constant feature of modern high tech life. In days gone by, a new device might come into my life every few months, but now it’s more like every few hours. The concept of the iPhone, and probably the iPad, includes encouraging the constant addition of more and more apps. Each app has at least a small learning curve, which consumes some amount of human energy.

Other than causing fatigue, do the apps do anything? The best thing they do is speed up information gathering. Whether the subject is world politics, scientific research, movies, or restaurants, it’s possible to get information faster. This could lead to better decisions. The problem is that our brains can only go so fast and only hold so much. Like John Henry racing to put down rails against the steam hammer, we can’t possibly keep up with the pace of our powerful computers.

So we have to figure out when to say, basta! On any given day, we have to be careful about turning to too many fresh tasks and forgetting what is really valuable. We have to quit downloading apps all the time and read something beautiful and profound, like Frost or Proust. Small, slow, and error-prone as our brains are, we need to protect and care for them and nourish them well.

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August 7, 2010

First Friday

Last night was First Friday, Raleigh’s monthly celebration of its downtown food, music, and art scene.  Despite the heat wave, thousands of people were out.  At Moore Square, there was a two-girl circus act in which one lay on her back, legs raised,  and the other got on top and balanced in various ways with a big smile.  In City Market, there was an oldies rock band, and the listeners were mostly middle-aged.  But at Art Space, there was a thick crowd of twenty-somethings, many with unsettling tattoos.

Sally and I had dinner at Gravy, which features reliable Italian comfort food in a hip brick-walled and oak package.  Among other things, we talked about the problem that large food portions served in most restaurants pose for American eaters.  Partly because of too many business meals recently, I’d again picked up three pounds I didn’t want to carry about. This inspired my latest eating experiment:  cutting off about a third of my food before beginning to eat, and leaving that third on the plate at the end.  The eggplant pie (thin breaded eggplant with marinara and ricotta) was really tasty, but more than I needed, and I’m sure I’d have eaten it all if I hadn’t established a visible stopping place.

I was taught as a child not to leave food on my plate, which was supported with the moral note that children were starving in Africa.  It did not occur to me until much later that the tragedy of starving children was not going to be mitigated by over-eating, which would itself cause obesity, illness, and premature death.  But changing those early ingrained eating habits requires more than recognizing their lack of justification; you have to replace them with other, better, habits.  We’ll see if this cut-a-third system works.

After dinner we looked in some galleries and then strolled back to our neighborhood.  We stopped at Second Empire and had cocktails in their classic bar.  It turns out that stop lights that are mistimed and clog traffic are one of Sally’s pet peeves, and we discussed them for a while.  We got back to our building around eleven.  Just a few steps from our door, in front of the Still Life club, there was a lively scene, with girls with high heels, long legs, and very short black dresses coming or going.  Sally noted as she took Stuart out for his last pee of the day that she wanted to have another look at those dresses.

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July 24, 2010

A ballet dress rehearsal

As part of our contribution to the Carolina Ballet, we’re sponsoring the pointe shoes of one of the dancers.  Ballet is not ballet without pointe shoes, and professional dancers go through them so quickly that they become a major budget item.  The ballerina we’re sponsoring, Lola Cooper, invited us to a dress rehearsal last Thursday for a program where she had a significant solo.

It turned out that Sally and I were the only non-company people there.  The rehearsal was in Fletcher, a small but elegant hall, where we had the best seats in the house.  It’s rare to see performers in the state of being in between simple practice and performance.  From my high school days at the N.C. School of the Arts, I was familiar with the basic ideas, but it was interesting to see how these artists used the precious time when the show is imminent.  The dancers at times left off steps and did simple blocking, getting a feel for the surface and space of the stage, the lights, and their costumes.  Ricky Weiss shouted a few specific directions during the run throughs, and after each piece went on stage to discuss refinements.

While we waited for Lola’s piece, we talked with our friend Ginny about other dancers struggling to succeed as artists and to get by.  For those just starting out, the wages are tiny, and for the more experienced, they are low.  There’s a huge disconnect between the inherent value of the artistry of these professionals, the amount of physical and emotional effort required for their art, and the economic rewards.  It’s depressing that their brilliant work is priced at a fraction of that of, say, professional baseball or football players (or doctors, accountants, or lawyers).   For those of us who care about ballet, it’s a reminder that we are a struggling minority, while the majority places little value on the art.

At the same time, the disconnect is a reminder that money is far from the only reason for work.  Artists almost by definition are pursuing something outside the realm of the senses, something beyond the everyday.  They explore these other realms and share with the rest of us their discoveries.  These deeper levels of feeling and meaning have no well-developed markets — there’s no effective system of pricing them in dollars.  But humans have engaged in this type of artistic commerce for thousands of years, and they keep on doing it.  This is an admirable characteristic of the species, and a cheering fact.  This does not, however, mean we shouldn’t worry about getting our dancers a living wage.  It’s in our best interest that they be well nourished, well clothed, in safe quarters,with reliable transportation, and with enough left over to have some fun.  Happy, healthy dancers are good for us.

At the rehearsal, Ricky introduced us to his wife and prima ballerina Melissa Podcasy, and  I felt really honored.  I’ve been very moved by so many of her great performances over the years (among others, Juliet, Carmen, the wife in the Kreutzer Sonata, the woman who yearns in Carmina Burana).  We talked a bit about our cats.  At the pauses, she worked with the performers.

Lola’s piece, from Balanchine’s Raymonda, was last.  She came out of the gate very strong.  Her jumps were big, and she had great quickness and speed.  Her solo was long and arduous, and after several minutes the strain was showing.  We talked for a few minutes afterward, when she was still breathing hard, and she was thinking about improvements.  She’ll be great.

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