Technically Responsible

Many years ago my wife and I had dinner with a friend of mine, who is a very talented theatre director, and performer. His work was inspiring to me, and I would generally see anything he did. I must admit though, as with my free jazz performances, his style of experimental theatre did not attract very large audiences. He made a statement to us, which at the time I thought rather pretentious. He said that he did not care if there was an audience at all. He would do his performance every night in an empty theatre if he had to, and still feel the same power and importance for creating a unique art. He felt no responsibility to an audience, only to himself. I would later find that many great and even successful artists's, whether it was Miles Davis, or Ingmar Bergman cared little about the audience. In both of those cases the audiences came anyway, as they should have, because the art was so special. For those of us whose art does not appeal to large groups however, we can still continue to perform. The idea of responsibility to an audience is actually a huge distraction for the most part, as we may very well choose quantity over quality. In the arts we also need to be honest with ourselves, especially if we play free jazz or do experimental theatre. No matter whether we have a relatively big audience or not, it doesn't make such a difference. Either the product will live on, or not, but the moment is fleeting. It is also not exactly perfect to speak about responsibility to an audience, as even a bad performance won't be genocide, a famine, a world war or even a hangover. It will just be an unpleasant hour or two in a theatre. While this may be true in the arts, as a scientist, or a technologist there is much more at stake.

Many mornings when I am going to work I listen to Podcasts from the Stanford Literature Professor Robert Harrison called "Entitled Opinions". I highly recommend this podcast, as it is both entertaining and educational. Also for those of you that work in Academic Science or Technology it will be a huge change for you, as it was for me. Dr. Harrison is a classicist, and literary intellect, who while respecting and even hosting scientists from time to time, can be critical of modern society's manic drive to innovate, without particular attention to long term consequences. Though this may seem obvious, it is far from it for those of us who read and respect some of history's great scientific discoveries. I have often repeated a famous quote by Richard Feynman, who in addition to being a Nobel Laureate Physicist also worked on the Atomic bomb for the Manhattan Project. This is what Feynman said:

"scientific technology improves production, but we have trouble with automation. It brings about advances in medicine, but then we worry about the number of births and the fact that no one dies from the diseases we have eliminated. It produces rapid air transportation, but it also makes possible the severe horrors of air war. In a sense, science is like a key that can open the gates to heaven or hell. Which portal the key unlocks depends on the humans who employ it."

Often I and many other scientists working on theories or in labs even tend to use this as an excuse. In fact I am so convinced that this is a good statement that I think it is expressing something almost necessary in our evolution as a species. It is a desire to understand the universe of the large and small, and the mechanisms by which it functions. In doing that we uncover new ways to extend our lives, such as medicine, bio-engineering and even more futuristic notions such as neuro-regeneration and the downloadable brain. This seems to me to be what we must do. What Dr. Harrison and his guests put in perceptive for me is that we cannot pursue science and technology in intellectual isolation. Isolation has several relevant meaning here. Often when working on complex equations or experiments we physically and politically isolate ourselves, almost out of necessity. It is just too hard to lose focus. Maybe more importantly we isolate ourselves philosophically. I have written in this blog before of a convergence of art, science and philosophy, and how our specialized Academic world can limit our experience, and even hold back progress in the fields we work in. What I think of more now however is how working without recognition and understanding of philosophy can be dangerous, and counterproductive to human progress. Certainly the bomb is an obvious one. It was hard working, brilliant scientists' pursuing an idea which could lead to destruction. But what about the seemingly smaller efforts we make? For example, what about the impact of a new material, not only on our environment but on our interaction with nature and other people? My French father in law and I have had many arguments about progress. He is an extremely educated polymath, who worked as an engineer, but is equally proficient in quoting Victor Hugo, and Chateaubriand by memory at the dinner table. With all of this knowledge, as well as the fact that he has used computers since computers were becoming personal, he has always told me that society should be conscious of the "arbre de connaissance". For many years I thought that his idea was anti-democratic. The free flow of information and the ability for everyone to participate through the internet is one of the luckiest benefits of being alive in the 21rst century. But he is right. Without thought of consequence, knowledge alone is not progress. Advances in science and technology require responsibility. The reason this is truer now than ever, is that not just academics are using and creating sophisticated technologies. Nearly everyone is a technologist, no matter what field they work in. Still, with these new technologies, and our constant innovation we have the same human struggles we have always had. We face our own mortality. Unlike Epicurus, and other great philosophers though, we tend to not address that mortality metaphysically, but rather physically or religiously. For the non religious, like me, we try to conquer death through invention. Reading great literature or philosophy though, puts us back in the same boat as all humans in recorded history. Suddenly we realize that we must continue to innovate, but if we do so only with tools and not the mind we will be alone. We must think of technology as a responsibility. We are no longer playing to ourselves in an empty theatre, even if it feels like it.

    

Embracing Abstraction

Mathematics and philosophy have come together and separated countless times in Western civilization. It seems to me that they diverged in one of the strongest ways just over 100 years ago when Einstein published his great works on special relativity, the photoelectric effect and quantum mechanics. Suddenly science and mathematics seemed to encompass such an important and large part of the imagination that philosophy was relegated to dealing primarily with human suffering and existential dread. Both of these are important, but they are limited to human consciousness, while physics was not just reaching towards far away galaxies, but also inwards. It was analyzing time in new ways and exploring the invisible, but real worlds of atoms and molecules. This was the unofficial debut of the theoretical scientist as the stars of logic. The idea of theory to an artist and philosopher is one of ideas. To a scientists theory is mathematics. Theoretical physicists use mathematics to model the universe. To extrapolate our experience beyond our vision.

Recently my wife Marine was explaining Montessori education to me, and the systems that are used for teaching mathematics. Though I am now deeply interested in this, I still don’t know much at all. The main point was that children will learn numbers as a physical reality in small quantities. They can then extrapolate the concept for larger values. Only after this do they learn the symbols, which are written numbers. Though this is a digression from my point, it is what got me thinking about abstraction and science for this blog.

A scientist derives, proves and calculates in order to represent reality in a precise way. What the artist and theoretical scientist have in common in this regard is that both pursuits exist only with a strong ability to abstract. Physics which is the study of nature is not explored by the theoretician in a manner of direct observation, but by manipulation of matrices and formulae.

Abstraction may be a unique human ability which makes the creation of technologies, sculptures, space ships and books possible. It is also likely connected to our desire to distance ourselves from real nature by abstracting it further and further into our models. Goethe, the great poet, famous for words, which are abstractions en par with numbers, pushed back from Newtonian reductionism in favor of a more observation based science of Optics. In most ways Goethe’s scientific ideas were wrong. Newton describes nature in a much more accurate way; the question which remains however is who saw it (as opposed to describe it) more accurately? I believe what the Physicist Richard Feynman said to an artist friend who complained to Feynman that scientists take away the beauty of a yellow flower by reducing it to its scientific components. Feynman said that because he understands why a flower is yellow he appreciates it more. Feynman was unique in his ability to see nature on a deeper level esthetically and realistically while representing it with numbers and diagrams. This is the human intellectual evolution where we can congregate to abstract, but not without first observing. A child may not be able to calculate 1,000,000, but because she understands how to get from 1 to 10, from both observing and abstracting, she can comprehend the concept of 1,000,000. This is what Marine explained to me. As scientists we need perhaps to intuitively understand those things we can see, create numerical abstractions, then extrapolate. With that the theoretician, artist and philosopher can meet on common ground.

Was Wilbur a Rheologist?

Sometimes I stay up late at night and read, watch sci-fi television or write these blogs. Of course in the blogs sometimes my exhaustion shows, as I make rather strange connections between the science I am working on and art. This is all to say that though this one may involve the most farfetched of analogies, I am perfectly awake, and at least as sane as I usually am. Since I am up late some nights, it is especially difficult to wake up early when my little girl does. Many times my wife gets up with her, but other times I do. I find that coffee is slow in getting me going, and since my little girl wants to play, I find things that will get us both moving, and that we both like. My wife put the kibosh on gansta rap music, which had become a nice ritual, when my daughter started saying that “it’s all about the Benjamins baby”, and “It’s hard out here for a Pimp”, at family dinners. So I turned to another source of funny entertainment from my childhood, the 1960’s television series, Mr. Ed., which I had watched in reruns, while home sick from grammar school. Thanks to You Tube I can now share the miraculous talking, brilliant, hilarious horse with my 4 year old daughter, who now even translates “a Horse is a Horse of course of course” to French. I guess that the show was a hit in those days, because it was so damn funny, but also because people could relate to both the horse Mr. Ed., who due to the unfortunate act of birth was born a horse with an IQ and vocal abilities that combined Albert Einstein and Frank Sinatra, and Wilbur, who had such a brilliant friend, but because this friend lived in the stables, could not share the companionship with anyone. Perhaps we all feel lonely like this sometimes, and that either ourselves, or the people (or animals) we love are misunderstood. Mr. Ed. reads every newspaper that Wilbur brings to him, and he has an excellent analytical mind. In one episode for instance he figures out the problem in the Dodgers line up, and has Wilbur write to Dodgers management. The solution clears up the whole problem, and the Dodgers go on to winning a pennant, in addition to getting great publicity with pictures of a horse sliding into home base taken when Wilbur brings Mr. Ed. to the field. What didn’t occur to me, though it must seem obvious to anyone who thinks about it outside the isolation of Nickelodeon Syndication, is that Wilbur most likely has a severe case of schizophrenia. Though we mostly think of people with this disease as homeless, and in many cases dangerous, it is a rather common disease, and it is not unlikely that upper middle class Californians like Wilbur are visiting the barn for a night cap with a thoroughbred. So suddenly this old sitcom became all the more personal to me, as I have related to Wilbur and Ed since 1980i. I started thinking about my days, and whether I am either farm animal living amonst creatures who don’t speak my language, or a bourgeois business man whose intellectual equals eat hay while standing on all fours. It is probably not so uncommon that I am thinking in these terms, as I am living in France, where my French is not so good. I have conversations in a language, where I might as well be saying neigh half of the time. Still there is something more to this. I also spend the majority of my day working in a small field of physics called Rheology. If you ask 99.9% of all Physicists in the world their opinion on rheological issues they will not know what you are talking about. Yet like most academic pursuits those of us who do spend a good amount of time considering issues relating rheology, we find it very interesting, compelling to the point of obsessiveness, and even extremely important. Though I assume everyone reading this must have a basic understanding of rheology (do I suffer from delusions?), it will sum it up to say that it is the study of complex flow of materials. Any materials that is, which to me seems like it is the study of nearly everything in the Universe. That is very a very broad philosophical interpretation of it though, as the truth is we have to study very specific properties, of very specific materials, which means that the universe as a whole rarely comes into focus. Still, I spent all week, and will spend many more working on this topic, with one, or at most two other people who are smarter, than, and at least as passionate as I am about this subject. This weekend I played with the family, and tomorrow I go back to the University (or is it the stable), and figure out how to analyze polymers in the fluid state, or is that win the pennant?


It may seem like I am saying that either I am a nut who can’t communicate with other people, like Wilbur, or a genius that no one understands, Like Mr. Ed. This is not really true in a directly analogous way. Wilbur and Mr. Ed. are cultural extremes. Wilbur is the most middle class normal married guy, and Mr. Ed is the most… well talking horse. Neither of these extremes exists in real life. What do exist are small enclaves in University science departments, art schools, back rooms of jazz clubs, and internet chat rooms. In these places everyone is working very hard at doing something they find important in some way, while struggling with to find a language that the rest of society can understand. We run up against a society where conformity now means not only having the best cocktail parties for the neighbors, but how many Facebook Friends you have, and Google hits occur when you type your name into the subject line. All of this pressure to speak and to be understood by the world as a whole however isn’t what our lives are really about. Really it is more like Wilbur and Mr. Ed, facing the world together and apart.

Why does France like the piano?

I have never given this much thought until the first night I was living in Paris. My wife, little girl and I went to Bistrot Amelot, almost across the street from our new 400 year-old apartment. We picked this restaurant because they had confit de canard and homemade sorbet but I soon noticed that it also had a 1920’s upright piano on the bar-side. When I asked about it, the waitress, who is also one of the owners, invited me to play it. This was incredible luck. I had found a regular place to play within 2 hours of moving to Paris.

So now that I have been in Paris for one month, I have made the Bistrot my own salon, where I play almost daily, take my daughter for snack and get to know my new neighbors. I could write an entire book, a kind of Damon Runyon of Le Marais tale of the regulars of the Bistrot but that will wait.

One aspect of conversation that always surprises me is how much the clientele love the piano. Everyone has a favorite piano player, piano style, piano composer, and even, in some cases, piano maker. The French pride which causes them to buy Renaults and Peugeots religiously also gives them an unquestioned loyalty to the Pleyel. This shouldn’t be a surprise to me when I think of French music history. Chopin, the most famous piano composer in history, though Polish-born, composed most of his important work in Paris. He was more than welcomed here along with Liszt, also lived in Paris. They were arguably the most sought after artists and social figures in Paris. Within one hundred year, Paris had Debussy and Satie, both innovators on the keyboard who are still respected, performed and taught throughout the world. Other examples are Messian in contemporary classical music and most recently the pianist Pierre Aimard who is so famous in the classical world that he played at the Cleveland Orchestra and Carnegie Hall in the same week.

So why do the French like the piano? I have an idea, which is so much a guess, that I am not even sure why I am bothering to write it. France has a long history of Salon life, especially in upper-class and artistic societies. This is not uniquely French, but it is famously French. Though it is hard to point to the beginning of this movement, we are certain that it is at least as old as the 17th century. I am currently writing this while looking at a house that once belonged to the writer Madame de Sévigné. She chronicled some of the most important Parisian salons, where along with food and gossip, music was served and respected.
By the time Chopin was living and composing in Paris, the salon was the primary place for musical entertainment, competition and experimentation. While Chopin didn’t much like public performances, he did thrive on salon playing. Often, Liszt would be in the same room and the two of them would replace each other at the keyboard to both try out new composition and to improvise on themes suggested by other guests. Witnesses from these salons say that the Chopin improvisations were more impressive even than the formal compositions. This continued throughout the 20th century. Even the famous art salon of Gertrude Stein had a Pleyel where both Satie and Stravinsky played while everyone from Proust to Picasso listened. Later in the 20th century, the presence of the salon and the piano were reduced in importance but some of the residual feelings remained. For one thing, the French tend to spend hours together at home, essentially around a meal. Even when a meal is finished, family and friends entertain and challenge each other with stories, jokes and even music. Some of my wife’s finest memories of childhood are late evenings falling asleep to her parents and family friends singing and playing instruments in the salon.

There is a big difference between salon music and concerts. It is of course more intimate, which may be why the French have a more personal connection with this type of music. It is hard to imagine a contemporary equivalent. It just doesn’t seem the same to have Béyoncé performing in our living rooms, though some of us wouldn’t mind.

Two nights ago, I was watching an amazing television show called “La boite à musique”. This program is 2 hours of classical and contemporary music with modern culture thrown in. There was a prodigious and creative jazz pianist, Yaron Herman who played on the show. Before the program had even ended, I had requested him as a Facebook friend and sent a message that I was also a pianist living in Paris. We are planning on soon meeting to play maybe at the Bistrot or maybe at a home. For me, this may be as close as I can come to the excitement of playing in a Parisian salon. It might also help provide more people with an introduction to the piano.

Adversely Creative

Ever since I have arrived in France two months ago, I have been increasingly impressed by the French appreciation of jazz, and of science. This is very encouraging for me, since neither of these things is particularly popular in the United States at the moment. There is so much truth in this that I am beginning to wonder why we still have some of the greatest innovation, and some of the best music coming out of the States. Quality of innovation is subjective, so any point I make is arguable. Still, while I don’t have any agenda as an American, I would like to figure this out as a professor and an improvisational musician. Like most positive things there seem to be an equal amount of negative. The negatives I am referring to may even be the cause of the creativity.
Last month the guitarist Les Paul died at the age of 94. My family and I had seen him perform twice just in the last 2 years, which was a pleasure from an entertainment and historical perspective, but I never really thought about it beyond the music. I of course knew that there was a Gibson guitar called the Les Paul, and that he must have somehow been involved with the development of this instrument. It was only when I heard a rebroadcast of 1992 interview of him, that I realized how much Les Paul himself straddled the worlds of artistic and technological innovation, and how much his contributions were in part due to the personal obstacles he overcame. Les Paul invented the process of multi tracking, for instance, in order to be able to continue a recording session even after his bass player left the room. He invented extended sustain and looping, because of the immobility in his hands due to extreme arthritis. With these techniques, he could play slower and less notes at the same time, while achieving a sound that was more complex than he was able to achieve when he had perfect fingers. Les Paul also told a story of a time when he was in his late 50’s and could not get a gig. He volunteered to play on Monday nights at Fat Tuesdays in New York, because the club was closed on Mondays. He even worked for door money alone. All of this is to say that his contributions came from adversity.
As I write this, there are protests all around the United States about the proposed health care bill which is being debated in congress. Regardless of what stance people take on this particular plan, there is one thing that seems very obvious from here in Paris. That is that the United States has adversity. There is a very small middle class. More babies are dying than in the rest of the western world (we are ranked 33rd in the world in infant mortality), and the country’s poor are living in fear of bankruptcy due to health care bills (over 60% of personal bankruptcies in 2008 were due to health related issues). Though France has its problems, access of health care is not even discussed here, as the problem has been essentially solved by a proven government run system. Like most things that we get used to, it is assumed that this is a universal status quo. Health care is just one example of this. When my daughter was 4 days old in Brooklyn, we took her to the pediatrician for her first check up. As any new parent knows, this is an anxious time, when you have no idea what you are doing. We waited in the lobby, and were not allowed to enter for the appointment because we had forgotten the health insurance card at home. We have health insurance. I can’t imagine how parents without manage. In France it is forbidden to even ask, before taking in a patient. Other examples of this are pregnancy leave which is 4 and 1/2 months in France (for the first child, more for subsequent children), and universal Pre-K, which starts at 2 ½ years old.
My French wife and friends will point out that France is not the Utopia that I make it out to be, and certainly they are right. I am new to France, and already I have seen how the famous French bureaucracy can lead to frustration, or apathy, while perhaps discouraging entrepreneurship. While this is no doubt true, it doesn’t address the lone talent, who has a vision for composing, painting, or even inventing. While government is a hassle and a help, the society in general is left healthier and more educated than in America.
So how these two stories relate, may answer some questions that could help us learn on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps America’s adversity, like adversity faced by Les Paul, has brought about innovation. Perhaps this feeling that Americans have a positive ambitious creativity is simply out of necessity. A kind of creative survival of the fittest. This is scary, as this will leave out most Americans. For those that do survive however, they may produce some great art and technology. This should not be good enough for us Americans. We should realize that not everyone needs to be a Les Paul, and that everyone does need to have health care. Here in France, the situation is reversed. While the French appreciate art and science, they need to take more risks. In a society that gives as much as France does, it becomes necessary for the artist and scientist to step back from the comfort of that, and recognize what personal shortcomings they may have despite the luck of being born here. When they do that more people will be able to see that their own immobility, like Les Paul’s, may be their greatest asset.

Reinventing the...?

One of the most clichéd pieces of advice given to someone who is starting a new business is “don’t reinvent the wheel”. This is so obviously true that it is not a very useful suggestion. While I don’t know much about wheels, I have worked with the tire industry for a long time, as a supplier and advisor to research and quality control labs. Tires are products that in the 21rst century we tend to not think of much. The reason we don’t think of them much however, is that even in recent years the tire has been reinvented. Billions of dollars are spent every year for research in order to make tires more efficient, cheaper, higher quality and more environmentally friendly. Much of this research has been successful, or at least in the process of succeeding, as most of us drive long distances without ever worrying about flat tires. At the same time, while better, there are still issues with tires, especially with the environmental impact of them. So research continues, and without most of us knowing, the tire will be reinvented.
Last night we went with friends to a Baroque concert which was a part of the Saintes festival near Cognac in France. The friends who invited us I respect very much for their taste in music, so despite the fact that it was very old music, in a very old Romanesque abbey, I looked forward to it. This old Church was completely packed, people having bought tickets over a year in advance. All of this was in a small town, to see and hear a lute player, and conter tenor perform songs of the 16th century. As soon as the concert started I forgot that what I was listening to was such an old creation. By the time the performance was over my immediate thought was “this was beautiful”. Why do we keep re-inventing the wheel by trying to create new music?” I don’t believe this of course, but I am know there are certainly many people who would still say the Bach achieved a perfection that has not been rivaled to this day.
I have spent much of my life in music in the same way I have with tire labs. I sometimes participate in a small way to improve things, and in most cases I happily and curiously observe others doing it. Music of course is subjective and creative in a way that industry is not. It will always be disputable whether John Cage is as important of a figure as Schoenberg, or Beethoven as Mozart. Still, when I listened to the Baroque performance I realized that the change is much more subtle, especially consider the hundreds of years that separate the music I was hearing from the music we now create, that I do think reinvention happens not as a grand revolution, but quietly in the labs of composers.

Naked

When I was 23 years old, which was quite a long time ago, I spent a few weeks alone in Paris, at a friend’s apartment in Le Marais. I spoke no French, and my soon to be wife Marine was running a summer camp in the country in the south of France. Looking back this was a unique time which couldn’t happen now. We didn’t have cell phones, so we only spoke when we both could get to pay phones at the same time. This was complicated, but it gave me an enormous amount of freedom to explore the city, and myself. I was, at the time, directing and producing plays in New York, having already given up on acting due to lack of talent (it would take a while longer to do the same for directing), and though the pieces I was involved with in New York were certainly edgy, and experimental in nature, what I wanted most was to create something completely natural and organic. This is to be distinguished from a theatrically naturalistic, which usually means a turn of the century style in which acting is very much meant to be like real life. Conversations around dinner tables kind of thing. When I mean natural, I mean a connection between body and mind, which is what attracted me about so much art from the poetry of Walt Whitman, to the painting of Picasso. This is one reason I always liked dance so much, having taken classes for years, even though I had no ability for it. So, one day in front of the Pompidou Center I saw some street performers dancing in a way which truly did seem modern to me. They were physically so involved with each other. A kind of Pilobolus thing, but which looked completely animalistic. Like dogs or lions rolling together, biting a bit, but all the while physically entangled. I watched this for a long time, and when they took a break to pass around the hat, I tried to talk to some, who luckily spoke better English than I spoke French. The man I spoke with could tell that I was in complete admiration of what they were doing, so he invited me to a class for the next day. I went to the store, and bought some dance clothes, as any I still had were left in New York, and went to the class. As soon as I entered, the instructor said, (after having to repeat for me in English) “you may now get undressed”. The class was to be completely in the nude. This really was naturalistic! Much more so than a dinner table conversation in a Eugene O’Neill play. I, to my embarrassment, and later regret, was too insecure to take the class, and walked out, only to torture myself over this missed opportunity.
Why did I think this was a missed opportunity? Why was I so attracted to what these dancers were doing? I think it has taken me many years to realize that what I admired most, and what attracted me most, was that I wanted to participate in a kind of conversation that I couldn’t have with words alone. This is especially urgent when in a country that you can’t speak the language. Even though in real life, there are times not only when the language of books and plays fails to be adequate to express yourself, but where normal discussions and language itself seems to fall short. Part of this is the social convention that surrounds what we choose to talk about, and the rest is something that is more philosophical. It is the full breakdown of Descartes body mind duality, where somehow we know that we cannot really express ourselves emotionally or intellectually with the conventions we are given, or from the brain (intellect) alone. These dancers certainly realized this.
Now many years later I am deeply involved in Jazz improvisation, which is an ongoing conversation between other musicians, and with myself. Wynton Marsalis said in this book “Moving to Higher Ground” that jazz improvisation requires such quick decisions to be made, that you don’t have the time to lie. There is something liberating about being forced to be honest with myself, my colleagues and an audience. There is also something about this experience which speaks to communication in general. I wonder if everyone is, like me, looking for a way to be forced to honesty. Also we may all have a desire to be forced to listen, and to entangle ourselves in someone else’s naked grasp. With our instruments tuned, and no words spoken, we are naked musicians, who are rolling around together in a profound human experience. It makes me feel like an early human who sang, drew and spoke for the first time.