“Homo vult decipi; decipiatur.”

Through years of traveling the world and writing articles in magazines, I’ve developed psychic powers. I can influence your actions by controlling the cadence of the text on the page as you read it. Unlike some charlatan astrologers, psychics and witch doctors, my skill is based in science, a lifetime of studying how the rhythm of language influences brainwaves, particularly certain passages buried deep within the English language, passages that were dictated to me by an old woman, a hermeneutic. The study of those passages demanded supreme scholarship to interpret, years of intense application, and it has still not been wholly worked out. In order to help me, the old woman gave birth to my grandmother, who bore my mother. When my mother gave birth to me, there I was, deciphering the dictations of the old woman.

Continue reading Magic

First a rant — forgive me, I’m flying and can’t help myself but marvel at the magnificently low IQ of the people in charge of airport security.  Because the latest attempt to bring down an airplane involved starting a fire in the last hour of the flight, now we can’t get out of our seats during the last hour. When the attempt included a shoe, everyone’s shoes got checked. After the liquid plot, liquids. Always fighting the last “war,” no matter how ridiculous a category.

If anything, after 911 airport security should have been DECREASED, except for bomb sniffing dogs, as now passengers will mob and kill any hijacker on sight instead of obeying like sheep and waiting for the authorities to handle it, as they were taught to before.

911 made airplanes far safer–because of more aggressive passengers and because of reinforced cockpit doors, not for any other reason–and security should be relaxed accordingly. Instead, we get more rules. Rules that are supposed to be idiot-proof. But when the people making the rules are themselves idiots you have this wild synergy of idiots drafting what they imagine to be idiot-proof rules, and the whole thing spirals into absurdity, orange alerts, and passengers peeing their pants while keeping their hands in their laps, visible at all times. And we’ve created such a society of passive obedience, that the majority of the audience in all this security theatre nods their heads and patriotically understands the necessity of waiting four hours in security.

The irony is that what foils people like this guy, or the shoe bomber, is aggressive, independent thinking passengers. But the government/TSA reacts — always — by creating rules geared towards increasing the docility of passengers. It’s like a one-way ratchet.

Even from the perennial perspective of cowardice (“safety first!”) that has become a default for our society, it’s frustrating. For the pretense of lowering a risk of dying that is only one in four million passengers, we’re willing to double wait times, costing 300 million passenger hours (or 450 lifetimes) each year. I don’t have the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet a large sum of money that deaths from blood clots as a result of being unable to get up from your seat the last hour will be higher than one in four million passengers, let alone than the actual decrease in risk from enacting this rule (i.e., one asshole who burned his balls). And imagine if those 300 million hours per year were put into something useful — medical research, community service, whatever, how many more lives that would save.

For that matter, imagine if the money put into the whole war on terror were put somewhere efficient. Forget morality, freedom, etc. Even simple efficiency comes to the same conclusion: if $100 billion directed to security saves 4000 people, but $100 million directed to health care saves 100,000 people, then simple cold, right-wing-style economics and rational thinking should say it’s more efficient to allocate the money to health care.

But sometimes one gets tired of railing against a tyranny that protects itself in large measure by marketing itself as nontyranny. It’s a subject that I get into arguments with my friends on both the Left and the Right. The Right seems to think that health care is tyranny but endless police powers make them free, an argument that I don’t understand at all. I don’t understand how they can see the enforcement/coercive power of the State as benign while seeming to be terrified by the additional option of government-provided health care. Or how their capitalist arguments in favour of efficiency can be squared with the cost-benefit numbers of military vs health care spending. As you unravel government, it seems to make more sense to unravel the inefficient bits first. And, as an anarchist/libertarian, I would add that it makes more sense to unravel those segments that are fundamentally anti-individualistic, which starts with the institutions that limit individual choice (police, etc), and leaves to the very end those that increase choice (health care, education, etc.)

And on the Left, I have friends convinced that Bush/Cheney engineered 911 in order to crown themselves kings, destroy democracy, as though their goal was to establish a tyranny — when what they fail to understand is that a tyranny becomes much less powerful once it’s seen as such. The strongest source of power in our tyranny is precisely the fact that the majority of its subjects don’t see it as such. By being selective, they can shut down any real threat to their power. I can speak and write as I want because I have no influence, no power at all, and by writing this I ensure that I never will. It would only be the most childish, unsophisticated of tyrannies that would attack people who are clearly no threat at all, simply out of paranoia or offense. Tyrannies like that mobilize their own enemies, and eventually fall. And nobody can accuse the military-industrial-multinational complex of being unsophisticated. Unfortunately, most of its critics on the Left are, and their use of poor argument tends to pull down the rest of us with it.

So enough about tyranny. Let’s talk about bladders instead, since we’ll all be holding them for the last hour of the flight.

The TSA rules have made me wonder why we have bladders at all. Only placental mammals and bony fish have bladders. Yes, I can use my bladder for marking my territory, or to prevent myself from leaving a trail that predators can follow, to pee my name in the snow and other evolutionary displays of social fitness. In a corporate high-rise office building setting, the ability to delay dribbling down one’s leg increases the odds of reproduction.

But how did we come to evolve them? The fish bladder is not homologous – fish tend to disperse of their ammonia through their gills, using their bladder for osmoregulation. That part still makes sense. But the vent in birds, the Malpighian tubules in insects, and the cloaca in reptiles, amphibians, marsupials, and monotremes combine all of the excretionary functions in one neat unit, and it works just fine. Why did we evolve first a separate urinary tract, and then a bladder?

What makes the whole thing even more puzzling is that other than humans and trained pets, most mammals don’t use their bladders to hold in their urine. They dribble it out as soon as it comes in. (Which weighs against one of the main ad-hoc explanations of the bladder, that its purpose is to prevent us leaving a scent trail for predators.)

Developing a whole organ takes some doing. Kidneys can reabsorb liquid, and generally make a lot of sense. Bladder, not so much.

The only thing that makes any sense at all for the bladder is that the bladder evolved as some aspect of osmoregulation in fish, was dropped by everyone other than mammals, and survived in mammals as peeing became an art form. Still, there’s a big gap there.

Obviously I don’t believe there is a nonevolutionary reason. That doesn’t mean anyone understands the evolutionary reason behind the bladder. In other words:
1. the adaptation was evolutionary (this is a statement of probability, as is all science, not “faith”)
2. nobody knows why it came about and survived long enough for peeing to become an art form / source of social status, etc.
3. once peeing became social, a whole new series of evolutionary reasons started to support fancy bladders.

Anyway, evolutionary biologists seem to have no idea and consider urinary bladders one of the few remaining Great Mysteries. And mysteries are always fun. And it’s easier on the blood pressure to think about bladders rather than tyranny.

Perhaps we can have a reality show, where everyone removes their bladder. Or has peeing contests. Or something equally distracting, to help us pass that last passive hour on the plane during which we hold our pee, keep our hands visible on our laps, and seek refuge in the TV in front of us. Temporary, of course. If the TSA manages to stick to this last-hour rule, then I wonder how long before the in-flight “entertainment” during the last hour of every flight becomes 100% commercials?

People who are uneducated, demoralized, distracted, and afraid are far easier to govern than those who are educated, unafraid, and engaged. And every shoe bomber, ball-burner, liquid mixer makes the job of those in power in our political system — the modern “fusion of state and corporate power” that Mussolini once defined as “fascism” — easier. Every one of those fanatic assholes shifts a bit of power from the people to the authorities.

Anyway, I’m just glad the guy didn’t try to set his pants on fire inside the toilet. If he had, the United States organs of state security would probably have banned all toilets from airplanes. Talk about demoralized and distracted.

I’ve always found it puzzling that my Christian friends find it puzzling that I celebrate Christmas even though I’m not a Christian. Or that my Jewish or Muslim friends correct me when I wish them a Merry Christmas. Christmas is a time for family, which is always a great excuse for a holiday. And, growing up, our Christmas was the sort of pantheist hodge-podge that only a family of atheists would come up with, including gefilte fish during Christmas dinner right after a specifically Slovak garlic-wafer-honey ritual that wards of demons and has fused with Catholic communion ideas, a Buddha and a Shiva on the mantle next to the Nativity scene, and so on. But in doing some research today to verify a suspicion that Christmas is already a pantheist hodge-podge (or “synthesis,” see below), I came across something that warms the religious cockles of my heart: that Santa is Odin in disguise.

Of all the gods, the only one that even as a kid I could ever imagine worshipping was Odin, but I’d thought him dead. And here I found he’s been hiding under my nose every Christmas for 38 years. This makes me happy: I can join all my friends in having a touch of religion, even if nostalgic childhood-ish religion, in my Christmas.

During the Germanic holiday of Yule, Odin led a great hunting party through the sky. Both the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, describe Odin as riding an eight-legged flying horse named Sleipnir. Among Odin’s names are “long beard,” and “Yule figure”.

Children would place their boots, filled with carrots, straw, or sugar, near the chimney for Sleipnir to eat. Odin would then reward those children for their kindness by replacing Sleipnir’s food with gifts or candy. This practice survived in most of continental Europe after the adoption of Christianity and became associated with Saint Nicholas (patron saint of children) as a result of the process of Christianization — St. Nick still fills children’s boots in Europe with candy on Dec. 5th/6th — though the holiday also started as a provocation to the church, with a child dressed up as a bishop, the burning of smelly shoes instead of incense, and rhymes with swear words like ‘kapoentje’ (castrated male chicken — a jab at the bishops) woven into the original Christmas carols.

Saint Nicholas, or Sinterklaas in Dutch, came to North America through New Amsterdam (renamed New York after it was traded to Britain), and turned into Santa Claus. Here, the boot ritual evolved into the hanging of socks or stockings at the fireplace.

And Odin, of course, was always associated with the tree, where he hung for nine days, Himself sacrificed to Himself, in order to learn wisdom. Although the leap from a tree to a cross is not large, trees were central to pagan rituals and, as such, this was one area where early Christianity did not try to graft itself onto existing beliefs. Rather, it tried to fight them: the Christmas tree is explicitly prohibited by the Bible. Jeremiah 10:1-5 says [2] …Learn not the way of the heathen… [3] For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. [4] They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

There are other tempting Christmas-tree associations in history. The shamans in Siberia used to pick the red-and-white amanita mascurias mushroom and use it for visions.  They’d found that if you ate the mushrooms directly, you’d have visions, but you’d also die of toxic shock. If you dried it over the fireplace in a stocking and fed it to a reindeer, on the other hand, the pee that passed through had only the good parts and you could fly through the air until spring, if you wanted. Which was good, since they lived in yurts that, in the winter, they entered through a chimney hole in the ceiling.

Getting high off reindeer pee may be a bit of a stretch for Christmas, but no more so than any Christian claims to the holiday. These claims revolve around the idea that Christ was born on December 25th, a belief that has no basis in either the books of the Bible or in early Christian history. For the first 330 years Christ’s birth was celebrated on the eve of January 6, and even then only paranthetically (since early Christians considered any celebration of birthdays to be a pagan custom) as part of the feast of Theophany. It was moved in 330 AD in an attempt to replace the Roman (pagan) festival of Saturnalia and the Sol Invictus festival of December 25th, the birth of the unconquered sun. The Romans believed that the winter solstice lasted three days, and December 25th was the first day with a detectable lengthening of daylight hours.

From Wikipedia re Saturnalia: “The celebrations included a school holiday, the making and giving of small presents (saturnalia et sigillaricia) and a special market (sigillaria). Gambling was allowed for all, even slaves. It was a time to eat, drink, and be merry. The toga was not worn, but rather the synthesis, i.e. colorful, informal “dinner clothes”; and the pileus (freedman’s hat) was worn by everyone. Slaves were exempt from punishment, and treated their masters with (a pretense of) disrespect.”

There is no evidence whatsoever associating Christ with December 25th that is older than 330 AD except for several manuscripts of Hippolytus’ Commentary on Daniel, a work of the early third century, that state

For the first appearance of our Lord in the flesh took place in Bethlehem eight days before the Kalends of January [25 December], on the fourth day [Wednesday], under Emperor Augustus, in the year 5500.

But most scholars of the period believe that the reference to 25 December is a late correction of the date actually stated by the author. The author’s date may be preserved in a single manuscript which curiously contradicts itself by giving two dates: both 25 December and 2 April. For two reasons, it is likely that 2 April is the original reading.

1. A third-century work called De Pascha Computus, which, it is agreed, is based on a lost work of Hippolytus, states that Christ was born on Passover. It is therefore probable that Hippolytus himself was of the same opinion. Although the date of Passover Eve varies from year to year, it is never far from 2 April.
2. In the Lateran Museum at Rome is an ancient statue of Hippolytus which was probably executed shortly after his death. This statue bears the dates of Passover for the years 222-333, and next to one date, 2 April of a certain year, is inscribed “genesis ['birth'] of Jesus Christ”. No doubt the statue was intended to honor Hippolytus as the one who calculated the dates of future Passovers. We therefore surmise that in the third century, it was believed that Hippolytus set Christ’s birth on 2 April, one of the recurring dates in the Passover cycle.

Then there is the whole issue of sheep. Not only were sheep rarely grazed in the wintertime, even in Palestine, but the particular sheep in the nativity story were sacrificial lambs being prepared for Passover. And there is a variety of (questionable) astrological “evidence” pointing to Christ’s birth in spring, which I won’t detail because it all depends on a correct assignation of the Star of Bethlehem in a particular constellation.

But if Santa is Odin, the tree and all “yule” celebrations are Germanic-pagan, the gift giving and feast are Roman, and the date has nothing to do with Jesus, what part of Christmas is Christian?

Not that this takes anything away from Christmas. I think it’s a wonderful holiday, and if people want to attach a religious significance to it, by all means, they should do so. For myself, I’ll focus on Odin/Santa, which adds a nice touch of tragedy to Christmas–I can’t help but feel a little sad for him, to go from a warrior god to a jolly fat man. But I guess that’s a natural part of the aging process for men and gods alike.

But my point today: throw out the toga and the dogma, and put on the synthesis and the freedman’s hat, Christmas is for everyone: Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, pagan, pantheist, atheist… MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

A brand used to be a symbol burned onto a cow’s butt. [When] a ranch had a long-standing reputation of raising healthy cows, the brand was its symbol of quality. But once the “-ing” was added to the word “brand,” and agencies started to ply the black art of “branding,” a brand was no longer the symbol of quality and reputation earned over time. Instead it was something that was just made up by ad agency creatives applying ingenuity to the disingenuous.”

— Augustine Fou

When people who are paid to opine wake up to a new industry dynamic, they often overreact. As pundits on the periphery of the branding industry belatedly noticed consumers exchanging information directly via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, the field began to echo with shouts of “Branding is dead!”

I don’t buy that argument. Would you, if I could name an $80 billion market that gets customers to pay between one and ten thousand times the price of an identical competing product, with nothing to differentiate the two except for 100% pure clean branding?

No, it’s not art, though I’ll come back to art later. It’s bottled water.

Continue reading The Brand Is Dead! Long Live the Brand!

Over the years the people I’ve met who self-identify as “anarchists” tend to be among the dumbest and the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure or displeasure of knowing. Very few reasonable people attach that label to themselves. In an attempt to avoid being lumped with the dumbest, I thought I’d distill my reasons for doing so, from the least to the most important.

1. Anarchism as the conscience of law. Given democratic notions of legitimacy, the fewer people who believe in “the rule of law” (i.e., the more who believe it is just a veiled imposition of power), the more transparent the veil, and the more the law has to obey its own rules in order to maintain legitimacy. When rule-of-law marketing and propaganda are insufficient to create legitimacy, the powerful have to limit the arbitrary use of their power and shrink the number of cases they can treat as extraordinary. Anarchists weaken the faith element within law, and by doing so force it to obey its own rules.

2. Anarchy as a vector. Through very gradual change, we’ve created societies in which nearly every aspect of our day-to-day life is controlled. I tried to go to a sunny outdoor bar at a lake with my three-year-old son the other day. I was told that (a) I had to wear a shirt; (b) my son couldn’t be in the bar even without drinking; and (c) I couldn’t get the beers to go. These were all rules created by my neighbors, though none of the three had any impact on them. I don’t necessarily want to live in full-blown anarchy, except perhaps in a small anarchic community where all the individuals are highly educated and empathetic. But I do think we need to go in the direction of less order.

When you put a frog in water and turn the heat up suddenly, it will jump out. When you turn the heat up gradually, it will stay in and cook. Human beings work the same way, and we have overcooked ourselves with rules to the point where (shifting culinary metaphors for a moment from frogs to pasta) our modern societies have become a porridge in which you can no longer tell whether you started off with fettuccine or with fusilli or, for that matter, with frogs. If full anarchy is raw pasta, then yes, perhaps it’s hard to chew, but when you’re starting with a tasteless overcooked mess, raw sounds pretty good.

At any rate, I don’t believe in utopias. There are no stable end points, only movement and vectors. Given where the world is today, I’m an anarchist.

3.  Anarchism as ontologically authentic. Groups, being soulless, don’t exist except in the abstract. The individual human—who is born, lives, and dies—is the only relevant metric by which any non-abstract phenomenon in this universe can be measured. Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends,” and Heidegger spelled out in magnificent nuance the importance of being-towards-death as the only possible structuring mechanism for life, authenticity, and meaning. Institutions, organizations, corporations, unions, countries, societies, religions, legal systems—soulless collectives of all sorts—don’t live towards death. An immortal abstract entity without subjectivity or a soul can never understand the concept of authenticity, let alone sort through the ever-present ambiguity between what is authentic and what is not. And any individual who abdicates his personal sovereignty to the value system of a group gives up his own chance at authenticity and meaning. These require responsibility, or the ability to respond to specific situations on a subjective level.

Each individual can find meaning and authenticity only by personally rolling in the mud. By climbing a tree (considered “disorderly behavior” in many US cities; see e.g., NYC Parks and Recreation section 1-04(l)(2)). By facing death. By stealing fire from the gods and slugging it out with the angels. By exercising personal responsibility and care. The only political system I know of that doesn’t clash with these criteria is anarchism.

4. It’s fun to break the rules.

I’m an anarchist and it’s OK was first published in the October 2009 issue of Liberty.

After Boing Boing blogged, yes, Boing Boing blogged, about Ralph Lauren’s most recent photoshop disaster, they (obviously) included the photo. The one over there, on the left, with the model whose head is larger than her entire pelvis.

Ralph Lauren’s law firm cynically sued. I say cynically, because you don’t get a more perfect bull’s eye on the fair use exception to copyright: a reproduction “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,” etc. But large companies do this all the time. They sue knowing they’ll lose, simply because the blogger or magazine can’t afford to defend the case for years. They use the law as a club, and in today’s cautious culture, many, maybe most, people cave.

But Boing Boing’s blogger Cory Doctorow didn’t cave. In a rare (everyone else took the photo down) dual display of backbone and funnybone, he responded with this brilliant post:

So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn’t give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will:

a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and;

b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and

c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.”

Thank you Mr. Doctorow!

He also writes, “As Wendy Seltzer from the Chilling Effects project said, “Sounds like a pretty solid fair use case to me. If criticism diminishes its effectiveness, that’s different from the market substitution copyright protects against. And I’ve rarely seen a thinner DMCA form-letter.”" And yet Photoshop Disasters’ ISP took the image down, as did lots of other cowardly sites. Shame on you, Google Blogspot!

In the type of world I’d like to live in, for every coward who took the image down ten more would put it up. Not because I care about Ralph Lauren or the whole argument about skinny models (I personally don’t want models to look like regular women, though as a man looking at an image I find nothing attractive about a giant skull on spindles; and just so I don’t seem effeminately enlightened, I’ll add that I prefer models to have more characteristics of balloons and fewer characteristics of sticks; but whatever), but I do care about bully companies and literary freedom.

This is the type of case I became a lawyer to fight. Instead, I found myself reading 512-page addenda on ball-bearing classifications, or on a team with 120 other lawyers spinning Palm off from 3 COM (giving away my age now…). But if I can’t fight this as a lawyer, the least I can do is stick my neck out as one additional defendant for Ralph to sue.

(I’ll say it again: “Boing Boing blogged”. It’s a good thing to write.)

After tearing a tendon in my wrist I found myself running up the 2,830-step natural stairmaster behind my house called the Grouse Grind. Though I’ve always disliked cardio, there’s something surprisingly pleasant in the hour-long vertical hike — what, between the trees and view and the beer at the end of it. Okay, well, to be honest the hike isn’t pleasant at all, but the beer at the end, that’s worth it. Those post-hike endorphins become a magical ingredient when mixed with the beer, a slow-earned brew that can only be enjoyed the hard way. (I tried taking the gondola once, and the beer was definitely mediocre without the endorphins — but with them, I’d rank their brew higher than the finest hop-houses in Prague, better than the best beerswills in Brussels.)

I drink it at the Bistro, outside, with its gorgeous views of Vancouver, while editing some piece of writing or other that I lug up the 2,830 stairs. Apparently for a 180-pound man taking one hour, the Grouse Grind burns 1,100 calories. For me, that translates into about 1,344 free beer calories (about seven pints).

Did I mention it was 2,830 steps? Anyway, I’ve been doing this regularly, until yesterday. Yesterday, I forgot my wallet at the bottom of the mountain. I discovered this as I was ordering my beer at the Bistro. My entire motivation, my reason for suffering, hadn’t made it up the hill with me.

I tried asking for a beer on the honour system. I thought of the Bistro as my neighbourhood pub, just a little higher up, and in a neighbourhood pub, I could have run a tab. I didn’t really expect it to work. We don’t live in a world of honour and neighbourhood pubs anymore, and the Bistro has too many tourists (and tourists are like acid to business-customer relationships when the business is “rational” enough to base its behaviour on even the most basic premises of game theory). And no, it didn’t work.

But since I had my bag with me, for lugging that manuscript, I started a search. I found four dollars. A pint cost six. Not enough. Then I had a brilliant idea inspired by my grade three math teacher. Six divided by two is three. Plus one for tip, minus one for tax, close enough. I asked for half a pint.

“We don’t serve half pints,” the bartender told me.

But a manager was right there. So I asked her.

“We don’t serve half pints,” she told me.

“Please, please, please, please, please,” I said.

“We don’t serve half pints.”

“Pour me whatever this will buy.” I put my cash on the bar, and added a 10,000 rupiah note that happened to be in the bag, for good measure. It was money. It was a joke. “And when I come back I’ll pay double.”

“We can’t do that. The computer doesn’t dispense beers in half pints. There’s no way to put it into the system.”

“But you throw out half a pint at a time when pouring. When there’s too much head, or the start of a keg, right?”

“Yes, we do that. But we don’t serve half pints.”

I explained my hiking methodology. I explained that I was there on a regular basis, sitting outside where few others wanted to sit and enjoying my beer and the cold view.

“I can’t help you. We’re not set up for half pints. The computer won’t let us punch it in that way. End of story.”

“Where’s the humanity?” I asked. Yes, I actually did.

“Humanity runs on cash these days,” she said. Yes, she actually did.

“But I have money for a half pint!”

“Can’t help you.” The place was empty, nearly no customers. I had the money, she had the beer, but we couldn’t make a deal because the computer said so. But, of course, she could have.

I recently wrote a post about the dangers of technology, of computers changing the way people thought. This seemed a perfect example. But it was more than that. In her eyes, I was a homeless person begging for a beer, someone looking to game the system, to break the rules.

I don’t look like a bum these days. Clean shaven, had my Blackberry Bold on me in its Otterbox case, yuppie MEC hiking clothes, etc., some of the waitresses recognized me as a regular (though I’d never met the manager or bartender before). But the act of trying to buy a beer on the honour system had already gotten me categorized.

But I’m getting off point. The real sad thing is the neighbourhood bar. Or the lack of it. Despite its cozy fireplace, there was a coldness to the Bistro and to its manager–at that particular moment, anyway–that was as opposite as one could find to the old idea of a neighbourhood bar. And yet that coldness is what we’re all moving towards. All our businesses are. And, increasingly, so are people.

The entire justification for capitalism was once that it was reactive, it responded to customer demand. But in the era of computers and consultants, cutting costs has a bigger impact on profits than customer satisfaction. Customers will still buy a beer, because of the location, and any customer happiness beyond that is just a form of consumer surplus. A waste for the company. Automation lowers costs, and if it automates the staff and managers in the process, perhaps that’s even better in the aggregate. You wouldn’t want to bartender giving an extra ounce to someone by accident of humanity.

(The irony is that I’ve had very good experiences with the people at the bottom of the mountain, the people who sell the passes and run the gondola and make everything run smoothly. The people whom you would expect to be bored and mechanized by running the Grouse machinery have been, well, extraordinarily human. I once forgot to bring my bike lock, and a very kind staff member offered to put my bike in storage for me while I hiked up and sat drinking my beer at the top. I remember being amazed, happy that I was in Vancouver rather than New York, where such flexibility is much more rare, where some lawyer would have forbidden such acts of kindness based on a stretched theory of legal liability for the bike. But I suspect that the people selling tickets and such are students, people in those jobs temporarily — these are the people who deserve a tip…)

At one point I was told, “You wouldn’t go into a McDonalds and try to buy half a Big Mac, would you?”

Well, no. But I was hoping that my pub wouldn’t be run like a McDonalds. Pubs used to be the most human of places, in all the richness of what that meant. Now too many have turned into these clean, coldly efficient lounges where the front looks like Soho and the back office thinks like McDonalds. Still, I can’t shut that voice of protest in my head nagging that pubs should be places for humans to meet first, hard businesses second.

ADDENDUM: I had a journalist housemate before I became one. While we were living together, the war in Kosovo broke out. She got a great story by following a group of American Kosovars who trained in the US for a month and then went “home” to fight — a chartered plane full of American Kosovars, and her. Many were more American than Kosovar. One of them became a friend, and when they arrived in Kosovo he invited her to accompany him to his village to meet his family. She was with him when he walked into his living room and found his father’s freshly severed head, his body in a different room. She was with him when he walked out of the house, found the first Serb — not anyone connected to his father’s death, just the first Serb he came across in the village — and executed him. It all made for a great story, a great book, and yet I couldn’t understand my friend. This Kosovar had become her friend. By writing about him, she was at the very least exiling her friend from the United States for life, and probably putting a target on his back. The story trumped her friendship. I asked her how she could do that and her answer was, “I’m a journalist.”

During our interview Damien Hirst told me, “You look for triggers.” Writers do the same thing, and the manager’s line that, “Humanity runs on cash” became a perfect trigger for a story that had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with Grouse Mountain. It was a perfect lede to a story about the loss of the neighbourhood pub, the encroachment of corporatism and consultants and computers onto what was once a central ganglion of human interaction. And in writing it, I did nothing to undo that “Empire” — I was replicating it.

The Kosovo story to me is first about friendship, and the manager here was not my friend. But there’s a secondary truth as well, about journalism, and human beings at the other side of a story. As one of the commentor’s said, my pride and prize is someone else’s punishment and shame. Someone whom I don’t know at all, but whose identity is clearly far more complex than one unfortunate “cash” comment.

I don’t know where the right line is. At the very least, I should not have used the manager’s name, so I’ve taken it out.

One of the very best things that can happen to a thinking person is to have his assumptions flipped. When I met Damien Hirst on Bali’s Brawa Beach, where he was finishing an intense three-month painting session, I expected him to have a bumper sticker on his laptop that said, “Suck my cock vomit.” Which he did. But I didn’t expect him to be extraordinarily down-to-earth, generous, and aware of his own position in a way that is caring rather than cynical.

This interview is the first he’s given since deciding here in Bali to stop all his production pieces in order to focus on making his own paintings. In the process, it touches on everything from the suicide of his close friend to the essence of painting to five-foot wooden giraffes—with a detour on the nature of visual language using Vaseline and a cucumber.

Alexander Boldizar: So you’ve stopped your production?

Damien Hirst: Yeah, I’ve stopped it all.

Continue reading Damien Hirst: New Paintings (Interview)

The desire for security stands against every great and noble enterprise. —Tacitus

In New York City you can get a ticket for sitting on a milk crate or taking up two seats on a subway or putting on a puppet show visible from the street or climbing a tree or driving a taxi while wearing shorts. NYPD officers walk through the stairwells of housing projects where crack gangs once ruled, not with drug dogs but with decibel-meters to hand out tickets to teenagers playing their music too loud. Central Park was once both dangerous and beautiful, but now someone has installed a fence every ten meters and it feels less natural than even the densest maze of Brooklyn concrete.

During my four years in New York, I walked alone at night into five or six of the worst projects in Brownsville, East New York, Harlem and the Bronx (to interview people), and I never experienced a moment of fear—something that only an escapee from a mental institution could have said fifteen years earlier.

Continue reading Fear.

My new novel, The Man Who Saw Seconds, is finished. And my agent turned it down because it’s science fiction, and she doesn’t do science fiction. I feel very grateful to have the agent I have–The Ugly is a difficult book, and finding an agent who cares about literature more than money is rare, unusual, extraordinarily lucky.

And yet I can’t help feeling a bit of frustration at the way we all put ourselves in boxes. Why can’t the same author write both heavy stuff and thrillers? Comments I’ve received from other published writers who’ve been kind enough to give me their time as readers included, “I was irritated whenever I had to put it down,” “It would/will make an amazing film,” and “I’m stunned your agent wasn’t completely hooked. I certainly am.”

Again, I have a great agent. She just doesn’t do sci-fi. She suggested I work with her for my literary fiction, and find another agent for my commercial fiction. So…I’m looking for a sci-fi agent. And perhaps a pseudonym.

Manny Lampnut? Bald Lazier Ox? Roland Lulfromulber? Radix Loblaze? Or perhaps my literary character, Muzhduk the Ugli, can become the pseudonymous author of my science fiction, where he can create a character named Preble Jefferson, who, among other things, writes the memoirs of Alexander Boldizar as they are dictated to him by an old woman, a hermeneutic. The study of those passages and convoluted connections will demand supreme scholarship to interpret, years of intense application, after which time it will still not be wholly worked out. In order to help Preble, the old woman will give birth to his grandmother, who will bear his mother. When his mother will give birth to him, there I’ll be, deciphering the dictations of the old woman.