Month: September 2020

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How not to think

I have an old friend who is suffering from anxiety. I mean, we all are (I know I am), but he has additional issues having to do with health. I suggested meditation, and he said he had tried, but he couldn’t stop thinking! He couldn’t get a “clear mind!”

I told him that he was being over-ambitious. Start by just sitting still for five minutes. After succeeding at that for a few days, add listening to breath and ambient noise. Then add feeling your body…

After doing this for a while, add noticing your thoughts. Now, this is hard. You’re thinking your thoughts, how do you notice a thought that you’re thinking?

Here’s my very amateurish, totally not a yogi approach. I believe our mind/brain has dozens if not hundreds of somewhat independent agents, each of whom is making their own noise. Our left-brain interpreter (itself an agent) is the storyteller of our brain. We listen to it more than other agents because it’s louder and its stories are more complete and compelling. But we can hear, if we listen, more of our agents.

You know that trick, at a party, of listening to the hubbub of the party, then zeroing in on a single voice? Do it the other way. Soften your focus, zoom out to sense the field of noise, not any one piece of it.

Do this with your thoughts. They’re all making noise, listen to the crowd. This makes any one thought or story seem less engrossing.

Try this with your vision, too. Allow the entire field of color and shadow and light to be present, while not sharpening your focus on any one detail. When you (inevitably) do focus, zoom out again.

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Anxiety shopping

I’ve been resisting anxiety shopping. I could easily waste hundreds of dollars if I’m not careful. Here’s what I’ve been eyeing:

The reMarkable tablet. Such a sweet piece of technology! Super thin, it can be used for PDF reading, note taking and drawing. You can also use it as an ePub reader, but I’m told it’s not good for that, though they don’t give details about what it’s not good at. Oh, and it’s $400, and that’s its “introductory” pricing, where they toss in a special stylus and cover, which would be an additional $137. $400 is a lot of money, and I have no pressing need for it. I just admire the tech and it seem quite beautiful.

I recently (6 mos ago?) replaced my HP 17-inch Pavilion laptop. I had kept it going for years by replacing and upgrading parts. I got pretty good at that. The fans of that machine tend to fail after a couple of years (okay, maybe you need to puff air through the vents more regularly than I did…). I had replaced the fan a while ago, and did it again, but I must have tugged on the wire to the monitor because it suddenly went all green. So I bit the bullet and bought a ZBook G6 17, which is a fantastic computer. It weighs a lot, so it’s barely a laptop — they call it a “mobile workstation”. The stand I’m using is from the old Pavilion, the HP USB Media Dock. It has an integrated (removable) USB3 docking station that plugs into the base of the stand, which is also an Altec Lansing speaker. Much better and louder than the quite good B&O speakers built into the ZBook. Then I have an external old Samsung monitor that I keep on a heavy articulated arm stand clamped to my desk. I found the HP Display and Notebook Stand II (e8g00aa) made by Ergotron, and it’s verrry nice; I love Ergotron! Elegant way to hold the computer and an extra monitor while taking up much less desk space than I use now. It accommodates various HP docking stations, none of which, sadly, I can use with my machine, AFAIK. The port replicator I could use with my machine costs another $300 (the Thunderbolt 230W Dock G2 with the confusingly-named “combo cable” which is a power cord and USB-C cable glommed together; and I can’t even power my mobile workstation via the dock, so I would have a cluster of big, heavy, HP power bricks). Also it doesn’t have a speaker. But the stand is a very sweet design, and can be bought for $190. But I didn’t NEEEED it. Not really. But then I listened to the sound on my laptop stand, and the speakers weren’t working! Finally, an excuse! So I bought the e8g00aa. Then I thought, wait: have I updated the drivers of my DisplayLink docking station? So I did that, and … the speakers work just fine.

I canceled my order. *sigh*

I’ll be taking a Statistics class at UCLA Extension as a prerequisite for an MLIS program which I would like to start in a year. The course suggested a scientific or graphing calculator. It’s always nagged at me that I should never have thrown out the old HP-25 I had in college and used until the battery pack up and died. So I explored vintage HP programmable calculators. Now I want to buy an HP-41CX with the Stats pack. Like this one, on eBay. But, my god, $310? Without the manuals? Seems like a lot for something I don’t really need. I can do everything I need on Excel ON MY PHONE. But the vintage HP calculators are super sweet… And my Pixel 3? Eh, I have no emotional connection with it. This kind of thing is most fun when you get it at a thrift shop for $20 and spend $290 on fixing it up, right? Yikes. So I haven’t bought one … yet. But I have my eyes open.

I just recently spent $380 on refurbishment and repair of an old German Erika Naumann typewriter sent to me by a relative. It was such a sweet gesture, that I really wanted to do the repair as a gesture of gratitude and to honor the dead relative who owned it. And, if we’re counting, it’s a valuable typewriter.

More egregiously, I spent $1200 (!!) on a Comma 2 for my Prius Prime, to add more driver assistance features. It’s amazing, really. Works great. Beeps too much. It beeps when I engage cruise control and when I disengage it. It also puts a green outline on the screen. Too much feedback and the beeps annoy and frighten passengers.

My daughter says we should buy pretty much anything we want—I still have a job, Ellen is still working, what the hell! But I try to be careful… Not only on spending but on accumulation. I have two big bags of things I want to sell on eBay. Maybe when I’ve sold them I can use the proceeds to get that calculator…

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Cheap rents and a vibrant culture

I’m a native New Yorker. My wife isn’t, but lived all her young adulthood there and is as committed to the idea of New York as any convert. She and I were both in theater there, often at the same theaters but at different times, so we didn’t meet until the 90s, when I moved to Los Angeles.

Often we sigh and say how much we miss New York… and then correct ourselves—we miss New York in the 70s and 80s, not New York now, debilitated as it is from money poisoning. Making a living is for losers—they want to make a killing. Commercial rent is jacked up not by 10% but by 100%, 200%, more, there is no top. And if space remains empty, the political and tax system support that. Once vibrant streets in the West Village are ghost towns, not because of Covid—this is from way before Covid—but because of rents. I suspect, but don’t know, that this is at least partly because landlord families are losing ground to hedge-fund and Wall St landlords who feel zero stake in the life of the city and the culture around them, and only respond, AI-like, to simple numerical metrics.

We may be seeing a return to cheap rents as Covid-19 hollows out cities and telework keeps people at their desk even in a remote location. Soon, some say and I hope but don’t dare believe, cities like New York can be places where people interested in collaborating on projects that don’t make all that much money can congregate and thrive.

These projects will seep into the culture and create a new, fresh American culture, which will replace the one we have now, decadent and rotting into the ground, and whose fate is to be compost for what comes later.

Oh, that’s fancy!

But New York is a disaster now. Its culture was embodied in the people who lived there and who left because of rents, maintained at an artificially high level by oligarchs parking money and by a Wall St mentality, driven by numerical metrics and divorced from any kind of human experience.

Even, though, at its most optimistic—the city empties out a little, rents ease, oligarchs complain about reducing value and decamp to seasteads, and artists can move back to the city—I wonder if it will, over the next few generations, become a fountainhead for American culture anything like it used to be.

In the 60s there was already a culture shaping across the country, so when it focused and concentrated in New York, it was a vibrant, transformational event. Post-war prosperity combined with a still-extant (soon to die) cultural egalitarianism that the whole world admired.

That’s gone now.

I can’t go on. I’m too vexed and upset… I’ll never be able to go home to NYC, and if I could (if rents dropped a LOT), it’s a cultural nothing.

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Charlie Hebdo and the Muhammad cartoons

The new issue of Charlie Hebdo is featuring the same Muhammad cartoons that provoked the terrorist killers five years ago to attack and kill CH staff members and cartoonists. The trial is starting now, so the magazine republished the cartoons. I subscribe to CH (digitally), and I’m trying to download the issue now, but the app isn’t responding. I’d ascribe that to popularity or to interference, but I suspect it’s just an unreliable app… NOTE — it worked. The app responded, and I’m looking at the issue.

So, where do I stand on CH? They should have the right to publish and not be murdered. Just so you know what I think. I suppose I think that, if they were wise, they would do more outreach in schools. Of course, they wouldn’t be allowed to, that would be supporting atheism… It’s only natural that Muslims consider attacks on Islam to be attacks on their bubbe and zayde (or teta and seedo). Many communities do not make the distinction between insulting “the religion” and insulting “the believers.”

There is research that shows that we react to attacks on values that are core to our identity (e.g., gun control) in ways indistinguishable from how we react to physical attacks. See the brilliant podcast You Are Not So Smart, #171.

(And, frankly, if you have to explain a joke or a cartoon that much, it isn’t working… you can blame the audience if you like for not “getting” it, but that doesn’t cut much ice when you’re sweating in front of the bare bricks…)

A good old friend of mine is disturbed that a recent poll (article in CH, article in Le Figaro) shows only 59% of French approve of CH’s publication of the cartoons, and that 18% of Muslims “do not condemn” the murders of the CH staff. My friend bemoans the lack of support for the French concept of laïcité.

As I understand it, laïcité just means that religion shall have no sway over government, which I think has a lot of support. I suspect that this is more, why should Muslims or young people who are sympathetic with them, be OK with a magazine that gratuitously offends a people who (in France) are underdogs and experience discrimination.

(Sidebar—Note the difference between the US idea of Freedom of Religion and the French concept of laïcité. Here in the US, the government cannot establish religion or interfere with the free exercise thereof. In France, religion may not interfere with government! I love that, and I wish we had more of it here—no more political “prayer breakfasts”, things being Under God, and so on. If only that were considered rude and wrong, as it is in France.)

(Sidebar to the Sidebar—Different histories explain this. Our revolution wasn’t explicitly about religion, but many colonists left England because it had an official religion that was not theirs. As soon as the Puritans got here and could exercise their religion freely, they set about docking the ears and noses of Quakers. They weren’t for “freedom of religion” except for their own. In France, the Revolution was against the aristocracy and the church. In the immortal words of Diderot, “The revolution is not over until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” For the history of this not-really-a-quote, see here.)

(Sidebar3—I wonder, since the French government owns all places of worship, why they permit Saudi petrocrat financing of Wahhabist extreme Islam. I suppose it must all be about the Euros. I have no information about this topic, but this is a blog that, after all, few people will ever see.)

And a lot of French people support the publication of the cartoons for what I would consider the wrong reason, namely that it does offend Muslims — that it “owns” them, to use the modern US phrase. I don’t think the pure, intellectual “freedom of speech” argument especially impresses kids in the banlieues who can’t get a job; and I don’t think it’s what is motivating a lot of the people cheering CH on — they just don’t like Arabs and Africans and enjoy seeing them insulted and humiliated.

I know that CH claims (vociferously!) that they are not aiming at Arab or African individuals but the religion, and they have anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic cartoons (and they must have anti-Protestant cartoons, but none come to mind…). Also, that Islam is a vastly powerful structure with a billion people under its sway. And this is very true. A lot of people who have strong opinions about CH have no idea what they actually publish. If you can read any French at all, I recommend taking a look. It’s quite amazing and very different from what you’d find in the US. If you’re thinking, Oh, isn’t it like Mad Magazine? you’re so, so wrong. There just is no equivalent.

While I am not religious myself, I do identify with Judaism and can feel personally threatened by attacks on the religion I don’t believe in (I do say the prayers on Friday night sometimes, though). But I do love a good “Hasids behaving badly” story when I see it in the Forward… And when CH mocks Judaism, it is more about Israel and circumcision and Hasidim and Haredim, which I agree are good targets for mockery (they’re not me, after all! Well, circumcision, sure, but I don’t have religious feelings about it; I never had a bris). They don’t have nice, bien-pensant Reform or Conservative Jewish congregations in Europe AFAIK, so there’s less of a target there and I am pretty much spared. So I acknowledge that it’s easy for me to support the right to negative speech that isn’t about me.

I love CH, and I love the culture that produces it, but I don’t agree with everything they do. They recently had a piece with several cartoons about how ridiculous it is to target Confederate monuments in the US—complete with what I consider offensive caricatures of black people. Their claim is the monuments are “just” speech. Of course, the speech they embody is saying, You will always be second-class citizens, you will always be under threat, you will never be safe, you will never be equal, we will kill you if we feel like it and we will be backed up by the police and justice system and we will never face punishment, while you must do as we say immediately and without question or we will kill you and get away with it because “we were scared”.

You know what I think about Confederate monuments? I think melt them into slag right there on their plinths. But, yes! I acknowledge that’s not a pure, principled, “all speech must be sacrosanct and left to express its message loudly forever” ideal. I prefer Germany’s approach that decided that pro-Nazi speech (in the form of monuments, among other things) should be removed. They made a national decision that certain speech was bad and had no place in a modern Germany. I’m perfectly OK with that.

I think Freedom of Speech and Freedom from Fear are in conflict much of the time. I understand that Congress cannot infringe FoS, but can’t do jack-shit about FfF, which is a “freedom” made up by FDR.

I know that fans of Confederate monuments claim that the “speech” they represent is something anodyne about pride, valor, respect… just like the Confederate flag is about sweet tea and magnolia blossoms. I am reminded of something a school friend’s older brother used to do: he’d swing his fist at his kid brother’s head and, at the last second, stop and coolly brush his hair back. So, induce fear and then claim deniability. He wasn’t going to hit him! (he just wanted to see him flinch…) This is cousin to the Schrödinger’s Douchebag phenomenon.

Anyway, I haven’t got a nice, tidy wrap-up. I approve of freedom of speech, including speech that intends to contradict or criticize someone else’s speech. And—just so it’s explicit—I’m against murder. I know! Brave stand.

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