Sunday, October 24, 2010

 

Great Exhibit


Fifth, Fourth, and Third Floors

The Last Newspaper

Multimedia available
The New Museum will present “The Last Newspaper,” a major exhibition inspired by the ways artists approach the news and respond to the stories and images that command the headlines. The exhibition will animate the Museum with signature artworks and a constant flow of information-gathering and processing undertaken by organizations and artist groups that have been invited to inhabit offices within the museum’s galleries. Partner organizations will use on-site offices to present their research, engage in rapid prototyping, and stage public dialogues, opening up the galleries as spaces of intellectual production as well as display. For visitors, “The Last Newspaper” will be a unique site of dialogue, participation, and critical thinking, posing new possibilities for a contemporary art museum experience. The exhibition is co-curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator of the New Museum, and Benjamin Godsill, Curatorial Associate.
The partner organizations that will form the active “departments” of “The Last Newspaper” exhibition include: the Center for Urban Pedagogy; StoryCorps; Latitudes; The Slought Foundation; INABA, Columbia University’s C-Lab; Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnlis/Netlab; and Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere. These partners will weave their topics together in on-site offices and a discussion space that will host scheduled programs such as talks and informal conversations between participants, museum visitors, and featured guests such as The New York Times Feminist Reading Groups, a project by Liz Linden and Jen Kennedy dedicated to examining that day’s issue of the newspaper.
A weekly newspaper compiled by partner organization Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Canepa Luna) will report on the events and discussions that take place throughout the galleries during the run of the exhibition. This publication will be distributed, free of charge, to New Museum visitors and will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings in lieu of a traditional catalogue. A second weekly publication, to be called “A Temporary Newspaper,” will evolve from a series of discussions, debates, interviews, and research into the epochal shifts occurring in the global information industry today. The “Temporary Newspaper” team (led by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab: Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture) will engage in the entire publication process, from conception to editorial discussions and design, in full view of the public.
“The Last Newspaper” will also include a selection of important art works from 1967 to the present, in which twenty-seven artists explore their own reactions to the news, the mechanics of its dispersal, or both. Paintings, works on paper, and performance pieces by artists like Judith Bernstein, Andrea Bowers, Sarah Charlesworth, Thomas Hirschhorn, Luciano Fabro, Hans Haacke, Emily Jacir, Mike Kelley, and Wolfgang Tillmans, all disassemble and re-contextualize elements of the newspaper in an effort to take charge of, and remake, the transmission of information that defines our daily lives. Using methods of collage, mimicry, and repurposing, these works deconstruct the newspaper and address the ambiguity about what is “news”.
The earliest work in “The Last Newspaper” exhibition is Luciano Fabro’s Pavement Tautology (1967), which is based on the traditional method of cleaning terrazzo, or tile floors, wherein the previous day’s newspapers are used to dry a freshly mopped floor. The most recent work in the show will be a series of paintings by Nate Lowman which he will create and install every week, working from a newspaper story and/or image that has compelled his attention. William Pope.L will supervise a performative restaging of his seminal work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) enlisting a team of collaborators to occasionally wander throughout the museum eating the financial daily. A suite of twenty works by Dash Snow, Untitled (2006), follows the downfall of Saddam Hussein as captured on the front pages of New York City tabloids, while Sarah Charlesworth’s Movie-Television-News-History (1979) addresses the coverage of an American newscaster’s on-camera murder by the troops of Anatasio Somoza at a check-point in Nicaragua. Featuring this arresting image as it appeared (often framed by a television window) on the front page of 27 U.S. newspapers, Charlesworth’s work shows the newspapers’ emerging dependency on electronic news formats, but also its import as a temporary but tangible record of events.
In many ways the exhibition is an exercise in citizen journalism whereby the constant re-ordering and annotation of information in both the artwork and the processes of the resident participants becomes an arena for the structuring and restructuring of truths.
PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
Center For Urban PedagogyFounded in 1997, Brooklyn-based CUP is a nonprofit organization that uses art, design, and visual culture to improve public participation in urban planning and community design, particularly among historically underrepresented communities. For this exhibition, CUP will present work from the Envisioning Development Toolkits program. Created in partnership with designers and community organizations throughout New York City, the toolkits are interactive teaching tools that demystify complex topics about land use and development. Organizers use them to reach their constituents and build their own advocacy campaigns around such topics as affordable housing and zoning. In this exhibit, CUP's toolkits will be on view, and CUP staff will conduct workshops with the completed Affordable Housing Toolkit, as well as field test hands-on activities from the forthcoming Zoning Toolkit.
StoryCorpsBrooklyn-based StoryCorps gathers the life stories of Americans by having close friends and family members interview each other in specially designed recording stations placed across the country. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. StoryCorps Conversations are preserved at the American Folklife Center and at the Library of Congress, and shared through weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition. For this exhibition, StoryCorps will use the New Museum’s visitor experience to research and rapidly prototype new ways to make their hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded information more readily available to the public.
Slought FoundationThis Philadelphia-based experimental organization, founded in 2002 by Aaron Levy, engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change through collaborations with cultural producers, communities, universities, and governments. For this exhibition, Slought will animate the entire New Museum with discursive displays about their Perpetual Peace Project, which explores Immanuel Kant's essay on the idea of "peace" with social theorists and political practitioners. Media stations in the interstitial spaces of the museum will accompany a shared community "arena" in the fourth-floor gallery intended for public programming, and a reading room "retreat" between the third- and fourth-floor galleries. For this exhibition, Slought and its partner institutions, including the European Union National Institutes of Culture and United Nations University, have collaborated with architect and designer Ken Saylor, as well as filmmakers Laura Hanna, Alexandra Lerman, and Project Projects.
LatitudesLatitudes, a Barcelona-based curatorial office founded in 2005, will act as instigators and connectors between the various artworks, departments, and other participants of “The Last Newspaper.” They will conceive, report, write, edit, design, and print a weekly newspaper “THE LAST POST / THE LAST GAZETTE / THE LAST REGISTER...” cataloguing the events and discussions that will take place in the gallery spaces during the duration of the exhibition. This free newspaper will be distributed to museum visitors, and a collected volume of all of the issues will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings.
Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/NetlabJoseph Grima is the current editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Kazys Varnelis the director of the Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Along with an expanded network of collaborators, Grima and Varnelis will create The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space in a performance-based editorial residency at the New Museum. This residency will transform a portion of the exhibition space into a forum for discussion as well as an editorial office. Grima, Varnelis, and their collaborators will publish a weekly publication that will be distributed in the galleries and will also be posted on walls around Manhattan allowing for open public reading.
Angel Nevarez and Valerie TevereA Dutiful Scrivener looks at the framework of the obituaries section of The New York Times. Through an interview with Bill McDonald, NY Times Obituaries Editor, A Dutiful Scrivener takes viewers through the journalistic criteria of posthumous representation, writing style, judgment, newsworthiness, and the obituary to be written. We see this as an alter-mausoleum where the logging of one’s achievements and failures is transformed into a process of questioning. How might we critically reflect upon this form of writing, its limitations and word count, in order to sum up a life?
Jeffrey Inaba/C-LabNew York-based architect Jeffrey Inaba will be working in collaboration with C-Lab, a think tank he directs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation which studies urbanism and architecture and makes policy recommendations, to animate the galleries by examining the role of weather in the news. The focus will be on weather as the single element in newscasts that is simultaneously predicative, interactive (with other stories at the top of the hour news broadcasts), and regularly featured on the front page of newspapers.
Jacob Fabricius/Old NewsJacob Fabricius, director of the Kunsthalle Malmo in Sweden, will continue his five-year-old practice of inviting artists to create newspapers that are themselves compilations of newspaper articles and advertisements gathered over time. Fabricius will present past examples of “Old News” as well as a new issue, commissioned by the New Museum for this exhibition.
Blu DotBlu Dot has created prototypes for self-assembly office furniture. Exhibition partner organizations can select from the available parts to create their workspaces from the central storage unit displayed within the gallery. The furniture is a combination of off-the-shelf parts and custom hardware.
ARTISTSAlighiero e Boetti;Judith Bernstein; Pierre Bismuth; Andrea Bowers; Francois Bucher; Sarah Charlesworth; Luciano Fabro; Robert Gober; Hans Haacke; Karl Haendel; Rachel Harrison; Thomas Hirschhorn; Emily Jacir; Larry Johnson; Mike Kelley; Nate Lowman; Sarah Lucas; Adam McEwen; Aleksandra Mir; Adrian Piper; William Pope.L; Allen Ruppersberg; Dexter Sinister; Dash Snow; Rikrit Tiravanija; Wolfgang Tillmans; and Kelley Walker.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

 

Baltimore City Paper on Jazz Scene

Music
Baltimore's Buzz
New jazz albums showcase some heady contemporary talent with local ties



By Geoffrey Himes
Published: October 20, 2010
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Since Michael Formanek moved to Maryland in 2003 to take a full-time teaching position in the Peabody Institute’s jazz department, the bear-like bassist has been a regular presence in Baltimore’s jazz venues. He quickly proved himself a fascinating composer and a fearless improviser, a musician who raised the game of everyone around him. None of this music, however, was documented, because Formanek hadn’t released an album under his own name since 1998. He claimed that he was staying away from the studio until he had his new teaching gig under control, but it was frustrating to hear all this terrific music in the clubs and then have it evaporate into thin air.
So it’s welcome news that Formanek is not only releasing a new album this month but is releasing it on one of the world’s top jazz labels: Germany’s ECM Records. The disc, The Rub and Spare Change, doesn’t feature one of Formanek’s Maryland bands but rather a group of his old New York friends—alto saxophonist Tim Berne, pianist Craig Taborn, and drummer Gerald Cleaver—who have all played with the bassist on Baltimore stages. The quartet showcases the impressive new album at An die Musik Oct. 29.
The Rub and Spare Change features six Formanek compositions that renegotiate the give-and-take between notated and improvised music in jazz. At its best, jazz works as a kind of democratic collaboration, where all musicians contribute musical ideas and respond to their colleagues’ ideas. A bandleader who is too controlling can stifle the flow, but a bandleader who is too passive can allow the interaction between ideas to wither with too many disconnected individual statements.
Formanek finds the sweet spot in between. He doesn’t determine the entire piece, as a classical composer or big-band arranger would, but neither does he offer one theme and then allow his soloists to go wherever they will. Instead, he offers several as guideposts through each tune and allows his musicians to travel from post to post as they think best. Because the improvisers share a starting point and several interval points before the ending, they tend to stay in contact with one another along the journey. Rather than one person soloing while the other three hang back in support, all four musicians are constantly improvising, alternating who takes the foreground, but all of them always prodding and responding. And because Formanek is a bassist who thinks rhythmically, this give-and-take is as much about divisions of time as it is about pitches of notes.
The title track, for example, begins with a Monkish theme that develops a stutter step, knocked out by Cleaver but adopted in various ways by everyone. About halfway through the nine-minute piece, a dreamy piano motif commands the foreground, even though Cleaver is still rattling in the background. Berne picks up Taborn’s reverie and starts murmuring along with it, but the sax grows increasingly agitated until it’s wailing like a siren over Taborn’s broken chords before subsiding again. It’s a joint journey for all four musicians, and it holds together only because Formanek has provided a good map. But the journey is more satisfying because the composer has allowed for so many scenic detours.
Formanek is also the bassist on a new album credited to two more Maryland musicians, saxophonist Carl Grubbs and pianist Lafayette Gilchrist. Maryland Traditions in Jazz takes its title from a program sponsored by the Maryland State Arts Council that pairs young, developing artists with older, established masters—not just in jazz but also in folk-culture fields ranging from Irish accordionists to Eastern Shore muskrat skinners. Gilchrist studied with Grubbs (who has recorded with Stanley Clarke, Julius Hemphill, and Kenny Barron) from 2007-2008. They performed the music they had worked on at An die Musik in 2009, and a recording of that show was released this year.
Because the emphasis was on Maryland’s own jazz history, the set list includes compositions by locals such as pianist Eubie Blake, singer Billie Holiday, drummer Chick Webb, and Grubbs himself. The results are about what you’d expect when four talented musicians (Eric Allen is the drummer) who don’t work together regularly tackle some familiar standards: There are a few rough patches (especially with intonation), but there are plenty of bravura moments too. What you mostly hear are the three bandleaders feeling relaxed, liberated from the challenge of inventing new music, and enjoying a romp through the past.
One of Formanek’s colleagues at Peabody is voice teacher Jay Clayton, who commutes from New York. Clayton—who has recorded with Steve Reich, Charlie Haden, John Cage, and Muhal Richard Abrams—has just released a solo album on Sunnyside Records, In and Out of Love. “Although I am primarily known as an avant-garde singer (kind of outdated term but it works),” she writes in the liner notes, “I love the jazz standards.” She recorded the new album at the same time she cut her 2008 disc, The Peace of Wild Things, a truly experimental project that had her inventing melodies for the poetry of e.e. cummings (among others) with no accompaniment but her own voice and manipulated electronics. Just as the tunefulness of jazz standards informed that effort, so does the experimental spirit of The Peace of Wild Things influence the approach of In and Out of Love.
On the new album, Clayton’s supple soprano is backed only by guitarist Jack Wilkins and bassist Jay Anderson. This wide open soundscape forces the singer to act as much as a horn player as an interpreter of lyrics. In fact, Clayton sings Eddie Harris’ “Freedom Jazz Dance” entirely in scat syllables—and she doesn’t just follow the original melody but bends it and twists it into knots. She adds a percussive snap to the front edge of these syllables, making her sound as much like a vibraphone as a horn. Several other songs, such as Kenny Barron’s “Sunshower” and John Carisi’s “Israel,” were instrumentals before words were added, and Clayton’s vocal approach is instrumental first and textual second. But even on standards as familiar as Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or Rodgers and Hart’s “Falling in Love with Love,” Clayton takes welcome liberties.
The most prominent Maryland jazz musician (with the possible exception of Gary Bartz) over the past two decades has been Cyrus Chestnut, who released a series of brilliant gospel-flavored jazz piano albums for Atlantic Records in the mid-’90s. Since then most of his releases have been high-concept projects—a Latin jazz outing, tributes to Elvis Presley and Pavement, a Christmas disc, a pair of hymn collections—all of them quite likable but most of them constrained by their concept. So it’s a pleasure to learn that Chestnut’s new album for Jazz Legacy Productions, Journeys, returns to the format of those Atlantic masterpieces: the pianist leading his road trio through a set of original compositions. The result is his best album since 2001’s Soul Food.
Chestnut opens the album with “Smitty’s Joint,” a blistering hard-bop number that proves just how melodic and precise he can be at even the fastest tempos—and bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Neal Smith have learned how to stay right there with the leader. “Little Jon” boasts a jaunty, Monkish theme that should seduce lots of pianists into playing it, while “New Light” surrounds its arresting center with a post-bop agitation. But Chestnut doesn’t have to play fast to impress; romantic ballads such as “Eyes of an Angel” and the title track generate a rhythmic tension even at slower tempos while they unleash a flood of feeling through harmonies that turn stretching into yearning. Something similar happens on the two slow hymns, both instrumental originals, that close the disc with a meditative yet intense prayerfulness. ■
Lafayette Gilchrist and the New Volcanoes are joined by Carl Filipiak for a free concert at the Towson University Center for the Arts Oct. 24 at 3 p.m. Michael Formanek, Tim Berne, Craig Taborn, and Gerald Cleaver play An Die Musik Oct. 29. Cyrus Chestnut performs at the Kennedy Center Jazz Club Nov. 19.

Friday, October 15, 2010

 

Econophysics Blog - Cool

(BTW Kapuscinski also wrote a bio of Jah himself, Sellasieh the First)

Friday, May 04, 2007

The Black Swan ... "Well, That's Life!"

The late, great Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, wrote -- in his book on the last days of the Soviet Union, Imperium -- that the genius of the Russian people can be summed up in their oft-repeated phrase, "Well, that's life!"A young boy finds that his hometown is no longer a part of Poland but is, instead, a part of the Soviet Union due to the extremely improbable (and brief) courtship between Hitler and Stalin. Well, that's life! Shortly thereafter, that same boy finds many of his friends and neighbors being carted off on trains to Siberia by the NKVD (the forerunner to the KGB) for no apparent reason. Well, that's life!On some perverse whim, Stalin decides to (literally) starve ten million Ukrainian peasants -- almost a third of the population -- to death. Well, that's life! At the death/work colony of Kolyma -- a place that gave birth to another phrase of relativist consolation, "Don't despair, it was worse in Kolyma!" -- Beria's henchmen gave their victims the 'choice' between dying of hunger, hard labor, sleep deprivation, disease, sadism, hopeless despair, (literal) freezing, and, for the fortunate few, being shot. Well, that's life!All of a sudden, the mighty Soviet Union -- which had terrorized, humiliated, enslaved, and froze people to death -- collapses and disappears from the maps ... its red tzars going the way of the tzars of old. Well, that's life! Just as unexpectedly, there are new nations and quasi-nations that arise out of the Imperium that virtually no one -- including the people who are part of these would-be nations -- had known had existed. Well, that's life!The genius of Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- on masterful display in his new book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable -- is that he has managed to capture what Kapuscinski calls the "essence of truth," as represented by the aphorism "Well, that's life!", in an even more succinct (but no less scientific) concept/turn-of-phrase: "The Black Swan."This being (in part) a book review, I feel compelled to offer up some sort of recommendation for the book buying public. So here it is: Buy this book. Read this book. Read it carefully. Read it again.The Black Swan, the book, is the most important book in social science since Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Nassim Taleb's book also happens to be the most significant contribution to the science and philosophy of uncertainty since Andrey Kolmogorov axiomitized probability theory (which along with Bayes, gave us the solid foundation necessary to think clearly about chance) and made progress (with contributions by Chaitin and Solomonoff) towards a more mathematically precise definition of randomness. In terms of epistemology, reading The Black Swan gave me a sense of intellectual kinship that I have not felt since reading Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox."The rest of this essay will be dedicated to explaining, at least in part, why I am heartily endorsing Nassim Taleb's latest book. As a bonus, I will explain why I started The Econophysics Blog."Amen," Platonicity, and 'The Little Prince'I am slightly embarrassed, but not too embarrassed, to admit that reading The Black Swan was an almost quasi-religious experience, full of sublime epiphanies. There were parts of this book where I found myself muttering "amen" -- in the fashion of many in the plebeian parts of Protestantism -- in delighted agreement with the sentiments of its author. (I don't know whether the Reverend Thomas Bayes ever generated an amen from his congregation, but I'm sure he would have given a hearty amen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb.)All of this genuine enthusiasm is despite the fact that I was expecting to be slightly disappointed by the latest book. After reading his previous book, Fooled By Randomness, I had the impression that Taleb's next book, which became The Black Swan, would be a book that would be geared toward a more technical audience and would be something akin to an anthology of NNT's more formal writings with a sprinkling of more accessible material. Instead, The Black Swan, the book, that we have before us is targeted toward more-or-less the same audience as Fooled By Randomness had, and follows a similar format and tone. But this superficial similarity is (unintentionally) deceptive.The Black Swan goes into intellectual territory that Fooled By Randomness almost but did not ultimately tread. The best way to distinguish the two books (and contrary to some book reviews out there, there definitely is a distinction) is via the following: Fooled By Randomness raised important and discomforting (which is precisely why it is important) questions about our understanding of, and decision making under, uncertainty; that book inspired the creation of The Econophysics Blog (more on this in the next section). The Black Swan either answers many of the questions raised by the previous book and/or it provides a solid road map to arriving at whatever solutions (and there may ultimately be no solutions) that may exist to the fundamental problem of living in a world where changes in time and chance profoundly affect us all.In other words, The Black Swan, the book, is one of the best maps available to help us navigate through a world of uncertainty. The idea of distinguishing between useful versus misleading maps is one of the themes that stood out in my mind as I read the book.Nassim Taleb mentions the analogy to maps in relation to his disdain for what he calls "Platonicity." Taleb defines Platonicity (named after the philosopher Plato) as "our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined 'forms,' whether objects, like triangles, or social notions .... we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures ..." The cardinal sin of Platonicity is that it "makes us think that we understand more than we actually do."As he makes clear throughout the book, Taleb is not absolutely against the use of intellectual 'maps' (i.e., idealized forms, concepts, methodologies, etc.); what he is opposed to is the uncritical acceptance and use of such Platonic maps and to the use of wrong or misleading maps for inappropriate situations.Taleb's idea about the foolishness and dangers of Platonicity reminded me of the observations Kapuscinski made about the map used by Antoine de Saint-Exupery as recounted in Saint-Exupery's book, Terre Des Hommes (the English translation: Wind, Sand and Stars). Saint-Exupery was an aviator, adventurer, and writer, who is best known for writing a book that is considered by some to be a classic in children's literature and by others to be a fascinating work of philosophical fiction, Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince).In 1926, Saint-Exupery was to make a flight from Toulouse (in France), across Spain, to Dakar (in north Africa). Kapuscinski sums up Saint-Exupery's predicament in the following manner (from Imperium):
Saint-Exupery studies the map of his route, but it tells him nothing; it is abstract, general, "vapid." He decides to consult his older colleague, Henry Guillaumet, who knows this route by heart. "But what a strange lesson in geography I was given!" the author recalled. ". . . Instead of telling me about Guadix [Cadiz], he spoke of three orange-trees on the edge of town. 'Beware of those trees. Better mark them on the map.' " And those three orange-trees seemed to me thenceforth higher than the Sierra Nevada." .... "I also assumed a defensive posture vis-a-vis the thirty sheep scattered as in a loose battle formation on the slope of a hill. . . . 'You think the meadow empty, and suddenly bang! there are thirty sheep in your wheels. . . .'"When Taleb is warning us against the Platonic confusion between maps and territories, what he is suggesting is that we are all in the same predicament that Saint-Exupery found himself in. Just as Saint-Exupery needed a good map to help him navigate in the highly dangerous and risky world of early aviation, we need good maps to help us navigate through a world full of high impact but difficult to predict risks (i.e., Black Swans, the concept). Yet, like that French aviator/writer, we are given useless and/or misleading maps by the so-called experts.Platonic 'maps' based on (Gaussian) bell-curve probability/statistical distributions (what Taleb calls the "Great Intellectual Fraud (GIF)") are like Guillaumet's map; they are (as Kapuscinski would have put it) 'map-mementos.' Platonic maps are too devoid of detail, too vapid, to serve as a useful guide when navigating a world shaped by extreme, catastrophic risk; those maps exaggerate non-dangers (like Guillaumet's 'giant' orange trees and the platoon of 'fearsome' sheep) while totally ignoring (or severely discounting) very serious dangers (like the actual mountains and platoons of hostile natives that Saint-Exupery was really worried about).One of many examples that Taleb dissects of a psuedo-expert promoting Platonic/Guillaumet maps of risk is the book on catastrophic risk written by Judge Richard Posner, a highly controversial U.S. federal appeals court judge, law school lecturer, and public 'intellectual' (I use the term loosely here). I can't think of someone who is less qualified by temperament, education, training, skill set, life experience, etc., to claim to be an expert on catastrophic risk. So what does he do? He writes a book about it! (Presumably, it sold well enough.) At least Henri Guillaumet had the decency to be qualified to make his map.Posner, along with a rogue's gallery of pseudo-experts (and, to be fair, real experts), advocate the use of Platonic Gaussian models of probability and risk despite the fact that one doesn't need to be Ramanujan or Karl Friedrich Gauss to figure out that events like 9/11 and many financial market crashes are double-digit sigma events, i.e., essentially impossible in the bell-curve, GIF world. Frankly, even from a textbook Gaussian perspective, many of these would-be Platonic 'mapmakers' are creating more confusion than clarity by their attempts to over-simplify the risky world we live in. Platonizers, like Posner, are essentially dismissing the possibilities of Black Swans, the concept; because they have seen thousands of white swans, they severely discount or completely dismiss the possibility that 'all swans aren't white.'What Nassim Nicholas Taleb does so well in this book is to offer up an intellectual map of our risk-filled world (an a-Platonic map) that is more accurate and realistic than the pedantic view of chance that routinely misses the black swans. In The Black Swan, Taleb embraces the emerging scientific field of complexity theory -- especially the fractal mathematics of Benoit Mandelbrot. Power law-Zipf-Mandelbrot-Pareto-Levy-whatever one wants to call it probability distributions, self-similarity / self-affinity, scale-free structures, undefined (or infinite) statistical moments, and 'wild,' fractal randomness, are what Taleb calls "Grey Swans of Extremistan," and they serve as viable alternatives to the Platonic models when it comes to understanding the high impact, almost unpredictable nature of extreme and catastrophic Black Swan events.I was GIF'ed (and Why Crowds Can Never Be Wise)When I took my first class in statistics (this was before Nassim Taleb started writing books), I faced an intellectual crises of confidence. I felt I was reasonably good at mathematics (at least the marks I received in math courses and exams said so), but some of what I was being told in my statistics class sounded daft to me.My biggest dilemma was over the concept of 'outliers.' In a nutshell, outliers are observations or data points that are considered to be so far outside the range of the expected (or hoped for?) bell-curve Gaussian density distribution that they could be ... ney, they should be! ... dismissed. I had a very serious problem with this cavalier dismissal of outliers. Why? It wasn't because I was too dull (or perhaps I was) to understand what the lecturer was saying or what was written in my introductory statistics textbook. I could deal with dogma as well as anybody. No, the problem went much deeper than that.I'm from a rough working class background. The 'outliers' -- what NNT calls Black Swans, the concept -- that my statistics class so easily waved away are what shaped my life and what shaped the lives of the people I was familiar with. The outliers ... the Black Swans ... are what we -- for better or worse (usually the latter) -- lived by. Most of the Black Swans people like myself faced were ugly: the spectre of poverty, humiliation at the hands of 'betters,' crappy hand-me-down clothes, illness and injury with no time or money to fix it, abusive families, alcoholism, tyrannical bosses, dead-end jobs, hopeless despair, fear. What kept us going was the possibility of a good outlier for a change: winning the lottery, hearing our favorite song on the radio, dreaming of a better life, and a down-on-his-luck kid somehow getting a fancy education.So I'm sitting in my statistics class trying to get a fancy education, and I'm in the grips of an intellectual (and, almost, moral) dilemma. On the one hand, every fiber of my blue-collar common sense being wanted to point out that it is ridiculous to dismiss some infrequent or improbable event when it is precisely such events that may have the biggest impact in the real world (keep in mind, this was well before NNT started writing books and I had heard of Sextus Empiricus, et al.). From where I came in life, you'd have to be a dummy to think that some out-of-the-blue thing wouldn't change (usually, mess up ... I'm trying to avoid profanity) your life. On the other hand, I knew I would be considered an idiot or a worm by those 'better' than me if I seriously challenged the pedantic notion of outliers.So I kept my mouth shut (for once in my life). I was a good boy and accepted the 'wisdom' of the bell-curve, along with the idea of outliers. But this always bothered me.So a few years ago, I bought and read a book by some guy named Nassim Nicholas Taleb titled, Fooled by Randomness (the second edition). This book was usually shelved in the business section in most bookstores, which automatically made me suspicious and reluctant to buy the book since I find most business books by business 'gurus' to be too vapid to be worth my time (I'd rather read a book by Kafka or a book on neuroscience, particle physics, or poker). I was pleasantly surprised to read Dr. Taleb's book. Here was someone who was my social 'better' giving me permission to think the way I always wanted to think. To me it was a proclamation of intellectual freedom.That is why I started blogging about a year ago and started The Econophysics Blog, which you are reading if you got this far. My original intent was to promote the spirit of Nassim Taleb's ideas ... basically, because the way he thought is basically the way I thought. On the masthead for this blog I could have put, instead of the nerdy stuff I have up there, the motto "I'm an intellectual explorer searching for truth in a world of uncertainty inspired by Taleb, Popper, et al.," but that sounded a bit too soft-in-the-head.That is also why I am writing this ringing endorsement of Dr. Taleb's latest book, The Black Swan. As I wrote in the previous section, The Black Swan picks up where Fooled By Randomness left off. Any would-be intellectual explorer searching for truth in a world of uncertainty must buy and read this book.There is one book out there that I will never give a positive review to. I agree with the idea that a book should not be judged by its cover, but some things on the cover, in this case the title, are so odious to me that I can't possibly like it. There is a book out there called The Wisdom of Crowds; the title is daft. Crowds can't be wise. They can never be wise.Yes, crowds can often have more information and, even, knowledge, but they may also be more ignorant than even the most marginalized individual. Crowds, or 'swarms,' can be more correct than individual judgments, but they can also be terrifically and terrifyingly wrong. But even if crowds were almost always better informed and almost always right, they can still never be wise.Wisdom is an outlier; wisdom is a Black Swan. By its very nature, wisdom goes against the grain. Wisdom cannot be manufactured by groupthink, or by a swam of bildungsphilisters, or a bildungsphilister(s) that happens to get a publishing deal.The Black Swan is full of that extremely rare and improbable quality, wisdom. As the book jacket states, The Black Swan, the book, is itself a Black Swan ... the good kind, the kind that is wisdom itself.Black Swan Virgins (or Did They Really Get It?)Needless to say, I have no serious criticism of The Black Swan, the book and the concept, or its author. But, since this is a (sort of) book review, I suppose I am expected to say something critical. In that case, the only criticism I can have is directed toward the potential readership of the book.Most of the book reviews of The Black Swan (with one unfortunate exception) have been positive. As of the time of writing, the book is number five on the New York Times Bestsellers' List. Someone not having read, or not understanding, the book might conclude that all of this good news is confirmatory evidence that the public gets it ... they really understand the Black Swan, the concept and the main point of the book. Unfortunately, as much as I love the book, I am skeptical about whether the reading public really gets it or will get it.The problem is not with the book, its author, or its editors. The book is well-written and well-thought out. There aren't any major errors or typos in it ... certainly, nothing that would cloud someone's understanding of the main points of the book. No, the problem lies with the readers themselves.As I wrote in the last section, reading Dr. Taleb's previous book opened up intellectual vistas for me. But this made me wonder, "How can this guy with a fancy pedigree understand things that cab drivers, auto mechanics, factory workers, janitors, truck drivers, et al., understand but those socially 'better' than them not understand?" I eventually got the answers when I read Malcolm Gladwell's excellent profile of NNT in The New Yorker (you can get a similar biography by reading The Black Swan book). Taleb got it 'because' he had experienced Black Swans -- homeland and culture torn apart due to an out-of-the-blue event, and health problems that the GIF-prone mind couldn't have foreseen.I want to take a slight digression here. I want to make it clear that I do not want to make the same logical mistake the southern Italian professor makes in chapter six of the book. This mistake is something that the book constantly challenges. The mistake -- which Taleb calls "the round trip fallacy" -- is really the idea of the sufficient condition being confused with the necessary condition in formal logic (e.g., "all poodles are dogs" does not make all dogs poodles). The mistake that the Italian professor makes in chapter six is a variant of this fallacy -- with the twist that the notion of assigning causality is involved along with the problem of sufficient vs. necessary.(By the way, I strongly object to the Italian professor's characterization of Protestants as being incapable of appreciating Black Swans. As Rev. Thomas Bayes and Sir Dr. Karl Popper could have attested to, being Protestant is no impediment to believing in Black Swans.)Clearly not all Lebanese Orthodox Christians who experienced the civil war and wound up becoming financial traders are Black Swan believing skeptical empiricists. What I am saying is that -- while it is not sufficient to have experienced (suffered) Black Swans to become a Black Swan believing skeptical empricist -- it is absolutely necessary.It is interesting to note that the two people that Nassim Nicholas Taleb expresses the highest respect towards -- Benoit Mandelbrot and George Soros -- are men who experienced Black Swans in their lives (escaping the Nazis during World War II). It is also interesting to note that my hero and the father of modern probability theory, the mathematician, Andrey Kolmogorov, experienced Black Swans in his life (lost both of his parents at an early age and was raised by his maternal aunts).One of my other heroes, Ryszard Kapuscinski, would have loved Nassim Taleb's book. Kapuscinski would have really gotten it. It's not because of any quantitative ability; Kapuscinski wasn't Stanislaw Ulam. I doubt Kapuscinski could have solved a stochastic differential equation to save his life, or had the foggiest notion of what a power law or a fractal was.But, time and time again, Kapuscinski experienced Black Swans. In fact, he made his career out of Black Swans by telling the stories of Black Swans that took the form of armed revolutions, ethnic conflict, deposed Middle Eastern shahs and African emperors, fearful and fleeing colonists, disintegerating empires, and wars fought over football (soccer).This leads me to another set of fallacies that are directed toward NNT. Many people claim that Taleb and those who are like minded are advocating taking no risks whatsoever. Nothing could be further from the truth!Obviously, Nassim Taleb, as a financial trader, has had to take a tremendous amount of risks in his professional life. Ditto for George Soros.Benoit Mandelbrot has taken on a tremendous amount of risk intellectually. Instead of taking the safe and intellectually deadening route of most academics, he has worked at the margins to make the idea of fractals a viable academic discipline. A similar sort of thing could be said about Andrey Kolmogorov.As for Ryszard Kapuscinski? He once asked the rhetorical question of why he did what he did, "Why do I risk my life time and time again?" Why did he risk his life time and time again when faced with murderous rebels, soldiers, and policemen? The answer: He was on a "mission" ... the mission was to get the story behind the story ... to get to the "essence of the truth."So those who believe in the Black Swan often take incredible risks ... they've stared the Black Swan in its face and they often want to do it again and again. As Nassim Taleb has so eloquently answered his critics, it's not that he wants people to take no risks, it's that he doesn't want us to take risks in ignorance or blind to the reality of 'wild,' discontinuous randomness.Other criticisms directed towards NNT -- that he is denying all casuality (no, he is not; he believes that assigning causal links should be based on skeptical empiricism -- which can include applying Einsteinian 'thought experiments'), or that he is opposed to all reductionism (i.e., Platonicity) in science (again, no; he -- as Einstein would have put it -- wants 'science' to be as simple as possible but no simpler) -- can be addressed in a similar fashion. But I must end this essay.In closing, why am I so skeptical that potential readers (recognizing the fact that buying a book is not the same thing as reading it) won't really get it? Because many readers of this book -- especially the MBA totting types (or want-to-be's), and, I suspect, even people with solid scientific backgrounds -- are Black Swan virgins. They've won't really get it 'because' they have never really experienced Black Swans. I'm not saying these people have never experienced problems or challenges, it's just that the problems they have faced belong in Mediocristan while Black Swans are creatures of Extremistan (read the book and you will know what I mean).I think Nassim Taleb makes the point about the importance of distinguishing between those who are experienced with Black Swans versus the Black Swan virgins eloquently in the Prologue of The Black Swan (p. xxiv):
I don't particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. ... the normal is often irrelevant.There used to be a time when -- even in the swankiest professions and socio-intellectual circles -- there were some old-hands and young 'Horatio Algers' that had experienced Black Swans ... i.e., those who had been tested under severe circumstances. It might be a financial trader who had been affected by the Great Depression or had to flee their homeland with only a suitcase or two. It might be a scientist (natural or social) who survived a war, revolution, genocide, or a famine. It might be a student whose parents didn't know the lingua franca (usually English) and really knew what hardscrabble meant without ever having heard that word because he or she lived it.But those times have passed. It is ironic that -- as I wrote in my previous blog post, Tyranny of the Power Law -- that the very thing that brought the 'elite' success in life, the power law -- a symptom of the Black Swan, makes people blind to Black Swans by allowing the Black Swan blind to 'protect' themselves by entrenching their privilege.Anyone who reads and understands The Black Swan, the book, will realize, however, that this can't last. Black Swan virgins -- especially those who are responsible for billions of dollars (or pounds, or Euros, etc.), or those responsible for the lives of millions (or even billions) of innocent people -- will eventually experience the Black Swan. Sadly, for innocent pension holders or even more innocent peace-loving, law-abiding citizens the world over, these Black Swan virgins won't know what to do. They'll fumble at the moment of destiny because they were blind to the fact that life is punctuated by extreme risks and they were blinded to that reality by the Platonized idea that risk can be 'managed' or controlled ... "risk leaps not glides."Even a book of rare genius like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book -- unless read carefully and with humility -- can do much to prepare these Black Swan virgins. When they face their Black Swan -- what the truly great historians and thinkers used to call 'destiny' -- it will be too late. Well, that's life!

Thursday, October 07, 2010

 

Felipe Campelo - Nosso Novo Bilac

Quem me compra ?

Quem me compra…
Este cavalo alado?
E este tigre deitado?
Quem me compra...
Este casarão?
E este facão?
Quem me compra...
Esta bala?
E esta moça na sala?
Quem me compra...
Este colégio?
E este badejo?
E quem me compra este canzarrão?
Nenhum homenzarrão?
Quem gosta do meu leilão?

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

 

Reciclagem Cultural e Ecologia Religiosa Pós-Tudo

(Trecho do conto "Intestino Grosso" de Rubem Fonseca, em "Feliz Ano Novo")

“Você disse, pelo telefone, o lema, adote uma árvore e mate uma criança. Isso significa que você odeia a humanidade?”

“Meu slogan podia ser, também, adote um animal selvagem e mate um homem. Isso não porque odeie, mas, ao contrário, por amar os meus semelhantes. Apenas tenho medo que os seres humanos se transformem primeiro em devoradores de insetos e depois em insetos devoradores. Em suma, tem gente demais, ou vai ter gente demais daqui a pouco no mundo, criando uma excessiva dependência à tecnologia e uma necessidade de regimentalização próxima da organização do formigueiro. Vai chegar o dia em que a melhor herança que os pais podem deixar para os filhos será o próprio corpo, para os filhos comerem. Aliás é chegado o momento de fazermos, nós os artistas e escritores, um grande movimento cultural e religioso universal, no sentido de se criar o hábito de nos alimentarmos também com a carne dos nossos mortos, Jesus, Alá, Maomé, Moisés, envolvidos na campanha. Está havendo um terrível desperdício de proteínas. Swift e outros já disseram coisa parecida, mas estavam fazendo sátira. O que eu proponho é uma nova religião, superantropocêntrica, o Canibalismo Místico.”

“Você comeria o seu pai?”

“Em churrasco ou ensopadinho, não. Mas em forma de biscoito, como foi mostrado naquele filme, eu não teria a menor repugnância em devorar o meu pai. É possível ainda que alguém queira devorar a mãe assada, inteirinha, como uma galinha, para depois lamber os dedos e os beiços, dizendo mamãe sempre foi muito boa. É uma questão de gosto.”

Monday, October 04, 2010

 

Pau Intelectuau

28/05/2010 - 17:39 - O tabu em torno da razão

MAURÍCIO TUFFANI O pensador alemão Martin Heidegger problematiza as próprias noções de verdade e de razão, ou seja, ele as recusa como absolutas Em seu artigo "Irracionalismo" (Ilustrada, 23/5), o colunista Antonio Cícero contestou os que acusam Descartes de ser autor de um pensamento conservador e repressivo. Mas o fez atribuindo indevidamente a Martin Heidegger um "feroz anticartesianismo" e também a "desqualificação" da tradição filosófica e da razão. Com o devido respeito ao colunista, suas imputações ao pensador alemão do século 20 são simplificações falseadoras, assim como as próprias acusações ao filósofo francês do século 17. Descartes é uma das melhores provas da fragilidade da famosa 11ª das "Teses sobre Feuerbach", de Marx: "Os filósofos se limitaram a interpretar o mundo. Cabe transformá-lo". É inegável o papel revolucionário do cartesianismo na consolidação do ideário que dessacralizou o mundo e possibilitou submetê-lo aos rumos da burguesia em ascensão. Heidegger não deixou de reconhecer o valor do pensamento moderno. Não faria sentido o rótulo "anticartesianismo", mesmo sem o adjetivo "feroz". Leitura cuidadosa de suas obras desautoriza a mostrá-las com uso do prefixo "anti". Aliás, como disse ele em "Sobre o Humanismo", de 1947, "no âmbito do pensamento essencial, toda oposição é supérflua". Em relação especificamente a Descartes, a obra principal de Heidegger, "Ser e Tempo" (parágrafo 24), ressalta não ser contestação à validade da concepção de certeza do pensador francês. Trata-se, isso sim, de mostrar a noção cartesiana não como essência da certeza, mas como derivação dessa essência. Em outras palavras, Heidegger problematiza as próprias noções de verdade e de razão. Ou seja, ele as recusa como absolutas. Mas isso -que o colunista não aceita - não é desqualificar a razão nem a ciência, a técnica e a modernidade. "Seria insensato investir às cegas contra o mundo técnico. Seria ter vistas curtas querer condenar o mundo técnico como uma obra do diabo", disse o pensador alemão em 1949, numa palestra para uma plateia não especializada, publicada com o título "Serenidade". Sua objeção é outra: "Contudo, sem nos darmos conta, estamos de tal modo apegados aos objetos técnicos que nos tornamos seus escravos". Há muitas críticas contundentes a Heidegger. Aqui mesmo, no Brasil, um de seus ex-alunos, o gaúcho Ernildo Stein, destacou que seu pensamento se torna vulnerável quando é preciso fazer juízos históricos sobre o aqui e agora. E acrescentou: "A tentação de se apresentar como profeta, enquanto se é filósofo, além de absurda, é ridícula. E Heidegger nem sempre consegue fugir a essa tentação". Por sua vez, Carlos Alberto Ribeiro de Moura, da USP, apontou na leitura heideggeriana de outros filósofos, especialmente de Nietzsche, a "tortura dos textos para extorquir-lhes "confissões" ao gosto do intérprete". Por falar em Nietzsche, vale lembrar que, em "Além do Bem e do Mal" (parágrafo sexto), ele destacou que toda filosofia esconde intenções morais. Sejam quais forem as de Antonio Cícero, elas parecem fazer do questionamento da razão um tabu.

MAURÍCIO TUFFANI é jornalista, editor do blog Laudas Críticas e assessor de comunicação e imprensa da Unesp.

ANTONIO CICERO

Heidegger, Descartes e a razão

Heidegger assegura que Descartes representa "o início de uma mais ampla decadência da filosofia"

EM ARTIGO intitulado "Irracionalismo", publicado há duas semanas nesta coluna, observei que, paradoxalmente, uma das explicações para a enorme influência de Heidegger sobre tantos intelectuais franceses parece ser justamente o seu feroz anticartesianismo.
Além disso, relacionei o irracionalismo que identifico nesses intelectuais "pós-modernistas" com a relativização a que o autor de "Caminhos de floresta" tenta submeter o próprio conceito de razão. Esta semana, o sr. Maurício Tuffani publicou na Folha um artigo intitulado "O tabu em torno da razão", em que, por um lado, afirma ser indevida minha atribuição a Heidegger de um feroz anticartesianismo e, por outro lado, pretende questionar minha crítica à tentativa heideggeriana de relativizar a razão.
Confesso que o artigo me surpreendeu. Supõe-se que alguém que se arvore em defensor de determinado autor tenha um grande interesse nele, de modo que, além de ter lido ao menos algumas de suas obras, conheça e admire o teor geral do seu pensamento.
Ora, as palavras do sr. Tuffani evidenciam que ele não leu nem conhece, ainda que indiretamente, a obra do autor que pretende socorrer. Não há outra explicação possível para sua declaração de que, em relação a Heidegger, "não faria sentido o rótulo "anticartesianismo", mesmo sem o adjetivo "feroz'"."
Digo isso porque um dos pontos em torno do qual há praticamente consenso entre os comentadores de Heidegger é exatamente quanto ao caráter anticartesiano da obra do "Mestre da Floresta Negra". É que Heidegger considera Descartes o fundador da metafísica moderna da subjetividade. Essa metafísica, segundo ele, leva às últimas consequências aquela que, iniciada na antiguidade, com Platão, identifica-se com o que o autor de "Ser e tempo" considera o "esquecimento do ser".
Heidegger pensa, ademais, que toda a filosofia moderna, inclusive a de Nietzsche, é refém da interpretação cartesiana do ente e da verdade. Ora, o pensamento de Heidegger pretende lutar exatamente contra esse esquecimento, do qual supõe decorrer o niilismo moderno, "o sombreamento do mundo, a fuga dos deuses, a destruição da terra, a massificação do ser humano, a suspeita rancorosa contra tudo o que é criador e livre". É evidente, portanto, que tal pensamento não poderia deixar de se constituir fundamentalmente contra a interpretação cartesiana do ente e da verdade: ergo, contra Descartes.
Naturalmente, reconhecer alguém como seu inimigo fundamental é antes respeitá-lo do que desprezá-lo. E embora, ao contrário do que o sr. Tuffani afirma, Heidegger nem sequer mencione Descartes no parágrafo 24 de "Ser e tempo", ele dedica os parágrafos 19, 20 e 21 do livro -e incontáveis parágrafos de outras obras- a atacar o filósofo francês.
Se isso não bastar para qualificar de "feroz" o anticartesianismo de Heidegger, lembro que ele, em "As questões fundamentais da filosofia", queixa-se da importância que é dada, nas universidades alemãs, ao estudo de Descartes, pois assegura que esse filósofo representa "o início de uma mais ampla decadência fundamental da filosofia".
No meu artigo, eu dera um exemplo da tentativa de Heidegger de relativizar o conceito de razão, tal como empregado pela tradição filosófica. Tentando rebater-me, o sr. Tuffani diz que "Heidegger problematiza as próprias noções de verdade e de razão. Ou seja, ele as recusa como absolutas". Ora, sr. Tuffani, o que é recusar uma coisa como absoluta senão relativizá-la?
Concluindo seu artigo, o sr. Tuffani, citando a tese de Nietzsche de que toda filosofia esconde intenções morais, afirma que as minhas, sejam quais forem, "parecem fazer do questionamento da razão um tabu".
Primeiro, confesso não entender como alguém que pense desse modo não tenha explicitado nem as intenções morais que o levaram a assim pensar, nem as que o levaram a afoitamente criticar meu artigo e tentar relativizar a razão e a verdade.
Segundo, observo que o questionamento da razão não é um tabu; contudo, como todo questionamento é feito pela própria razão, é evidente que esta, ao se questionar, não pode deixar de se afirmar. Terceiro, chamo atenção para o fato de que defender a razão, assim como defender a liberdade de pensamento contra o dogma, já constitui indiscutível obrigação moral.

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