purple motes

A person living in Arlington, Virginia, measured his Internet connection quality using the Federal Communications Commission's Consumer Broadband Test.   He found his Internet download speed to be about 750 kilobits per second (kbits/s).  Studying Akamai data on observed average Internet speeds, I found that only about 2% of Internet addresses (from business and residential users) in Arlington, Virginia, have Internet connections this slow or slower.

Under a promise of anonymity, I interviewed this unusual, technologically backward Internet user to try to understand why he doesn't upgrade to faster Internet connectivity.   Here's a lightly edited transcript of that interview:

Why don't you upgrade to a faster Internet connection?

Because I'm cheap and lazy.  What I have is good enough.

What do you pay per month for Internet connectivity?

I pay $23.99 per month for Verizon's "Internet 768/128" service.   Plus they tack on about $10 a month worth of incomprehensible charges.  Maybe those are for Internet, too, although I think I paid them even when I just had phone service.

How much would it cost you to get faster Internet connectivity?

I don't know.  Every month I get several offers in the mail.  They don't make it easy to figure out how much in total the new service actually costs and how much faster it is.    So I just throw the offers out.   I'm lazy.

Don't you want faster connectivity?

Sure.  But I'm cheap and I'm lazy.

But with faster connectivity you'd save time.

I do my laundry in a laundry room in the basement of my four-story apartment building.  I've got to walk up and down four flights of stairs to do my laundry.  That wastes more time than my slow Internet connection.

With faster connectivity you could watch more video on the Internet.

I watch the videos that are worth watching.  Watching more wastes time.

What about online virtual worlds?  Every heard of World of Warcraft?

Yup.  When I'm old and bedridden, I'll play that.  And I'll read the newspaper, if it's still around.

What about video conferencing?

With prostitutes?

No, I mean for meetings and stuff.

I prefer to meet in the flesh.

You have no idea of all the great things you can do with high-speed Internet connectivity.

How am I supposed to find out? Verizon keeps raising its rate for my slow connection.   If I sign up for high-speed Internet, they'll just get me faster.

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What that guy said reminds me of what an old farmer said.   See the video below.   They seem related.   Just goes to show why making progress in the communications industry is so difficult.

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The museum guard with a gun said, "Put your camera away. No photographs in the exhibit."  That's what I remember most about my first visit to the exhibit Revealing Culture, now at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.  VSA, the International Organization on Arts and Disability, sponsored the exhibit.  The guard was just doing his job.  I respect the many, dedicated bureaucrats who diligently do their jobs.

While I was dismayed that the Corcoran Gallery forbade non-commercial photographs of Maya Lin's re-formations of natural landscapes, forbidding photographs at Revealing Culture is worse.  VSA was founded "to provide arts and educational opportunities for people with disabilities and increase access to the arts for all."  What about persons who are bedridden and can't physically come to the exhibit?  What about those who do not have money or time to travel to the exhibit?

Preventing art exhibit visitors from making non-commercial photographs signals an exhibit's avariciousness for artifacts and contempt for art.  Constraints are a natural feature of the real world.  But reasonable accommodations are possible.  Allowing visitors to make and share photographs of an exhibit costs the organizers neither time nor money.  Sharing of non-commercial photographs through social networks can bring a sense of the exhibit to many persons who otherwise would have none.  Sharing enhances true art.  Art exhibits that prohibit non-commercial photographs seem to have an anti-social obsession with possession.

Change is possible.[*]  Earlier this week, strolling about the area, I again entered Revealing Culture.   A museum guard was there.  Still unwillingly suspended in disbelief, I asked him if I could take photographs.  He said, "Yes, in here you can."  Wonderful!  An art exhibit that allows sharing culture!

My favorite work in Revealing Culture is Jon Berge's Four/For Mona Lisa.   On the wall facing the exhibit entrance, it resembles a band of shields that riot police use in charging a crowd.  But in reality the shields are boards offering braille representations of inner-city children describing the Mona Lisa:

• Mona Lisa is a lady in a picture.  Bright eyes, pretty smile.  She has no family.  She is outside in the sun.
• The Mona Lisa probably took a long time to draw so I bet she was very bored - and didn't want to stay any longer.  it only shows from the waist and up of her body.  the Mona Lisa has on eyebrows on her
• She looked like she wanted to kill Leonardo for making her pose for a picture and she doesn't dress like us.  Leonardo must be her husband.
• Mona Lisa looks sad because she is alone.  She is poor

Touching Four/For Mona Lisa activates a digital recording of the children reading their descriptions.  Reality gives of itself to everyone who seeks it, to each in a way that relates to her or his capabilities.  Jon Berge's Four/For Mona Lisa is art of reality.

Revealing Culture is at the Smithsonian's Ripley Center in Washington, DC, through August 29, 2010.

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[*] A VSA publication, Arts Access Made Easy: Successful Strategies from the Award of Excellence in Arts Access, offers ten ways to achieve arts access.  It seems oblivious to the rapidly developing capabilities of digital networks.  Concern about access should include concern about being accessible through the Internet.  Moreover, Arts Access Made Easy is oriented toward organizational-bureaucratic actions.  Fostering grass-roots digital representations and peer-to-peer sharing across social networks can make a large contribution to improving access to a given body of work.

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Recently I picked up a Selective Service registration form at the Post Office.  The persistence of sexist selective service has an interesting intellectual structure.   The form itself, in contrast, displays simple, appalling moral obtuseness that goes beyond contempt for sex equality.

The most prominent words on the cover of the form are "men" and "register".  Within an arrow is written the moral exhortation, "Do the right thing."   Does "do the right thing" mean throw the sexist selective service form in the garbage can, and then throw the garbage can through the post office window?   Does "do the right thing" mean engage in non-violent civil disobedience, such as sitting down in the post office and refusing to move until the stack of sexist selective service forms is removed?  Or maybe have a men's die-in at the post office?

Inside the cover of the selective service form are answers to questions.  But the obvious, painful question, "How can this sexism pass in the U.S. in the year 2010?" isn't answered.   The questions and answers that are listed only make that question more searing.

"What is Selective Service Registration?"

Registration is the process by which the U.S. Government collects names and addresses of men age 18 through 25 to use in case of a national emergency, determined by Congress and the President, which would require rapid expansion of the Armed Forces.

"What Happens If I Don't Register?"

Not registering is a felony.  Young men prosecuted and convicted of failure to register may be fined up to $250,000, imprisoned for up to five years, or both.  Failure to register also may cause men to permanently lose eligibility for student financial aid, government employment, job training, and U.S. citizenship for male immigrants.

A felony?!!!?  Apparently criminal prosecutions for failure to register have not occurred since 1986.  But this crime remains in the law books, and severe punishment for it is cited in this current government form.  A least one person has recently lost his job because of failure to register with Selective Service seventeen years earlier.

Discretionary application of absurdly punitive and nonsensical criminal laws has become a general characteristic of the U.S. criminal justice system.  This criminal justice system has led to about 2.4 million persons being locked up in prisons and jails today.  That's an unrecognized national emergency.  Given that the criminal justice system locks up ten times as many men as women, this national emergency particularly concerns men.  Amidst this real and present national emergency, the Selective Service System prepares to conscript men, and only men, to use them in a national emergency.   Sacrificing men's lives obviously is all too easy.

"Who Must Register?"

Male U.S. citizens and immigrants, documented and undocumented, residing in the U.S. and its territories must register if they are age 18 through 25.

"What About After I Register?"

If you move, you are required by Federal law to provide address changes to Selective Service, which can be done at www.sss.gov to "Report a Change of Address Online," or by filling out and mailing a SSS Form 2 (Change of Information) at the post office.

This is worse than being asked to display right of residence if stopped by the police.  Whether a citizen or not, whether a documented or undocumented immigrant, the Selective Service System demands under federal law to be informed of the movement of all males ages 18 to 25.  After all, these males might be needed in the future to die for freedom.

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On this day, a century ago, the U.S. Congress established federal communication regulation under the Mann-Elkins Act.  The Mann-Elkins Act, enacted on June 18, 1910, extended the authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission to interstate communications.  Central principles of communications common carrier regulation thus have roots in the Interstate Commerce Commission's regulation of railroads.

The communications industry has grown to offer mind-boggling marvels.  Anyone with Internet access has access to a huge repository of knowledge and human creations, a word press that does color photographs and video at no extra charge, and worldwide text, photo, and video distribution.  You can carry around a small device that allows you to communicate by voice or video with billions of persons around the world.  It can store all the music you could ever hear, and many movies, too.  It knows your location, offers you any map you want, and tells you local information that interests you.   What's truly unbelievable is now real.

However you look at it, a century of communications industry regulation and communications industry development has produced results worth celebrating.  Celebrate a century of federal communications regulation by studying data on telephone companies that the Interstate Commerce Commission collected in 1917.   Even better, celebrate a century of federal communications regulation by being grateful for dedicated, hard-working, and public-spirited federal communications regulators.

Note: The text of the Mann-Elkins Act, 36 Stat 539 (1910), is available online in this fine collection of early U.S. Statutes at Large.  The Mann-Elkins Act is in volume 36, Part 1, text page 539 (pdf file page 568).

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If you have a problem, an old bicycle inner tube probably can fix it.   For example, the velcro on my saddle bag was failing.  I secured it with an old bicycle inner tube.  Another problem: the pannier on my commuting bike would fall off when I hit a big bump.   I secured it with an old bicycle inner tube.  Everybody has problems.  Old bicycle inner tubes can fix them.

Old bicycle inner tubes are like big rubber bands.  They're strong and elastic.  You can tie them around anything to provide protection or tension.  Moreover, all bicycle inner tubes come in a stylish black for no extra charge.

If you're a cyclist, don't even think of using tubeless tires.   You need inner tubes.

If you don't ride bikes, get friendly with a neighboring cyclist.  He or she is likely to have a continually expanding supply of inner tubes that have flatted.

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Hey Jerry, some reasons why:

1. Because I promised to do it.
2. Because it will help them.
3. Because it will make me stronger and smarter.
4. Because it's the right thing to do.
5. Because it will make for a better future.
6. Because I gotta earn a living somehow.
7. Because it's gotta get done, and somebody's got to do it.

All the reasons won't fit on a bumper sticker.  How 'bout vegetable companies start printing them on their packages?

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The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700 had a sensational debut in the National Gallery, London, late last autumn.  An art critic began her review thus:

This is the most powerful show the National Gallery is ever likely to hold. One can say that without overstatement. It is not common for people to weep at a press view, nor to fall silent with awe, but both happened this week at the National Gallery.

This exhibition is now at the National Gallery, Washington.   In our age of mechanical reproduction, here in a colder region of the world than Spain, profoundly natural artistic work, even life-sized, might be experienced without passion.  Yet even with just a small amount of time, attention, and receptivity, everyone can sense the full bodily reality of these works.  Everyone can understand that these are not just art, but vital works still active in living, loving devotion.

In sixteenth-century England, intense battles over sensuous means of representation confirmed the power of human sense.  Throughout the European Middle Ages, life-like statues of Mary, the mother of Jesus, wore gold crowns, rich robes, and rings, and were surrounded with candles, jewels, and burning incense.  They were widely venerated objects of popular religious pilgrimages.  The most famous English statues of this type were destroyed from 1535 to 1538.  They were not just destroyed, but executed through elaborate public executions in London of the type that a prominent human heretic might receive.   Attempts to discipline human sense utterly failed in the form of the action:

A wooden statue of Derfel Gadarn, much honored at his shrine in Northern Wales, was taken to London and burned along with friar John Forest, who had been confessor to Catherine of Aragon and refused to renounce Roman Catholicism. Burning the statue of Derfel Gadarn along with friar Forest in part enacted a pun on a popular prophecy that Derfel Gadarn would one day set a forest on fire. Present at the execution of the statue and the friar were an array of dukes, earls, bishops, and a crowd contemporarily estimated at more than ten thousand persons. Hugh Latimer, who had been chaplain to King Henry VIII and was appointed Bishop of Worcester, preached a sermon from a specially constructed platform before the bonfire.[1]

With critical distance from the specific political and religious battles, one can only be in awe at the power of humans to make sense from words (a pun), a wooden statue (Derfel Gadarn), and an elite religious ritual (burning a heretic).

The Sacred Made Real offers a direct experience of works consummately designed for sensuous power.  Saint Francis in Meditation shows against a stark, dark background a kneeling Saint Francis, dressed in a tattered brown habit, pressing with clasped hands a skull to his breast.  His face is upturned in intense mediation.   The light catches his nose, and the painting insists on Saint Francis' three-dimensional form despite the flat canvas.  In another room, behind the wall displaying this work, two works show the dead Saint Francis standing in ecstasy.  One is a painting that seems to be a realization of a mental vision.  Another is a sculpture that encourages you to look up from Saint Francis' bare foot, along a real knotted cord to an exquisitely modeled face with ivory teeth, glass eyes, and human-hair eyelashes.   His cowl, which looks like a halo, takes the physicality of the sculpture back into the mental vision of the painting.[2]

While bodily senses collaboratively make one, The Sacred Made Real displays polychrome sculptures produced according to guild rules imposing skill separation in artistic production.  A sculptor not formally certified as a painter was forbidden to paint his own sculpture.  Hence polychrome sculptures in Spain early in the seventeenth century were typically produced through a contractual collaboration between a sculptor and a painter.    The sculptor and the painter typically split equally the total commission payment.

Over time, sculptors vertically integrated into painting to capture a larger share of the commission.   The eminent sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés and the renowned painter Francisco Pacheco collaborated to produce many polychrome sculptures in Spain early in the seventeenth century.   However, in 1621, Montañés won full control over a major contract for an altarpiece for the convent of Santa Clara in Seville.   Montañés decided to keep three-quarters of the commission for himself as the sculptor and to hire a painter with the remaining quarter of the commission.[3]

Francisco Pacheco responded to Montañés artistic merger with a public letter learnedly declaring the distinctiveness of the painter's art and asserting the superiority of painting over sculpture.   Painters and sculptors, along with their intellectual advocates, have been arguing since antiquity about the relative value of painting and sculpture (the argument probably stretches back to the first paid commission for a painted sculpture).   Pacheco contributed to this argument and went on to write a book about the art of painting.[4]

Pacheco's public letter also harshly criticized Montañés.  In recognition of his eminence in producing wood sculptures, Montañés was known as the "God of Wood" ("el dios de la madera").   With a sharp rhetorical edge, Pacheco declared of Montañés:

Neither will I set about judging the defects in his works, although those who know in Seville find them even in his most careful productions.  Because I am convinced that he is a man like any other and thus it is no wonder that he errs like the rest.  For this reason I would counsel my friends to cease praising or damning his works, because he does the former better than anyone while there is no lack of people to do the latter.[5]

Pacheco collaborated with Montañés to produce many great works of sacred art.  The dispute between Pacheco and Montañés and the ego competition that shows up subtly in and across works exhibited in The Sacred Made Real are another dimension of the sacred made real.

For me, the exhibition film being shown continuously in the auditorium below contained the most moving work in the exhibition.   After discussing the exhibition, Xavier Bray, the curator, faces Velázquez's painting, Christ After the Flagellation, pauses tensely for a moment, and then sings a saeta.  Knowing nothing about such song, I nonetheless found his action deeply moving.   With whatever knowledge, experience, and beliefs you have, go to The Sacred Made Real and natural passion will move you.

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The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700 is at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, through May 31, 2010.   The exhibition is presented on the occasion of the Spanish Presidency of the European Union, with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Spain, the Spain–USA Foundation and the Embassy of Spain in Washington, DC.  The National Gallery is the only U.S. venue for this exhibition.

Images courtesy of the National Gallery of Art:

Juan Martínez Montañés and Francisco Pacheco, Saint Francis Borgia, about 1624; painted wood and cloth stiffened with glue; size 174 x 68 x 51 cm.  Church of the Anunciación, Seville University.  © Copyright Photo Imagen M.A.S. Reproduction, courtesy of Universidad de Sevilla.

Pedro de Mena, Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Ecce Homo), 1673; polychromed wood, human hair, ivory, and glass; 98 x 50 x 41 cm.  Real Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid. © Copyright 2009 Photo Gonzalo de la Serna.

Notes:

[1] Galbi, Douglas (2003), "Sense in Communication," p. 89.

[2] These works are Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Francis in Meditation, 1635-9 (oil on canvas); Zurbarán, Saint Francis standing in Ecstasy, about 1640 (oil on canvas); Pedro de Mena, Saint Francis standing in Ecstasy, 1663 (polychrome sculpture).

[3] Bray, Xavier, Alfonso Rodríguez G. de Ceballos, Daphne Barbour, and Judy Ozone (2009), The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700 (London: National Gallery) p. 22.

[4] Id. p. 19.  Pacheco's book, Arte de la Pintura, was published in 1649.  While the relative value of sculpture and painting continues to be debated, the integration of sculpting and painting became common in Seville in the second half of the seventeenth century.  Pedro Roldán secured certification in both sculptor and painting, as did Alonso Cano, who was one of Pacheco's students.  Cano taught his sculpture students Pedro de Mena and José de Mora to paint their own sculptures.  Three of Mena's polychrome sculptures, which he painted himself, are included in the exhibition.

[5] Id. pp. 19, 195.  The letter is in Spanish and is dated 16 July 1622.  Id. pp. 194-5 provides an extract translated into English.

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Don't look for a good product.  Seek a creative space.

G-40: The Summit, in Crystal City, VA, through the end of March, exhibits a collective greater than its individual pieces, a creative space.

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The Corkinhorn Gallery's current exhibition, Painting Transversally, rides the frontiers of literary criticism and literary theory to raise profound questions for modern art.  Painting Traversally violently interrogates modern arts' failure to become post-modern.  It complicates the relationship between art object and art consumer and implicates mass media and corporate America in the symbolic commercialization and dissignification / dissemination of art impulses.

I found this marvelous little gallery just south of the Phillips Collection.  I would describe it further, but I don't have time right now.  Here's my favorite piece, Masterwork in Bluish.

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