Felix Salmon

A long back-and-forth

I was having at 2Blowhards the other day prompted Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata

to nominate

one of my postings as "the silliest and most potentially disastrous blog

comment of the year 2002". His problem was that I suggested that Michael

Blowhard read more Feyerabend, and he considers Feyerabend (or me, it’s not

entirely clear) to be an "anti-philosopher of anti-science".

At the same time, I was having a hard time with the Blowhards. Friedrich seemed

to be lumping Feyerabend in with Nietzsche, while Michael went one better and

started comparing him to Foucault, of all people. Then, a few days

later, 2Blowhards printed a guest posting by the more philosophically adept

Chris Bertram, who mentioned Feyerabend in the same breath as David Hume.

Now it’s unclear whether Mr Bertram considers Feyerabend to be a philosopher

in the same tradition as Hume, or whether he believes the opposite. But certainly

there seems to be a general perception that Feyerabend is a crazy continental

type who doesn’t belong in the tradition of analytic philosophy. And I just

wanted to use my baby pulpit, here, to assert that he is, indeed, a very rigorous

analytical philosopher, who very much works in the tradition of Hume.

The reason I say this is not necessarily because I agree with everything he

says, and it’s certainly not because Feyerabend was a very good physicist before

he became a philosopher. (Many physicists display distressingly woolly thinking

when it comes to disciplines outside physics.) Rather, I consider Feyerabend

to be at the forefront of the single most important project in philosophy: to

defeat skepticism.

What I’m talking about here is philosophy in the tradition not only of Hume,

but also of Descartes or Wittgenstein. Each of these people carried the skeptical

position further than it had been taken before, in attempt to find out exactly

what we can be sure we know about the world. Hume addressed inference: how can

we know the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, because it always has in the past,

and the future will be like the past. But how can we know the future will be

like the past? Well, because it always has been in the past. The question just

circles back onto itself, and never gets answered. So far, no one has managed

to really solve this paradox which lies at the heart of all science, and indeed

of all our everyday behaviour.

Descartes addressed not our expectations of what will happen in the future,

but our experience of what is happening in the present: what if all our senses

were being tricked by some evil demon? What if this is all some kind of dream?

Can we really trust the evidence of our senses?

And Wittgenstein addressed not what we perceive, but how we think: since we

think in language, and no one can be entirely sure exactly what we mean by anything,

can we even rely on our own thought processes as Descartes proposed?

OK, these are Philosophy 101 oversimplifications of great philosophers. Wittgenstein,

especially, is a lot more complex and nuanced than I’m giving him credit for

here. (If you want, you can dump the "real" Wittgenstein for Saul

Kripke’s "Kripkenstein": he fits my thesis a bit better.) But you

get the general idea: the way that philosophy is advanced is by philosophers

setting out a skeptical stall, and then trying to find solutions to how we can

still arrive at life and knowledge despite the nihilistic attraction of the

skeptical position.

And Feyerabend fits very easily into this tradition. For sure, he attacks science

as we know it, and sets out a position which basically says it’s no better than

witchcraft. But that’s what philosophers do: they advance the skeptical position

so that those who believe in science (which is most of us) are forced to construct

with much more rigor and clarity the argument for exactly why we do.

Check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry

on Feyerabend. At the bottom, there’s a list of related entries: "analytic

philosophy | anarchism | essential vs. accidental properties | Frege, Gottlob

| Galileo Galilei | Kuhn, Thomas | Lakatos, Imre | liberalism | logic: inductive

| logical positivism | Mach, Ernst | Marxism | meaning | Mill, John Stuart |

Nietzsche, Friedrich | paradox: of analysis | Popper, Karl | postmodernism |

Principia Mathematica | quantum mechanics | rationalism vs. empiricism | realism

| relativism | scientific method | scientific realism | social democracy | Vienna

Circle | Wittgenstein, Ludwig". This isn’t a list of woolly-headed Frenchy

post-structuralists, this is the core of hard-nosed analytic philosophy.

So feel free to disagree with Feyerabend: most of us do. But don’t dismiss

him as an "anti-philosopher": he deserves a lot more respect than

that.

I went to the unveiling of the new plans

for the World Trade Center site this morning, and they’re miles ahead from the

vague and unimaginitive plans we saw

five months ago. There are nine plans in total, from seven architectural teams,

and between them they have a lot of excellent ideas.

There are some definite surprises, chief among them that the dream team of

Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl – New

Yorkers all – should have come up with the worst design of the lot. SOM,

as well, the most experienced skyscraper-builders in the world, fell flat on

their face.

A notch up in quality are the teams who had some but not all of what was needed.

The urban planning duo of Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg came up with

a very workable but completely unimaginative design. The team calling itself

Think had no fewer than three ideas, all of which are quite clever, but none

of which stand up to much scrutiny. And Norman Foster, although he does have

a wonderful skyscraper, has little else.

The best designs came from Daniel Liebeskind, who stunned with a coherent,

realistic and highly imaginative plan; and United Architects, with an idea which

reimagines just what urban design can be all about.

The one thing which everybody did, however, was present skyscrapers as public

spaces. Something’s going to go up on the site, and whatever it

is will have much more public access than any other tall building in the world.

That’s certain, now, and it’s welcome, too.

At the risk of getting blogged down, so to speak, I’m going to run through

each in turn, since I think it’s important to point out the bad things as well

as the good.

Meier

et al first, then. Richard Meier was very cocky in his presentation:

"We’re the New York team," he said. "Some say we’re the dream

team." But what this team came up with looks like a classic case of design

by committee. They put reflecting pools on the footprints of the twin towers,

which let light through to a memorial space below – so far, so normal.

Then they took the shadows which the towers cast (to the west) on September

11, and planted them with trees. One of the shadows went into the river, so

that area becomes a "floating memorial plaza" which 5000 people can

fit onto should they so desire. It’s one of dozens of different memorials which

they’re dotting around Lower Manhattan, in a kind of distributed remembrance which I don’t think really works. You don’t want to keep on bumping unexpectedly into another memorial as you go about your daily life.

The main problem with the design is the skyscraper portion, however. The Lower

Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), as part of its excellent brief, told

all the competing architects that "a restored skyline will provide a significant,

identifiable symbol for the residents of the metropolitan area". Well,

this symbol looks like nothing so much as a pair of tic-tac-toe games set at

right angles to each other. Peter Eisenman tried to liken the buildings to "the

fingers of two hands embracing the site," but they aren’t. Rather, they

block off the site (and Battery Park City) from the rest of Manhattan, reading

more as barriers than as entry gates.

Next

Skidmore Owings & Merrill, who teamed up with four artists,

including Jessica Stockholder, to create what they call "a dense grid of

vertical structures that support multiple strata of public and cultural spaces".

What that means in practice is a set of no fewer than nine more-or-less-identical

skyscrapers shoehorned into a very small area, with the occasional sky bridge

connecting one to another. They all have sky gardens on the top, which is nice,

but no matter how airy they are, street level will become dark and permanently

in shadow, and it’s not going to be a nice place to be.

There’s also an element of the Jetsons in the way that SOM has designed the

transit hub with two roads as well as the 1 and 9 subway trains running straight

through it in glass tubes. The whole presentation, in fact, feels much more

like the conceptual projects we all saw in the immediate aftermath of the disaster,

and far from anything which could ever be constructed in reality.

The

odd team out of the seven is Peterson/Littenberg Architecture and Urban

Design. It’s a small partnership which impressed the LMDC with its

approach to the site and somehow made it, as architects, to the final round.

It’s one of the few teams to break the rules: while the LMDC said that it didn’t

want to build on the footprints of the original towers, Peterson/Littenberg

put an amphitheatre in one of them.

This team was also one of the prime movers beind opening up West Street into

a tree-lined promenade which stretches all the way down to the Battery. It’s

a great idea, and one which the LMDC has adopted, but it was specifically exluded

from this particular brief. Again, Peterson and Littenberg ignored the brief.

As urban planners, rather than architects, this pair spent a lot of time designing

a lovely garden, and constructing a pedestrian-friendly street grid. They’re

the only team which not only extended the original streets into the World Trade

Center site, but also added a brand new street as well. The final plan is certainly

a nice place to be, but it shows very little in the way of boldness or imagination.

And the new skyscrapers aren’t imagined at all, beyond the fact that their height

is limited to 55 stories (roughly the height of the existing American Express

building). Two of them will have 35-storey campaniles on top (one a hotel, the

other residential); these will serve to replace the lost elements of the New

York skyline. There’s very little mention of public access to the new buildings,

something that is at the forefront of the other schemes.

Think,

a huge team including Frederic Schwartz, Rafael Viñoly, Shigeru Ban and

David Rockwell, couldn’t come to any decisions at all, and instead presented

three different designs. The first, called Sky Park, floats a 16-acre park into

mid-air, with various buildings huddled in the darkness below. The last, called

the World Cultural Center, is a crazy idea to build a latticework around the

footprints of the original towers, and then slap various cultural institutions

(schools, theatres, whatever) inside the latticework at various different

heights. At the exact points in midair where the planes flew in to the World

Trade Center would be a memorial linking the two structures. Whatever. This

is a flight of fancy, it could never happen.

Think also proposed what they call a Great Room, which basically comprises

enclosing most of the site in a huge 30-storey glass plaza. The roof would be

held up by office buildings around the perimeter, as well as by another pair

of latticework columns surrounding the footprints. Next door to the site, where

the Deutsche Bank building currently sits empty, the tallest building in the

world would be constructed to help out on the skyline front. The whole thing

is less bad than the other two ideas, but I’m not sure there would be too much

demand for offices which front straight on to a memorial, or even for any new

structure of this magnitude.

Foster

and Partners is definitely an improvement on the previous four. Lord

(Norman) Foster knows his onions when it comes to monumental architecture, and

he’s designed a beautiful twisting "twinned tower" which would be

a welcome addition to any city’s skyline. He calls it "the most secure,

the greenest and the tallest in the world," and there’s no reason not to

believe him. It will be filled with high tree-filled public atriums at various

levels, which will provide stunning views over the rest of the site as well

as far beyond. There could even be funiculars sweeping us all up the side of

the building at high speed – what an attraction, and not just for tourists.

Foster has kept the footprints as voids, and placed high walls around them

to set them apart and intensify the memorial experience. You can’t go into them,

but you can go around them, and then up a ramp into a huge green park which

stretches over the top of West Street and all the way to the river. (In this

way, Foster avoids the huge expense of burying West Street, freeing up those

funds for other transportation or infrastructure projects.)

What

keeps Foster out of the top two, however, is a certain lack of imagination.

His plan is workable, and strong, but it’s not really bold. Daniel Liebeskind,

however, has a wonderful central idea (you can read his statement here)

which he’s managed to turn into a compelling architectural concept.

It all starts down in the dirt, by the huge slurry walls which stop the Hudson

River from rushing in to the site. These were and are true engineering marvels:

as Liebeskind says, they "withstood the unimaginable trauma of the destuction

and stand eloquent". He keeps them exposed, 70 feet below ground, and then

spirals up and out, into the rest of the site and beyond.

At the bottom is the museum and the memorial; at the top is a vertical "gardens

of the world", rising in a glorious spike well above the rest of the skyline.

The buildings in the rest of the site are extremely strong as well, especially

the ones which border on what Liebeskind rather unfortunately calls the "wedge

of light". This is a triangular plaza which will have no shadows each year

on September 11 between the hours of 8:46am and 10:28am. It’s mirrored by the

Heroes Park, one of three or four green spaces in the plan. Finally, symmetrically

opposite the gardens of the world is the transit hub, a center not only for

PATH and subway trains, but also the point to which the "paths of heroes"

– the routes taken by the fire and police forces on September 11 –

converge. Everything, down to the parking area for tourist buses, has been carefully

thought out and put in what feels like exactly the right place.

Finally,

there’s United Architects, a group including Foreign Office

Architects, Greg Lynn, Kevin Kennon, RUR Architecture, and UN Studio. Somehow,

they’ve managed to transcend all the problems which faced the other large groups

in the competition, and come up with a very strong, simple and new idea.

United Architects, just like Liebeskind, go down to bedrock and build vertical

sacrosanct areas around the edge of the footprints. Looking up from the bottom

of their voids, however, one sees not just sky but skyscrapers too: "the

memorial and the development are not divided, but linked," in the words

of Greg Lynn. The effect is a cathedral-like space, where the buildings carve

out a volume of light.

One enters the space walking down a sprial from Greenwich Street, passing various

cultural institutions on the way; to go back up, there are elevators back to

ground level and higher still, up the sides of the new buildings.

There are five of them altogether, each at least 65 stories tall, and each

touching on the next at least once. At street level, there will be huge gaps

between the buildings, maintaining street grids and view corridors. But 60 stories

up in the air, they converge onto a minimum of five stories of contiguous space:

a whole new public area, 200,000 square feet in all, high in the sky.

The buildings would all be self-standing, and could be designed by different

architects, within the basic constraints of the overall plan. But they would

all support each other, too, both architecturally and structurally, creating

an incredibly strong and safe set of skyscrapers. They would have 29 exiting

cores between them, all accessible from any building, and 43 areas of refuge,

combining to create thousands of different exit routes. The tallest of the buildings,

at 1,620 feet, would be the tallest in the world, but would also be much safer

than the twin towers were. (Liebeskind’s tallest tower, by comparison, is a

more symbolic 1,776 feet. Its top, however, is filled with plants rather than

offices.)

The way the five towers link to each other would create, in the words of the

architects, "a new symbol of unity and interdependence"; it would

also be a very impressive addition to the skyline.

Of all the plans, it seems to me that the last two are easily the best. It’s

hard to choose between them: they’re both bold and exhilarating, but in different

ways. Liebeskind creates an exciting new area of New York City; United Architects

limn a whole new way of living, based as much in the air as on the ground. Of

course, neither of these two visions is going to make it into reality: there

will be committees and compromises and revisions galore before anything even

starts getting built. And a lot of them will be for the better. But at least

now, unlike five months ago, I can hope that what we will end up with at Ground

Zero will be a truly wonderful piece of first-rate architecture, something the

rest of the world will envy us for generations to come. Those who died on September

11 would want nothing less, for us and for them.

A standard lament in the communications industry is that American consumers

have been slow to adopt broadband internet connections. DSL and cable modems

have been around for years now, but the vast majority of internet users continue

to stick with dialup accounts rather than upgrading.

The reason that people don’t upgrade is that they consider a high-bandwidth

connection to be a luxury, not a necessity. Faster web browsing is nice, as

is the ability to download pictures, MP3s and applications in minutes rather

than hours. But it’s not a reason to spend an extra $25 a month or so –

$300 a year.

In most of these cases, the reason why they’re on the internet at all is email.

Even web access is, for most people, a luxury: the reason that they’re coughing

up $20 a month to be online is that email is a necessity. And email, of all

internet applications, is the one least improved by upgrading to broadband.

Now, however, Vonage has arrived. Broadband

providers should be ecstatic, dialup providers worried, and traditional telecommunications

companies terrified. Finally, there’s a reason for just about anyone to upgrade

to broadband.

Vonage is basically a way of plugging your phone into your cable modem or DSL

connection rather than into a phone jack. Peter Rojas, in Slate, has the goods:

For $40 a month, Vonage gives you unlimited local and long-distance calls,

along with free voice mail, caller ID, call forwarding, and call waiting.

A cheaper version of the service costs $25.99 a month and includes just 500

minutes of long distance. (It’s 3.9 cents a minute after the 500 minutes are

used up.) With the average American household paying about $36 just for local

phone service, Vonage looks like a pretty good deal.

In comparison, I’m paying Verizon $50 a month, plus $16 in taxes, just for the local

component of Vonage’s service. (Tax on Vonage is only 3%, or $1.20 a month on

the premium package, since it’s classed as a data service.)

The great thing about this service is that you don’t need to plug anything

into your computer. In fact, you don’t even need a computer! The router plugs

straight into your broadband connection, and your standard home phone plugs

straight in to the router. (You then need to plug all the other phones in your

home into the same router: this might involve a trip to Radio Shack and a little

bit of time, depending on the size of your house. If you’re in a New York apartment,

it’s not an issue.)

What Vonage has done is make local phone service more or less obsolete. Vonage

makes no distinction between local and long-distance calls, and offers competitive

rates on international calls as well. The baby bells – the companies which

provide the copper wires into your home – used to have a complete monopoly

on local calls. Then other companies were allowed to offer local phone service

too, but still using the baby bells’ copper wire, and still paying them for

that service. Mobile phones offered the first opportunity to lose local phone

service completely, but you couldn’t dial up to the internet on them, and international

calling rates remain appallingly overpriced. Also, you had to change your phone

number.

With Vonage, I can keep my phone number. I can even travel with it: if I hook

up my computer to a hotel’s dataport, plug in the Vonage router, and plug the

hotel phone into that, it’s automatically become my home phone, wherever I am

in the world. I could be in Moscow or Buenos Aires, and I would receive phone

calls for free, and make calls to the US for free, all from my home phone number.

Just think – no more overpriced hotel international phone calls! And at

10 cents a minute to Argentina, even local calls in Buenos Aires might be better

placed through Vonage.

I’ve already persuaded my friend Stefan, in Stockholm, to sign up for the service.

Even when it doesn’t cost very much, people often think twice about calling

internationally when it’s not necessary. Now, if anybody wants to call Stefan,

they can just dial a New York number, and it will go straight through to him.

This is a godsend for ex-pats, even though for some reason Vonage will only

post the necessary router to a US address.

I think that Vonage is going to revolutionise telecommunications. It’s got

good pedigree: Jeffrey Citron, the chairman and CEO, also founded Datek Online

Holdings, the fourth largest US online brokerage, and Island ECN, the second

largest global financial exchange. Pretty soon, competitors will spring up,

and prices will come down further, to the point where Vonage plus a broadband

connection will cost less than the combination of your monthly ISP charges and

your monthly phone bill. At that point, it will actually be cheaper

to have broadband than to have dialup.

My only worry is that the FCC, which is the

creature of the baby bells, will cave

in to them again, and somehow come up with regulations and taxes which put

Vonage out of business. I hope it doesn’t, though. There’s a lot of excess bandwidth

in the US, the product of wildly overoptimistic investment by telecommunications

companies who thought the internet was growing much faster than it actually

was. Vonage could be the perfect application to eat up that bandwidth and get

the telecoms industry going again. Except for the much-hated local phone companies,

of course.

I went upstate on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and stayed at the Hudson

House in Cold Spring, "the second oldest continually operating inn in the

state of New York". It’s a pleasant enough hotel, a nice place to spend

the night if you’re travelling in the Hudson valley, but not the sort of place

I’d normally be tempted to blog about.

But in this bucolic setting, proudly described as "quaint" in the

hotel’s promotional literature, I found something a little jarring. On entering

the room, the first thing I noticed was a little envelope propped up against

the mirror. Here’s what it said:

Thank you for staying with us!

Your Housekeeper has been _________. We hope that everything done for you

has met with your satisfaction. Your Housekeeper has tried to make your stay

with us as pleasant as possible. If there is anything we can do to make your

stay even more pleasant, please let us know.

If you wish to leave anything for your Housekeeper’s effort, we are providing

this envelope.

Please come back and stay with us again soon. It has been our pleasure to

have you as our guest.

The Management

I hadn’t seen anything like this before, but apparently it’s quite common,

since the envelope is manufactured by the American Hotel Register Co., of Northbrook,

IL, which helpfully provides a reorder number on the front. My Housekeeper,

Irene, had equally helpfully filled in her name in the blank provided.

The following morning, I went down to breakfast, which is for hotel guests

only. At the bottom of the breakfast menu, a notice in block capitals said that

although the cost of the breakfast was included in the room rate, a gratuity

was not included.

Twice, then, I was hit up for tips by a hotel in a none-too-subtle manner.

I can see why they had to be unsubtle about it, though: since most hotel guests

consider both housekeeping and breakfast to be part of the service they’re paying

for in the room rate, they see no need to tip.

People don’t customarily leave a tip when paying their bill at a hotel: I think

it’s assumed that service is included not only in the room rate but also in

the inflated prices for things like the minibar. (At the St Regis in Manhattan,

the New York Times informs

us, room-service tea, including finger sandwiches, scones and a fruit plate,

costs $102.17.)

At the Hudson House and places like it, however, there’s no room service and

no minibar. Even so, I was opposed to tipping. It’s hard to decide to tip at

the Hudson House, but not to tip at higher-end hotels or at lower-end B&Bs

where the owners do all the work. And in fact it’s extremely difficult to tip

one’s maid in the vast majority of hotels, since she obviously couldn’t take

any money you left out unless it was very clearly marked.

Also, it’s impossible to calculate the tip using the normal percentage technique.

Since the cost and/or value of the housekeeping and the breakfast are unknown,

you can’t divide them by five to get a tip amount.

All the same, it’s hard to justify withholding tips from maids when one tips

the surly barista at the neighbourhood coffee shop. I guess the difference is

that the barista is basically just getting loose change, maybe the occasional

buck on a big order, while if one places money in an envelope it’d better be

something a bit more substantial.

In general, though, I’m sure that these envelopes and menu notices are a regressive

phenomenon. Tipping is a bad habit, and one which society as a whole should

be working to abolish: the more service compris restaurants the better.

Service personnel should be paid a decent wage, and customers should be spared

the difficulty of working out how much to leave: if you normally double the

tax, should you tip 20% for really good service? How much should you deduct

for bad service? Should you include the cover charge when calculating the tip?

What about the tax? And that expensive bottle of wine? The situation of sitting

in a hotel eating breakfast and being asked to calculate the tip on a nonexistent

bill is just one of many decisions we shouldn’t be asked to make.

All the same, I was overruled on the breakfast, and a tip was left. In fact,

it had to be planned out carefully: after the meal was over, two of us had to

stay at the table, while a third went up to her room, got some cash, and came

back with it so that when we departed the tip would be there. I won on the housekeeper,

however. She left a large piece of furniture blocking the window, and the duvet

cover was upside-down, with the cold brass buttons up at the head of the bed

rather than at the foot, where they won’t be felt. No tips for that.

Over

the weekend, I went to see a fantastic new play, which is running

at the Vineyard Theatre on 15th Street: The Fourth Sister, by Janusz

Glowacki. Full disclosure: I’m a friend of the translator, Eva Nagorski, and

I went to a preview, since the official opening isn’t until November 21. So

consider this advance buzz, rather than any kind of official review. But I enjoyed

the play so much I had to write about it.

The play is set in Moscow, in "the present", by which Glowacki means

not some vague idea of post-Communist Russia, but rather a very specific place

and time, with references to Chechnya and George W Bush. It opens with an old

babushka (is there any other kind?) complaining about the fact that she’s being

charged $300 for the removal of her late husband’s body from her second-floor

walk-up. The amount is shocking not only for its size, but also because we’re

used, in the theatre, to shocked reactions to sums which today would be laughably

small. Five pounds! Fifty kopecks! An amount which is actually shocking to us

– in today’s money, in the US – is a rare thing in theatre, and

makes us sit up and take notice. I don’t know whether this play is going to

become obsolete in the future, or whether it’s meant

to, but the fact that it’s so focused on the actual world as it is today,

specifics and all, is refreshing.

The next thing we notice is that there’s an equally refreshing headlong exuberance

to the writing. Scenes rush straight into other scenes, with hours or even days

elided as though they simply didn’t exist. Tania (Alicia Goranson), who is the

centre of the first half of the play, speaks in a beautifully-captured early-adolescent

stream of consciousness, full of strange and wonderful jumps from astonishing

solipsism to penetrating psychological insight. She’s the youngest of three

sisters, all of whom yearn for a romantic ideal we know they will never achieve.

But we’ve come a long way from Chekhov: the buttoned-up manners of Russian country

houses have been replaced by a world filled with gun-toting gangsters and Hollywood

film directors.

Much of the comedy in this play is broad, in a crazy, exaggerated sort of way.

When the gangsters kill the wrong man, they apologise to his mother and make

over-the-top amends. A film of a blatant deception wins an Oscar for Best Documentary.

A lot of people lose limbs, one of them the manager of a circus, whose leg is

eaten by a starved tiger called Pepsi. (Another of the sisters has been taking

half of Pepsi’s meat home, to feed her family.) These are the sort of things

we might be used to finding in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman

Rushdie, but they work just as well on stage.

If one author springs to mind more than anybody else, however, it’s probably

Zadie Smith, another talent who uses her out-of-control imagination to illuminate

lower-middle-class life. And just like White Teeth, The Fourth

Sister rocks about so joyfully that it pretty much collapses at the end.

On the way there, though, there’s a great deal of fun, interwoven with drama

and tragedy. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, since the twists

are delicious, but suffice to say that it includes defenestration, cross-dressing,

drug deals with warlords, and a newborn baby toting a kalashnikov. (And if that

sounds like it comes straight from a film script by Quentin Tarantino, don’t

worry, Glowacki and the director, Lisa Peterson, are one step ahead of you on

that front, too.)

The acting is excellent, especially from the supporting cast. Rarely will anybody

have relished playing Ganster No. 2 quite as much as in this play, and in return

for some great writing, Glowacki gets some great performances. Goranson is particularly

good in a very difficult role. (And I don’t particularly want to say this, but

if I don’t, you’ll spend half of the beginning of the play wondering why she

looks so familiar: she was Becky in Roseanne. Don’t let that

put you off.)

Ultimately, however, the play is Glowacki’s triumph. Peterson keeps it moving

at a cracking pace, and Nagorski has done a great job, with Glowacki’s help,

in preserving the individuality of the voices. But it is Glowacki who has managed

to take an important and depressing subject, and turn it into a grand and dark

comedy. Go, and

enjoy.

You wait years for a major piece of contemporary non-secular art to blow you

away, and then two come along at once…

Back in New York after my trip to San Francisco to see Saint

François d’Assise, I accompanied a couple of houseguests on

their first trip to the Guggenheim Museum. The main exhibition there, Moving

Pictures, is a chronological survey of photographic and video pieces

from the permanent collection. It includes a lot of first-rate artists, but

many fewer first-rate works. It’s probably worth a visit, but it’s certainly

not the kind of show you’ll remember for years to come.

At the top of the museum, however, is an amazing piece by Bill Viola, called

Going Forth By Day. If you’re one of the handful of people who consider

themselves to be big fans of video installations, then I’m sure you’ve seen

this already and don’t need me to tell you how good it is. If, on the other

hand, you’re the sort of person who would rather eat nails than stand uncomfortably

in a darkened room for 35 minutes while nothing much happens in videos projected

onto the walls, then I would very much encourage you to go see this installation:

it just might change your mind about the whole medium.

Going Forth By Day was commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin,

which has a pretty good English-language website

devoted to the piece. The installation comprises five panels, representing a

cycle from birth through to resurrection. In the original installation, in Berlin,

one stepped into the room through the first panel: "To enter the space,

visitors must literally step into the light of the first image," in the

words of the website. For whatever reason, New York turned the installation

around, so you enter between panels 2 and 3 and then exit through panel

1 into a little room with wall texts and sponsorship details.

I kind of see why Viola might have wanted people to "step into the light"

in Berlin, but certainly the way the installation is configured in New York,

I hate the way that the portal to the back room cuts a huge hole in the first

panel. It’s a bit like the huge Arthur Boyd tapestry

in Canberra’s parliament building: for all that people say it’s meant to look

like that, it still looks wrong. You can’t ignore the hole: in that sense it’s

more like the Nasdaq

Sign in Times Square. And Viola’s videos are so luscious that you don’t

want large chunks removed from them.

In New York, then, you end up really looking only at the last four of the five

panels. You occasionally glance over to the first one, but it’s hard to make

out what’s going on, there’s a bright room behind it which makes it difficult

to concentrate on the video, and in any case nothing really happens: it’s just

a kind of amniotic underwater scene, filmed in orange.

The second panel is the most technically astonishing: long and thin, it uses

three state-of-the-art RGB projectors, each not only perfectly aligned itself,

but also perfectly aligned with its neighbour(s). I fear to think how long it

took to set up this room. The upshot is an endless procession of people, walking

from left to right in a forest. (The title

"isolated elements swimming in the same direction for the purpose of understanding"

springs to mind; Viola has gone for the more simple "The Path".) Each

walks in his own way, at his own pace, although it looks as if Viola has also

done his trademark slowing-down here. It would be fascinating to just sit and

watch this line of individuals walking towards something unknown, but there

aren’t any seats in the room and there’s too much going on elsewhere.

The third panel is the centerpiece of the suite. Called "The Deluge",

it shows a stone building, and the people who pass into, out of and past it.

It fits into Viola’s recent rubric of making films where first you wait for

something to happen, then something happens suddenly, and finally you watch

the aftermath of the thing which happened. The temporal framing heightens the

impact of the thing which happens – in this case, a flood of water which

washes away those people who dallied too long. And the fact that you’re forced

to spend a lot of time looking at the high-definition video also serves to make

you notice things you might normally ignore. Most good art gets better the longer

you spend with it, of course, but that doesn’t stop most of use from failing

to give great paintings the amount of time they deserve. Viola forces us to

give him time, and in return he gives us something genuinely transcendent.

Viola has done similar things with the fourth and fifth panels, called "The

Voyage" and "First Light" respectively. He’s timed them so that

the main event in each panel happens sequentially: first in the third, then

in the fourth and finally in the fifth, with the resurrection of a woman’s son

from under the flood waters. Viola is directing our attention to a certain place

with both action and sound, but of course we’re free to keep an eye on the other

panels as well.

The crystal-clear images are deliberately designed to echo Renaissance fresco

painting: they’re projected directly onto the wall, with no framing mechanism.

Viola is positioning himself as the heir to the non-secular masters of the past,

although his vision is more broadly religious than specifically Roman Catholic

or even Christian. (The title Going Forth By Day is derived from a

literal translation of the title of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, "The

Book of Going Forth by Day".)

After having experienced both this work and Saint François d’Assise

in short succession, I’m beginning to see what it is that the likes of Kim

Howells see missing in contemporary art. I’m a huge fan of conceptualism,

and I think that works like Damien Hirst’s shark

and fly-zapper

can raise deep and troubling questions about mortality. Other works, such as

the spot paintings,

can be very beautiful. But faith, an idea of deeply-felt conviction

and artistic vision, is largely missing.

Religion is definitely uncool in the art world, and often when it does appear

it’s so nauseating

that one can forgive the gallery-going public from being turned off it altogether.

But occasionally an artist will have the courage of his religious convictions,

risk ridicule, and try to create a work which touches the spirit as well as

the mind. Even more occasionally, he will succeed – even in the case of

those of us who don’t even believe in the existence of the spirit in the first

place. And when that happens, art reaches levels which even the most sublime

of modernists could never hope to achieve.