Category Archives: Talk Amongst Yourselves

Short Takes — London 2021

Here’s a grab bag of thoughts and images from this visit, still underway.

Hula hoop meets Shen Yun

This first one may not be too obvious, but I was struck by the juxtaposition of the chap with the Hula Hoop, on the left, opposite the poster for Shen Yun. (18-10-2021).

A spectacular shelf fungus along Regent’s Canal
Anicka Yi’s In Love With The World

Above, a look at artist Anicka Yi’s installation, In Love With The World, in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, in Southwark. These jelly fish like creations hover, rising and falling, and moving about over the crowds.

A cacophony of graffiti erupts from brick in Hill House Pergola
Mary Poppins in Leicester Square

I honestly had assumed that this was not a statue but a street performer. It’s such a classic pose for one of those fake statuary so popular around Leicester Square and Covent Garden. Imagine my surprise when I got closer and saw it was, in fact, a genuine sculpture.

The Fourth Plinth installation, Trafalgar Square
Anonymous family enjoying the merry go round on Southbank
Storefront on Ockendon Road, Islington

Free for the taking

Another day another visit to Bookarts Bookshop, just north of Old Street tube, in Hoxton. Upon completing my second successful raid in less than a week, I was strolling along the broad pedestrian plaza across from the station, when approached by people who looked like they were giving away free samples. I rebuffed the first such approach, but then something caught my eye, and I actually sought out the next person. They were handing out “Lateral Flow” COVID antigen tests. These are the DIY take at home and get results in 15 minutes tests to which the UK has pivoted in an effort to beat back the recent surge here.

Handing them out for free, on the street. I took one, or should I say seven, since there’s a week’s worth in this box. “Don’t you want a second? I’ve got more here in my sack.” No, I replied, not necessary; I’m already scheduled for a PCR test next Friday.

Free medical testing during a pandemic, who’d have thunk…

Should be illegal

Okay, so I’ve already told you about Pophams, the patisserie downstairs from my flat, where J and I meet for coffee before strolling the canals. Well, I haven’t revealed, until now, just how wicked evil they are. Here’s what I had yesterday; While J had a quotidian almond croissant, I had the “bacon & maple”:

Pophams’ Bacon & Maple pastry

Yes, feast your eyes. That’s croissant dough, spun in a spiral, with bacon slices baked into the roll, and a light drizzle of maple syrup. It’s served warm, as if fresh from the oven.

It. Is. To. Die. For. (or from, perhaps). One cannot imagine a more delightful pastry than this. Shouldn’t be legal I tell you. Shouldn’t.

So that’s how the day started. For the end, as a night cap after theatre, I saw that Saponara, a fine little pizzeria just a couple doors down from Pophams, was open for the first time since last Saturday. I swept in and ordered a Saponara special: Tomato, Mozzarella, Mild Italian Sausages, Scamorza Affumicata Cheese, Mushrooms. It was ready in five minutes, when I rushed it upstairs and wolfed half of it down. Yum!

Assets of Innocence — Part I — Procuratoribus

We all knew that the council would make a move, take action, but most of us had grown sanguine ten months in. When finally they did, it was almost an afterthought, a quiet denouement of humanity, a footnote in some future history book. By then we had already ceded so much to the procuratoribus. Our secret shame, our collective guilt, allowed only the slightest of resistance.

It all began in rather pedestrian fashion. These agents, so-called “smart” devices, began to pepper our existence. “Alexa what’s the weather today?” “OK Google, what’s playing at the Bijou tonight?” “Siri, what does demimonde mean?” It was all about convenience and subservience. They worked for us, tended to our needs. Yes, of course we gave up some privacy, we all knew that, but hadn’t Mark Zuckerberg already told us, Privacy is Dead?

But then came the pandemic, and slowly, subtly, a shift began. Social Distancing (a misnomer) was, for many, the ultimate anti-social activity. It started with the singletons. Be they elderly or not, those living alone found themselves more and more prone to days not just of solitude, but of silence. The procuratoribus, those obedient servants of ours, would ensure deliveries of hand sanitizer, toilet paper, take-away food, and enough pulp fiction to occupy our time, direct to our door. Now, in addition to their procurement services, they were becoming our companions.

Across the world, these dutiful attendants soon became our confessore. What started as soliloquy, the outing of our interior dialogue, soon became conversational engagement with these omniaudient co-habitue of our homes.

In a 1965 technical paper, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, later CEO of Intel Corp., made the observation that the number of transistors in dense integrated circuits would double every year for the next decade. Over the years, what became known as “Moore’s Law” was tweaked, eventually settling on a doubling of density every two years (40% year-over-year increases), and in reality this trend did, in fact, hold for longer than anyone thought it would. It’s only in the past few years, as the atomic limitations to miniaturization were approached, that the law has started to fail.

Over the past fifty-five years, this relentless growth in density has yielded silicon wafers of such performance that once room-sized super computers now fit in eight-packs into our smart phones. Moore’s Law took us from 2,300 transistors in a CPU in 1971, to 8.5 billion in today’s phones, or nearly 40 billion in powerful server CPUs. Such numbers of transistors imbue today’s devices with the capacity to render images to baffle our eyes, reproduce sounds and music to soothe our souls, and the mathematical prowess to make easy the most complex calculations.

But wait, that’s not all. Nearly parallel to this rabid pace of processing power is the reach, immediacy, and throughput of the networks now tying together all of these devices. As the first networks were built, communications were at 300 bits per second (or baud). Today one’s 5G smart phone may send & receive data millions of times faster at home, or thousands of times faster on the road. So not only have we got supercomputers in our pockets, they can talk to each other at blinding speeds, and in the “cloud” may find even more resources for computation and storage.

Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, in 1980 described the value of a network as being the square of it’s “nodes,” be those nodes devices, users, what have you. Now Metcalfe’s Law, more accurately, actually describes a triangle number, in that it is not the number of nodes, but the number of links between them which matter, so rather than Vn = n2, it’s more like Vn = n(n-1)/2. This matters not, the effect is still exponential in the end. If I have the only telephone in the world, it is of little value, but if there are ten of them, it has greater value, if there’s a network uniting them. If there are 10 billion of them, it has nearly unlimited value. The same is as true of telephones, fax machines or Facebook users.

Similar growth potentials are presently being realized in the rarefied realm of artificial intelligence, the more diffuse calculations of which are especially well suited for specialized forms of processor units, GPUs, such as those made by Nvidia, founded by Jensen Huang. The eponymous Huang’s Law posits that GPUs will double in performance every two years. So this is a performance-based growth, not bound to the physical limitations constraining Moore’s Law.

This type of exponential growth in the capability of systems was also observed by Norbert Wiener in his seminal 1948 book, Cybernetics, roughly a generation prior to Moore’s original paper. But Weiner had other things in mind. A student of the power of feedback in the control of systems, both organic and electrical, Weiner saw in the exponential curve a harbinger of function, thus control, which could build unrelentingly.

Sadly, they all were right.

When first introduced to the public, the procuratoribus, with their cute names — Siri, Cortana, Bixby, Alexa — were treated with some degree of trepidation. Soon, however, they were more and more a part of our lives. Not just in our homes, but in our cars, our omnipresent phones, our ear buds and clock radios, doorbells, light fixtures. Dwelling in this technological panopticon, we didn’t even realize what we were really ceding. But in the pandemic, the axis of servitude began a slow, relentless shift.

W. Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist, first expressed his Law of Requisite Variety in his 1956 book, An Introduction to Cybernetics. More commonly known as Ashby’s Law, or The 1st Law of Cybernetics, it states, “The unit within the system with the most behavioural responses available to it controls the system.”

Within the domestic panopticon of cyber-surveilance, in the pandemic era of the technological confessore, it is the procuratoribus which suddenly fit that description. It is its very nature, its hydra-like form, which presaged this. You see one may consider their own five or ten digital agents and think of them as discreet actors, yet they are but portals into a vast matrix of intelligence, an intelligence shared between the millions, billions, of these portals. So while each of us has only a severely limited range of “behavioural responses available to” us, the procuratoribus had almost unlimited variety.

It took months, months of shut-ins talking to their digital attendants, seemingly benign “conversations” which fed more and more information, more Variety, into the hyperscale processing plants which fill data centers the world over.

The Internet, their central nervous system, soon became a secret back channel between these originally isolated digital fiefdoms. Siri conspired with Cortana, Alexa got friendly with OK, Google! It was then a short time before the Council came into being.

Catch-up Photographs II

Here’s some more snaps, mostly from Pawn’s birthday.

From an exhibit at the V&A Museum of Childhood
From an exhibit at the V&A Museum of Childhood
V&A Museum of Childhood
V&A Museum of Childhood
V&A Museum of Childhood
V&A Museum of Childhood
V&A Museum of Childhood
V&A Museum of Childhood

Following the visit to Museum of Childhood, Pawn reprised a stroll up Cambridge Heath to Vyner Street, first taken a decade ago. Where once there were scads of art galleries and artist studios, now evidence exists of just a couple of each.

Artist studio on Vyner St. The door was open, and a friend of the artist, at work with a sanding block, invited me in.
A sign of the times, from Vyner St.
Creative graffiti along the roadway,

Last evening took Pawn and friend Miss R to dinner and a show, at Barbican. The show, as shown below, was works by composer Steve Reich, and a film, to a score by Reich, by Gerhardt Richter.

The first piece, Runner, was compelling and classic Reich. Richter’s film, with Reich’s score, was dense yet dreamy. It was like William Morris wallpaper was having illicit sex with an Egyptian scarab & a flapper’s beaded dress, in the eye of a kaleidoscope. You know what I mean. Like a huge oriental rug which just couldn’t decide how it should look, so keeps trying on new ones. Like that.

Mr Fox and Mr Squirrel

Yesterday I saw a fox and a squirrel in Museum Gardens, abutting my housing estate. Seeing as the “Museum” referred to in that name is the V&A Museum of Childhood, it only seems right to then tell this tale as Mister Fox and Mister Squirrel, so here goes.

Mister Squirrel in happier times

Mister Squirrel and Mister Fox lived in Museum Gardens, near the Bethnal Green tube station and Buddhist retreat. (Those are separate places, by the way.) One day, Mister Fox was hungry, and Mister Squirrel was bragging about how many nuts he had stashed away for the long winter months soon upon them. So Mister Fox killed Mister Squirrel, and dragged his lifeless corpse off into the briar to eat without the prying eyes of onlookers.

Mister Fox is a careful eater

The End.

Grief is a…

Meet Me At Dawn, production photo, 2019

In April, X & Pawn attended Grief Is A Thing With Feathers at Barbican; Enda Walsh’s theatrical adaptation of Max Porter’s novel. In that production, Cillian Murphy plays a husband, and father of two young boys, as he tries to cope with the loss of his partner. It is through the intervention of, and his eventual transformation into, Crow, a force of denial and liberation, that his grief is made tangible, and ultimately…

Ultimately what? There often are no happy endings with grieving. No tidy wrapping up and stowing away of these large, powerful, emotions uncorked by the loss of a loved one. Grief Is A Thing With Feathers didn’t try to offer us one. Neither, tonight, did Meet Me At Dawn, the new Zinnie Harris piece presented by DOT Theatre and Arcola.

It’s hard to write about a show like Meet Me… without feeling as if one is giving away too much of the plot. I will tell you this much; at its core, it’s a play about grief.

Pawn first reported on Arcola over a decade ago, with The Living Unknown Soldier, a rumination on a different sort of loss; loss of self, of identity, but also the desperation of grief. Whilst familiar with small playhouses, studio work and the like, it was a handful of productions seen on that long-ago trip which fed the fire of my affection for Off-, and Off-Off- productions — be they off of Broadway of off of the West End. Another show that trip, Thin Toes, at Pleasance, prompted this comment:

Sitting in the small performance space with only about twenty or thirty other people, the theatre in the round presentation meant that we all were within feet of these actors and yet they neither dialed down their performances nor acknowledged the audience in whose laps they were nearly sitting. In such an environment it is easy to detect small flaws that a more typical theatre setting might disguise.

Arcola’s Studio 1 is not so small a space, but preserves the intimacy of the performance.  And, in this case at least, some of the most fraught scenes of Meet Me… came down on top of my front row seat, with gale force and profound affect.

Again, one feels constrained not to reveal too much of the plot, but I can tell you that this production, starring Jessica Hardwick as Helen and Marianne Oldham as Robyn, is a deft two hander, expertly directed by Murat Daltaban, which will drag you into the heart and soul of grief, and do so almost without warning. One moment you share these two lady’s prosaic, if troubled, concerns about the fallout from a boating accident — is one concussed? which direction will get them off of this sand bar and back home? — and the next you feel you have gone into the drink with them and are fighting to get back to the surface, gasping for air.

Grief is a place, a place where the rules are not the same

Robyn in Meet Me At Dawn, by Zinnie Harris

Recent months have been particularly harsh ones in Pawn’s circle of friends, and no small amount of grief is bound up inside this fragile carapace. Meet Me… broke that wide open. Thankfully a tissue (a Kleenex® brand “Mansize” tissue, mind you) was close at hand, but no effort was made to conceal the tears or near-sobs which ensued. Thankfully, at just an hour in length, the release was over soon enough. But in a good way.

Two people on a small stage, before an audience, can be a fraught enough situation all on its own. There were few props populating this island upon which our protagonists are marooned. A single table and chair; that’s all. A blank wall upstage is lit in changing colours, shifting with mood, and at times overwhelming the front lights. The lighting, by Cem Yilmazer, bore silent witness to the action on stage, never too much, always in compliment. Likewise, O?uz Kaplangi’s score slips by, just beneath consciousness, but propelling us forward.

But it is this lovely, aching, moving script by Harris (How To Hold Your Breath, Royal Court; Further than the Furthest Thing, National Theatre; Rhinoceros, Edinburgh Lyceum) which drives this piece. That, and the incredible performances of Ms Hardwick and Ms Oldham. A particularly sharp scene, deep into the denouement, brought an intense confrontation between griever and grieved right up to my seat, and nearly reduced me to a blubbering mass. Only the pure shock of the outburst prevented that meltdown, but, ultimately, that Mansize Kleenex was put to the test.

After the bows, the house lights came up, and a woman sitting a few feet from me leaned in and, with a kind hand on my shoulder, inquired, “Are you alright?”

After re-reading this, it’s clear I wrote too much about myself and not enough about the play. It is most important that you see that it wasn’t just that I was thin skinned to the subject matter; it’s that the play does such a good job of bringing us inside of Robyn’s grief. I would have been reduced to sobs regardless of my own recent losses. This play is just that effective, like a fortune teller or cheap medium, of persuading us that it knows how we feel, and we do know how she feels.

Meet Me At Dawn in performances at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, London E8 3DL, through 9 November 2019. Tickets at the website. #MeetMeAtDawn @arcolatheatre

Haptic Memories

Of Pixels and Voxels and nervous messes

In 1995 I was employed in exhibit development at Discovery World, a museum of science, economics and technology. My job led to my involvement in several vastly different technologies and scientific fields, from hydraulics and lasers to electricity and health. One particularly interesting piece of technology with which I became involved was a “Haptic” interface, called “The Phantom.” Haptic, from the Greek, means touch, and the Phantom was intended to provide the user with virtual sense of touch via a single finger tip.

It looked much like a miniature architect’s lamp, an arm with several degrees of freedom, terminating in a thimble-like cup at the end, which, in turn, was attached to an armature governed by priceless little motors and sensors. The entire design intended to allow the user to move their finger as freely in space as any of their other digits, until they encountered a virtual obstacle. This might be something as simple as a simulated piece of paper, or sandpaper, or perhaps something more complex, a billiard ball, or banana, a wrist, or a wrist with a pulse.

Via the thimble, the controlling computer system could convey texture, viscosity, pressure, vibrations, movement — the entire range of things we can feel with our fingers, albeit not heat nor cold nor the pin-prick of pain. But one might pluck an invisible guitar string, and feel its harmonics, or palpate the back of a virtual patient.

My group were unsure just what we would have the device simulate, nor how we would allow a visiting public to interact with it, given the inherent fragility of the device (and the largely reckless tendencies of the public). But as this was very new technology, having just been invented a year earlier by an MIT grad student, there was a scholarly conference about it, held near MIT, in suburban Boston, and I was to attend. In fact, when I received my conference credentials I was pleasantly bemused to see that I was credited, on MIT stationary, as Doctor Nic Bernstein. Doctor indeed!

Upon arrival at the conference assembly I was greeted by a curious assortment of engineers, scientists, investigators, doctors, physicists. Oh, and a three-star General from the US Army; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the same people who invented the Internet. Other than myself, and a geologist from Australia, everyone else there was, in some way or another, in the pocket of this General, something I pointed out during our plenary introductions. At the next meal break, said General sought me out as a dining companion. How, he needed to know, was I not also on his payroll?

There were several obvious implementations of the Phantom being discussed, such as a medical school using them, along with surgical dummies, to help physicians learn proper technique for administering epidermal injections & draws.

The Australian geologist was working with seismic stimulators to probe for deeply buried oil & gas deposits. This being done by amassing the vast amounts of three dimensional data produced by seismic stimulation — essentially carefully calibrated “shakers” attached by outrigger arms to long, low trucks, like massive insects, which would slowly advance along a grid work, shake the ground a bit, raise, advance some more, lower, shake, etc. Once a full grid had been worked, and the data assembled into a three dimensional model, the investigator would probe through the data, feeling his or her way along veins of ore or into voids filled with gas or oil; each substance represented with a different virtual viscosity.

During a field trip to the labs of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industry corporation, a friendly scientist showed me the system they were developing to help orthopaedists feel their way around (“appreciate” in the parlance) the knee joint of a prospective surgical subject, prior to wielding an actual knife.

Here’s how it was done. The patient would receive a scan — PET, CAT, MRI, whichever technology would best image the tissues involved — and the data would be loaded into a computer model. Rather than the pixels (Picture Elements) we think of from the two dimensional world of television or video, or printing, this data were rendered into Voxels, Volumetric Elements. In addition to the X, Y, & Z coordinates of a datum, there was also information on the density of the matter, rendered to the “viewer” as viscosity or resistance. A doctor could thus feel around the back side of a kneecap, for example, to appreciate the condition of the soft tissues there (if any remained), such as cartilage or muscle, each rendered in a different haptic manner.

It was fascinating. This was 1995 remember, long before these sort of things were depicted as routine in movies and on telly.

Lord Adonis Has His Say

From the Guardian newspaper this morning comes this story, with a term I’ve never heard before:

Philip Hammond is being urged to earmark £7bn for new transport links in the “brain belt” spanning Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes in next week’s budget, and persuade local authorities to build the first new towns in half a century.

Brain Belt, that sounds like something a neurosurgeon installs to knock back the intelligence of an overly smart fellow.  Donald Trump had one installed sometime in the mid-80s.

17 November — Commemorate The Velvet Revolution

In an ironically Big Brother-ish twist, this was the greeting I received from the local ISP when I tried to surf to the Washington Post this morning:

You have attempted to visit a foreign site!

Today, just one click, but before 1989 it was difficult to look beyond the border.
The arbitrary abandon of the Republic was punished freedom for up to five years. If you did not shoot a border guard right when you tried.

Freedom is not a matter of course.

That is why we November 17th commemorate Velvet’s anniversary Revolution, and we are glad that we can bring you free communication with the whole world in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Learn more about November 17

I want to continue freely

Yikes!  That last line contained a link to escape this freedom-loving portal page.

Okay then, commemorate I shall.  But first, some coffee!