Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Language

An excerpt from Brian Murphy’s 2005 book The Root of Wild Madder, an exploration of the majestic, sometimes Delphic, and always offbeat world of Persian rugs:

The challenges of taking literature across languages are huge and thoroughly discussed. Poetry takes the chore to a higher level.

First, let me say that this statement can be generalized beyond its application to literature. It pertains, in fact, to all language, beyond that of prose or the written form. This means it applies just as well to spoken verse, which is, after all, contemporary poetry’s origin, though much popular poetry was originally based on spoken verse– think Sappho. Second, the statement seems intuitive, but is worth a little bit of discussion. I think a common statement of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies well:

The measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle’s momentum, and vice versa.

Or, in terms of language:

The measurement of expression necessarily disturbs a statement’s meaning, and vice versa.

Scientific treatises are rarely translated because the specificity of the terms usually leaves very little ambiguity and only exist in one language (English). There’s no problem in measuring expression because the meaning usually speaks for itself. But words used in poetry are often far more ambiguous and we praise the form for its ability to prod, poke, provoke, and elicit from seemingly humble expressions. The more energy spent on translating, that is, measuring the expression, the more the actual meaning in fact changes. The closer we come to a precise measurement of electron positions in orbitals, the more the position is disturbed, meaning we will lose other types of information. We are trading one for another. In the translation of language, poetry being the hardest, the more precise measurement we obtain of the statement, binding words from one language to words of another, the more the new expression through translation necessarily differs from the other in meaning.

Of course, some translations of poetry are still wildly successful or evocative. But they are not and can never be the same, leaving alone for the time being the differences in interpretation caused by different neural structures arising from different language structures! As I mentioned in my post on Rachel Carson’s book of Sappho’s poetry:

Carson uses words such as sweetbitter, honeyvoiced, mythweaver, songdelighting. These are not words that we really have in English, but their composition follows standard rules for word formation and seem to be quite intelligible. Translators should never shirk from creating new words in order to translate. We need some frame of reference to understand these terms, after all. And if these new words help us see things we already understood in new ways, like a metaphor might, then these truly expand our power of comprehension, opening our minds to possibilities that we had never before considered.

Adding new words in English is exactly what we do when there’s something new to be described that another language does better, or if the word has some sort of economy. I applaud translators capable of this feat, for word creation is the best weapon short of borrowing (which defeats the purpose of translation) for defeating the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in language.

We were together

We were together
Only a little while,
And we believed our love
Would last a thousand years.

~Otomo no Yakamochi

Leadership and the Last Conversation with Gene Roddenberry

Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek and his name is still found at the beginning of every episode or movie created either by fans or Paramount, including the latest (excellent) movie directed by JJ Abrams.  Roddenberry’s life ended in 1991, just prior to the public release of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, but not prior to the conclusion of Yvonne Fern’s work on Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation.

Though the title was certainly posthumous, she obtained an enormous corpus of material from Roddenberry, asking questions that he had never been asked before. The book is utterly engrossing reading, in part because Roddenberry reveals a narcissism not entirely uncommon to science fiction progenitors. Many answers are contrived by Roddenberry to seem profound, as when he argues that he created Kirk and Spock as two halves of the same person. In the best case scenario, he’s implying that he created them having the next 3 seasons and several movies in mind when he made them. But he never did. That’s quite silly, and I don’t want to get into all the reasons why because they’re too arcane and Trek-oteric, but much more powerful arguments have been made that, if anything, he unconsciously developed Kirk as a virtually archetypically superego, Spock as ego, and McCoy as id.

Even worse, Roddenberry keeps invoking the word humanity for so many weird reasons. You can tell he’s grasping at his own greatness and not quite getting there. I am sure that the author must have realized this, but perhaps only after the fact. It is clear that Roddenberry bought into his own myth: that he was a visionary. Many Star Trek fans adulated him, so it’s not a mystery as to how or why. It also explains part, though not all, of the comments about money being obsolete in the future — statements that would involve destruction common sense (see this excellent explanation of the glory of currency by Murray Rothbard) to say nothing of human nature. Ironic, since in “What are Little Girls Made of?”, an original series episode, Kirk argues with Dr. Roger Corby over his achievement of creating robots that feel no hate, jealous, or anger, saying that they will also never know love, tenderness, and sentiment.

As you can see, although I haven’t laid eyes on this book in probably five years, the book definitely messed with my head. I am someone for whom Star Trek can be said to be a religion. I don’t wear it on my sleeve, like some, but it comes out in many conversations, my nickname, all sorts of ways. Gene Roddenberry was demolished by this book. I can’t imagine that the late Majel Roddenberry, who was a gifted and charismatic keeper of the flame, would have been pleased with this. His sometimes extraordinary and cruel vice, which will not be mentioned further here, were not actually balanced by all the humanity hogwash. If anything, they were exacerbated by the delusions of godhood. I was really, really, really disappointed. Star Trek has inspired millions and will continue to do so — and Roddenberry deserves an enormous amount of credit for that — but it goes only so far. It turns out that Bob Justman, Gene Coon, Herb Solow, and many others deserve almost equal credit.

Nothing wrong with that.

In any case, as I read the book, I took a few notes on passages that seemed interesting. My favorite is an exchange on “leadership.” Gene says, my emphasis:

You see, Captain Kirk is a good man. And he is also an excellent man—well trained, experienced. But he is a man who was born to be a leader. And whatever that is, it is what makes him capable of convincing others who are less experienced, less able, to allow him to lead. In his leadership, he gives others the opportunity to grow. He isn’t so in love with leading that he forgets his duty. His duty is to seek out life—and that also means the lives in his care—to bring them along, to see that they have the opportunity to learn and grow to their fullest. Their fullest may not be a quarter of what Kirk’s is, but it’s theirs and they have a right to it.

This is the best explication of great leadership that I have yet encountered. In order to be a great military commander, you probably need to be terrific at training troops, understanding logistics, and possessing keen strategical insight. Someone who fits that bill is General Douglas MacArthur. In order to be a great politician, you need to have a sense of people, vision, and drama (poise, theater, timing). Someone who fits that bill might be Margaret Thatcher. In order to be a great team captain, you are going to need will power, demanding requirements, and respect of others. I can think of several in basketball: Michael Jordan and Tim Duncan come to mind. In order to be a great fashion model, in order to separate from the pack, you need an engaging personality, an entrepreneurial command, not to mention tenacious will. Heidi Klum comes to mind. But what do all of these people have in common? They all have the ability to, as Roddenberry put it, coax everyone’s full potential.

Kirk did it on an episode-by-episode basis, demanding brilliance from his chief engineer, results from his first officer, instant vaccines from his chief medical officer. He expects genius first, but he’s not disappointed or vindictive when they do not come through because he knows that it is simply not possible. MacArthur is often considered to be one of the greatest commanders of men the world has ever known — his ability to train troops was unsurpassed, and many of the greats, including Eisenhower, came through his command. Thatcher sapped every bit of strength and potential the Conservative Party had in order to revolutionize and revive the United Kingdom. Before she took over, it was the poorest Western European democracy. When she left, it was the richest. Michael Jordan learned in part from Phil Jackson how to respect his teammates and to will a team to victory — two sets of back-to-back-to-back championships. Many of his teammates overachieved and never did so well again on any other team. Heidi Klum has encouraged and allowed Tim Gunn’s peculiar genius for leadership to bloom, so much so that he probably overshadows her in terms of love from Project Runway fans.

So this is all to say that I think Roddenberry’s statement is a necessary condition for great leadership. It may not be sufficient, the exact conditions for that changing based on situation, context, or industry. I think that one of the enduring mysteries for me is how he might have unwittingly said these words, but done so poorly at executing them in his many years involved in Star Trek. Even after he had long been removed from day-to-day running of TOS or TNG, he seemed to rarely if ever express any humility, any mention of others at all. Indeed, it must be said to helping others to fulfill their potential has to be more than asking them to do it in your own name.

Sigh, I can’t end this post having written all this negative stuff about the creator of Star Trek. His contribution to the world is far beyond what most of us mortals ever get to do. Kirk lives on today as an example of leadership. Spock lives on, if not as President Obama (contrary to the MSM’s belief, he is much more a TNG than a TOS character), then as a courageous, selfless, and devoted friend. McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov — they’re all there too, to say nothing of Picard, Riker, Data, Troi, Crusher, Worf, and LaForge. These are all his children. They’ve inspired so many firsts. Interracial couples, interracial children, dozens of astronauts, writers, teachers, actors, mothers, fathers, children, challenged persons, businesspersons, just all kinds of people. And it is the thing that, thank God, will not die. It will keep going and going, forever. And all this… from Roddenberry? The answer to the question is that it seems like it’s one of those paradoxes that mostly come from human perception. We’re not all light and we’re not all dark. Maybe Herbert Muller writes it best when he discusses the Hagia Sophia:

Only, my reflections failed to produce a neat theory of history, or any simple, wholesome moral. Hagia Sophia, or the ‘Holy Wisdom,’ gave me instead a fuller sense of the complexities, ambiguities, and paradoxes of human history. Nevertheless, I propose to dwell on these messy meanings. They may be, after all, the most wholesome meanings for us today; or so I finally concluded.

This rambling post is all about messy meanings, but they are undoubtedly the most wholesome meanings for us today.

The Rectilinear Design Fetish

On Google Reader, we are able to share posts quickly for commentary with our friends even easier than on blogs. Soon, Google Wave will alter this by synchronizing our sharing on Reader with our blogs, which means they’re going to get synergy from their purchase of blogger. One of my friends, a graphics artist at Dreamworks, says Google Wave is what email would be like if it was invented today. I tend to agree. ( To learn more about Google Wave, watch Google’s debut of it. )

Can we say the same about today’s architecture? Is there much revolutionary going on? If there is, is it rooted in some school or thinker of the past, or is it completely anew? First, I should make plain here that I am distinguishing between the architecture practiced on widespread commercial scales for suburban development from the more distinguished and idiosyncratic architecture likely to occur in Architectural Digest or featured in an architecture class in Harvard — not Cincinnati, however, for their students are more practical, yet no less intelligent (or such is my belief).

And so, I think it would be a stretch to call this latter form revolutionary, but we could definitely call it rectilinear. In some respects, this harkens to the Modernist constructions of the past, the rectilinear meme for which we continuously taught in architecture programs and highlighting as a glorious echo in history. What art history or architecture student does not know the name Le Corbusier? Or the modernist Bauhaus movement, from which the wave of “cubist” “open floor plan” designs exploded? So to tie this all back to my original point, my friends and I have been discussing the architecture on a blog we read, called freshome: Interior Design & Architecture, through Google Reader. The best thing about it? The wonderful pictures. Lots of em. Reading the blog is like reading a big architecture magazine and being able to imagine yourself inhabiting the homes it features. freshome often posts pictures of spacious, open homes with long blue pools under clear blue skies surrounded by deep green prairies. They’re not all strictly rectilinear, meaning “a polygon all of whose edges meet at right angles. Thus the interior angle at each vertex is either 90° or 270°.” Some of the homes shoot into the sky, even a few have curves! But it seems like most are rectilinear to an extreme. Here are some examples:

This is the House of Vision by Kouichi Kimura, discussed in a post here. It’s really worth looking into because it’s really beautiful inside, but even moreso because the rectilinear fashion becomes a fetish there. Hey, if that’s your thing……..

The Los Andes House by Juan Carlos Doblado, written up here. Very open, windows spanning the length(s) of the house, complemented by… you guessed it… a long one lane pool and prairies! There are many others: Casa Gutierrez by P&P Architects, the majestic Hilltop House by Safdie Rabines, etc.

I have two points to make on this subject. One: this is not so different from most architecture in Western history, though you’ll find some rather astonishing forms in other cultures as the norm. Gives you some food for thought on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Two: I actually think that an example from Star Trek history, yes STAR TREK, explains it much more eloquently than I. Recently Doug Drexler, a long-time art everyman for the Star Trek franchise (most recently Visual Effects CG Supervisor for Battlestar Galactica — a not insubstantial job one would think), posted somewhat of a memorial to Robert Justman, one of his predecessors as a Trek everyman, who was instrumental to keeping the dream of Trek alive for years. Justman as a producer for Trek had to be a master of cost control or the whole show would come apart. Drexler explains this mastery thusly (emphasis mine):

1986 – Since you are a professional… Bob reaches inside a file drawer… stops and looks up at me wryly… you ARE a professional? Yes sir, I think so, I reply. Bob removes a small box from the cabinet and sets it on his desk. I watch him remove something from it with the same sense of awe I had when I watched Reger uncover a self powered lighting panel in “Return of the Archons”. From the cardboard box he withdraws a five inch hand modeled prototype of the Enterprise D with pencil drawn windows on it. Bob smiles at my slack jawed reaction… Greg Jein built it for us… not a straight line on it… he says proudly. I smile, because I know that in producer-speak, that means “expensive”.

And so ends the mystery of the fetish of the rectilinear.

An Apple a Day, Part II: The Family

Much of the history of Fiona Apple is a matter of easy-to-find record. Recently, by coincidence, I found some interesting news about Fiona: she has a very talented family. First, her father, Brandon Maggart, is a Tony-nominated actor who also appeared in several television shows. He has been married twice, and his second marriage brought us Fiona and her sister Amber. However, a half-brother from the first marriage, Garett Maggart, has numerous television credits to his name, including being the sidekick in UPN’s The Sentinel which ran alongside Star Trek Voyager in the mid-1990s. He’s still going strong, appearing soon in CSI Miami.

Of course, the second marriage is where things get really interesting from our standpoint. This brought us Fiona, to be sure, Amber is no talent pushover. Primarily known as a cabaret singer performing in major U.S. cities, she uses the stage name “Maude Maggart,” an homage to her paternal great-great-grandmother, Maude Apple. Currently, she is fighting her way through the business, taking on artistic projects of interest and gaining praise from the New York Times.

How did I learn about her?

Well… you know that with me, most things come back to Star Trek. Unfortunately, I am a Wolfram Alpha Star Trek computer (the name for Wolfram Alpha clearly being stolen from Memory Alpha… grumble). Maggart recently recorded an album with Brent Spiner, who plays Mr. Data in the show and movies from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here’s a video of how the album was constructed, with far too little of Maude (but check 3:25, 3:56, 4:20 are key moments):

It’s an album concept that works. You can hear the similarity to Apple’s voice, as well. A little research dug up that she’s done a lot more than just Dreamland. But at the same time I was thinking about writing these posts, I came across this article in NYT Arts section, one of the must-read links in my Google Reader:

As Maude Maggart rummages through several decades of popular music in “Parents and Children,” her bewitching new show at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, you have the eerie sensation that a precocious young girl is leading you by the hand into an attic where forgotten family secrets are stored. [...] Singing these two songs… in a sweet, delicate voice whose rapid vibrato lends everything she performs a slightly otherworldly quality, her long-lined phrases, filled with twists and turns. [...]

Like Ms. Marcovicci, Ms. Maggart acts a song with a fluid body language that lends everything she sings an added dramatic intensity. And like Ms. Marcovicci she wields old-time Hollywood glamor to cast her seductive spell.

Interestingly, the article goes out of its way to not mention her sister Fiona. Maybe this is just being fair to Maude, who may be a formidable artist in her own right, but if so, the comparison to Claire Danes in the article seems gratuitous.

Maybe I should have titled these posts: “The Royal Applebaums.”

An Apple a Day, Part I: Fiona Apple

Fiona Apple released her first album, Tidal, in 1997. The album stunned reviewers and regular listeners alike. While “Criminal” stormed the airwaves, back when MTV still played music videos, with its subject verbally contrite, but factually writhing with sexual restlessness, other songs captured the praise and admiration of critics. As a young woman, Apple was raped, of which “Sullen Girl” expresses:

Is that why they call me a sullen girl – sullen girl.
They don’t know I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea.
But he washed me shore and he took my pearl -
And left an empty shell of me.

And there’s too much going on.
But its calm under the waves, in the blue of my oblivion.
Under the waves in the blue of my oblivion.

Personally, back in 1996-7, I thought “Never is a Promise” was the best song on the album. Apple conveys sentiments that I have heard many women, and a few men, struggle to express in words:

You’ll never see the courage I know
Its colors richness wont appear within your view
I’ll never glow – the way that you glow
Your presence dominates the judgments made on you [...]

You’ll say, don’t fear your dreams, its easier than it seems
You’ll say you’d never let me fall from hopes so high
But never is a promise and you cant afford to lie [...]

You’ll say you understand, you’ll never understand
I’ll say I’ll never wake up knowing how or why
I don’t know what to believe in, you don’t know who I am
You’ll say I need appeasing when I start to cry
But never is a promise and Ill never need a lie

The typical 1950s responses from us guys are not going to work on Fiona Apple. Sometimes a re-assuring hug or platitudes and declarations of certainties do little more than pour gas on the consuming fire — and risks explosion. During summer school in 1998, I was listening to this song when someone ripped my headphones off to listen to it. The kid waved the headphones in the air exasperated, “Is this the turkey bitch!??!” Although this term is listed in the Urban Dictionary, my esteemed colleague referred to Apple’s exhortation to stop eating turkey and turn to vegetarianism. By this time, she had also gained notoriety for a speech at the MTV Music Awards where she declared “this world is bullshit” and told viewers to stop taking their ethical and cultural cues from, well, people like her. Now, normally, these speeches seem contrived and just a little too cute (by far). Here, however, Apple is only 20 years old, she mentioned Maya Angelou, and she’s telling people to do something that probably hurts her market more than helps. And if the story ended here, you could still accuse her of just trying to get street cred and give the case to the jury feeling all right.

But over the next few years, Apple further developed her oeuvre, without much regard for market demand or the preferences of her record label. She released When the Pawn… [the rest of the Guinness Records-length title shortened for your sanity and mine] which proved a dismal market failure, but another extreme critical success ( For diametrically opposed readerships: Entertainment Weekly and Village Voice ). The album, like her first, is solid from the first song to the last, but none of the singles or music videos caught on this time. The closest she gets to mush, which is apparently what people expect from a woman who is writing her own music, comes at the end of the album in “I Know”:

And at my own suggestion,
I will ask no questions
While I do my thing in the background
But all the time, all the time
I’ll know, I’ll know
Baby- I can’t help you out, while she’s still around
So for the time being, I’m being patient
And amidst this bitterness
If you’ll just consider this-even if it don’t make sense
All the time- give it time
And when the crowd becomes your burden
And you’ve early closed your curtains,
I will wait by the backstage door
While you try to find the lines to speak your mind
And pry it open, hoping for an encore
And if it gets too late, for me to wait
For you to find you love me, and tell me so
It’s okay
Don’t need to say it

If you’re saying to yourself: hey, this isn’t mush at all, you’re right. That’s as close as it gets. This album is different. She talks about different things. She talks about familiar things in different ways. Her expressions are novel, sometimes graphic, and always force me to think. I had never considered that a relationship could take the shape where the woman ( a wife? a girlfriend? a partner? ) would wait like that. Is it possible that they could still survive it? It’s an intriguing thought. I guess the aftermath is for another song. But whatever the case: it’s new.

In her third album, Extraordinary Machine, well… I could never make heads or tails of it. But the story behind it is that she recorded it with a long-time producer, thought she could do better, and re-did it with another producer after a couple dozen fans started protesting the alleged imprisonment of her first go at the album. In fact, it was Apple, not Epic, that withheld the release. And it was her fans who stimulated her to get off her a-word and finish her album.

What emerges from this story is an artist who has seemed, at least until Extraordinary Machine, absorbed by her story — inhabiting the memories, her own personality, her relationships, the dynamism of all these things. Her artistry seems to have been consuming, in a way. I think that by Extraordinary Machine, she might have branched out into other subjects, new ways of expressing these things, with trepidation and tepid results. But I’m really interested in Apple’s seeming sensitivity to the people who interact with her music. The third album came out largely because of a few dozen fans. For other artists, this might not have meant much. But for Apple, it spurred her to finish the album and release it. She has responded in letters to magazines that have published critiques of her or her work. She used to engage with her work and the consequences of it — I wonder what she will do next.

A Conversation with Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood visited The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)  today, as part of the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival. She sounded much the same as she did at MIT in 2004, but she looked more grandmotherly, though not elderly. Her humor was very much in bloom. The subject of the “conversation” between her and the Chair of the Department of English, Professor Parker, was her recent poem “The Door” which comes from her collection of poems also titled The Door. This collection has been well-received, though not highly acclaimed.

I am going to respect the author’s wishes, that you might actually buy her book with the poem in it, so I will not paste the poem here. However, I will look at a few lines and discuss. The poem, as with much of Atwood’s work, is about time. I have discussed on this blog the power of paradox, especially as it pertains to time. Atwood admitted to being cognizant of this, remarking that this poem about time is simple — simple in structure, few if any dependent clauses, not unlike a circle. And just like a circle, with its properties mostly well-defined, tremendous mystery still abounds. We cannot grasp all the nuance and consequence of a circle, much less time, that constant companion we seem so well-acquainted with.

Her poem “The Door” generally describes our relationship with time. In each phase of our life, from youth to adolescence to adulthood to maturity and old age, we see the door opening and closing before us. At first, we are fearful of what’s inside. Later, we simply don’t notice it. Afterward, we become mildly curious about it, then very curious, and finally, we confide in it. It is a good poem, and you should go to a Barnes & Noble to flip open her book and read it. Even think about buying it, for there are enough good poems within to warrant it.

She began the conversation saying that novels come to her as scenes, poems as lines. Rhythmic lines, where meaning is not embedded in the content alone, but in the structure. She said that poetry often does begin with experience, but it is condensed human emotional experience, a matter of evocation versus mere self-expression, which would be like just shouting in the woods. Rather, evocation calls feeling out of the audience. Many bits of the personal information markers are shed, as the experience becomes condensed.

As for doors, they can sometimes be doors to the past, but they are always doors to the future. They represent people’s concept of time. Every culture has ways of marking time with recurring events, most based on the cycle of the sun and/or moon, and there are “power points” where another world seems closer, existing on hinges. Heaven has gates, just as Hell, yes? ( Yes, and Gore Vidal is not allowed in. ) Toward the end of the poem, and the end of the subject’s life, we suppose:

The door swings open:
O god of hinges,
god of long voyages,
you have  kept faith.
It’s dark in there.
You confide yourself to the darkness
You step in.
The door swings closed.

The god of hinges is Hermes: always young, wings on sandals, no spouse, messenger of the gods, conductor of souls to the underground, invented articulation…. You want him on your side. And have you ever heard of “Hermetically sealed?” ( Yes, and while we’re at it, Norman Mailer isn’t allowed in either. ) As to keeping the faith, Atwood suggests we cast our minds to those wanting eternal life, but who do not ask for eternal youth; there is always a catch with eternal youth, a cost, as with vampires. Also, in the end, darkness seems to have new meaning. It is not scary anymore, for we confide in it. Think, Atwood says, of how awful it would be if the sun was out all the time?

One final remark on the poem: the door is only closed to the outside observer. We do not know if it is death. We do not know what is inside that door, which the subject caught glimpses of all her life. Beware false assumptions.

Someone asked Atwood: when did your fascination with unpackaging old bits of bizarre history begin? After some rumination, Atwood replied that it must come from the back of comic books, which said to “send away for the decoder ring.” In the end, she says, it is all about secrets. She added, before this, that she loves to read diaries and recommends The Assassin’s Cloak, selections from the world’s greatest diarists. The Bookling discovers, “A diary is an assassin’s cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen.” – Willian Soutar, 1934

Speaking of secrets, you didn’t think I would leave you hanging without linking to her poem, “Siren Song,” did you? As a bonus, you get to hear an actual reading of it from the author herself.

Frank Lloyd Wright in Michigan

A long time ago, I published a post about a surprising Frank Lloyd Wright discovery in the state of Florida: he designed an entire campus for Florida Southern College, which I pass regularly on I-4 between Tampa and Orlando, right around “Orlampa.”

In a recent Wall Street Journal, I caught this article (”Wright’s House of Wax“) about an interesting site developed by Wright in the 1930s:

…the three-story administration building features a half-acre Great Workroom for clerical employees that is distinguished by an arboreal canopy created by a grid of “dendriform” columns and interspersed skylights. The resulting openness must seem even more refreshing today — in contrast to the tight, sterile spaces of Cubicle Nation — than when the building was completed in 1939.

It really does seem to have a 1930s sense of the futuristic. It’s nothing that we would recognize as so,  but what is odd to me, is that some of it seems to allude to a 70s design aesthetic. Even more odd, is that does not seem nearly as dated as that 70s design aesthetic. The bricks also remind me of the Southern college campus (Auburn, Ole Miss, Florida, Georgia) feel, though I guess it may in architectural circles harken more toward the Prarie School of the outdoors.

Apparently, in regards to this structure, Wright felt the following:

There in the Johnson Building you catch no sense of enclosure whatever at any angle, top or sides….Interior space comes free, you are not aware of any boxing in at all. Restricted space simply is not there. Right there where you’ve always experienced this interior constriction you take a look at the sky!

If this comment jars some memory for you, and you’re not an architect or architecture student, it may be that the pride and boast bring you back to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, in which the author explicitly based some of Howard Roark on Frank Lloyd Wright, and mirrored his bold, individualistic architectural adventurism as a “romantic” exemplification of Objectivism. (More on the relationship between Rand and Wright here.)

Picture 1: interior of the ‘Great Workroom’

Picture 2: the interior court

Picture 3: main exterior

Picture 4: mezzanines

I leave all the scarlet flowers

I leave all the scarlet flowers
For the woman I love
And hiding my tears from her
I pick
The flower of forgetfulness

~Yamakawa Tomiko

Obama’s… Cultural… Policy…? (Silence)

I can barely contain myself. The purveyors of anti-market (read: anti-human) ideology are at it again. Tyler Green has a post gushing about the prospects of the Obama Administration’s cultural policymakers.

First of all, do these people ever stop to say: why in the world is government spending money on cultural policy? Culture occurs everywhere and is always changing. It is always passed down in new and different ways, generation to generation. No culture, or art, is inherently superior to any other. If these assumptions are true: then why is government involved with trying to change it? Why do we need President-Elect Obama to use taxpayer money to direct culture? If he does so on his own, as he has, fine — I love seeing his Mao/Stalin-inspired Socialist visage on every leftist student’s car window just like anyone else.

But to spend our money on doing it…? That is definitely not one of the President’s constitutional roles, nor should it be. It should be up to the people to decide. To do otherwise is indeed the hallmark of a Socialist or Communist government. Why do we need to control culture?!