Another show at the Algoma Art Gallery

     Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s Why the Caged Bird Sings (to April 26th, 2014) is one of those shows whose significance and import the artist thinks has to be explained. I don’t like that; I think the artist should trust the viewer to make sense of what’s presented. L’Hirondelle is song-writer, which may account for her reliance on words. There’s a large poster with lots of words at the beginning of the installation.  I wish I hadn’t read them. If you intend to visit this show, don’t read the rest of this review.
     A number of iPads connected to telephone handsets are mounted around the room. You listen to people videoed listening to First Nations music  on a public payphone. Apparently, the intention is to help us empathise with people in prison, who communicate with their loved ones mostly by phone. In this limited sense, the works are successful, but the whole thing feels more like an “educational experience” than a work of art. It’s not that art doesn’t educate, but it does so by surprising us with new emotions, and insights. It teaches us to experience our world in ways we never imagined. This installation attempts to do that, but the maker focussed too much on the message and too little on the medium. If the explanation of the work’s intention had been withheld, I think working one’s way from one iPad to the next would have been far more involving. Our experience would have been driven by a mystery which we would have had to solve on our own. As it is, the explanation raises expectations that aren’t met, which is a too common effect of talking too much about one’s intentions. An interesting and thought-provoking show, but not engaging.
       L'Hirondelle's website here. She's made a lot of art and music. *½

Two shows at the Algoma Art Gallery

     1. Tom Benner is a graduate of Beal Tech in London Ontario, and it shows. There are strong hints of the London School, both in the materials and the contents of his art works, and in the blandly surrealistic contrasts of its subject matter. He likes assemblages of graphics and sculpture using a variety of materials. This show is labelled Call of the Wild (to May 31st, 2014). I especially liked his group of fibreglass African Asses, and his group of a large copper moon (about 8ft in diameter), a copper pine tree (about 8ft tall), and a small wolf. But every work is at least interesting.
     The overall effect is the artist’s obsessiveness on the one hand, and a paradoxical calm and quiet on the other. I mean, imagine building a copper sphere 8ft in diameter, or casting and painting 16 fibreglass beavers. Even apparently more conventional works contain evidence of Benner’s obsession with getting it right: there are three prints of pine trees accompanying the copper canoe, each print has a dozen or so small flying crows cut from black paper glued to them. I liked Benner’s work; it’s public art, in the sense that it would look best in large spaces such as high-rise building lobbies or atria, or even food courts in malls. Tom has a website. ***

     2. Gabriela Benitez (to May 25th 2014) likes to paint in the outdoors, not because she wants to make pictures of trees and rocks and water, but because she feels freer to lay down the paint in grand and eloquent gestures. The results are mixed. Most of the pieces on show here clearly have significance for the artist, but not necessarily for the viewer. She has a good colour sense. I liked a couple of canvases on which Benitez has layered paint and cloth and other materials in a palette of off whites, greys, and blues, with a glaze that adds shine and glitter, making vaguely figurative images. The others were interesting, but did not move me. Her website is here. **½

The Fantastic Planet (1973)

     The Fantastic Planet (1973) [D: Rene Laloux] Animated movie about the rebellion of the Oms (descendants of Earth space explorers) against the Draags (oversize blue-skinned, red-eyed humanoids). It drags. And the minimal animation in a style compounded of Hieronymus Bosch and semi-realism doesn’t help. This tape is apparently taken from an old print of the movie; the sound quality and colour are terrible. The movie was made in Czechoslovakia, hence the highly experimental style of animation and the themes of the story. It’s not at all fanciful to imagine the Oms as the Czechoslovaks, the Draags as the Soviets, and the domesticated Oms as the puppet rulers installed by the Soviets.
     Story: An Om baby is adopted as a pet by a Draag girl; he uses the teaching/study device to learn as much as he can about Oms, Draags, and the planet’s ecology. He’s tossed out of the park, and is rescued by a wild Om female. His knowledge of the Draags persuades the wild Oms to accept him. They kill a Draag, which prompts the Draags to attempt extermination of the Oms. However, the Oms figure out how to reactivate  a couple of rockets at an abandoned rocket base, and rebuild some weapons. The subsequent war threatens to destroy both Oms and Draags, so there is a last-minutes decision to make peace.
     This could have been a great movie. I think large parts of the movie/story are missing, it's incomplete. The fact that running time is only 73 minutes is one clue. The absence of character development is another, yet character is obviously a driving force: how else could the pet boy overcome the prejudices of the wild Om tribe? There are passages that are obviously meant to explain the backstory of both Oms and Draags, but there are neither logical nor psychological links to the main story line. To say the dialogue is stilted pays it a compliment.
     Recommended only for people who are interested in the history of SF and animated movies. The story is I think very much of its time and place, an aftershock of the Cold War (which would linger another couple of decades), and an example of the highly experimental cinema of the East Bloc. *

Gravity (2013)

     Gravity (2013) [D: Alfonso Cuaron. Sandra Bullock, George Clooney] If you’re stranded in space, you need a whole lot of luck to survive. And a movie designed for a movie theatre’s large screen and 16 speakers doesn’t work very well on a TV screen.

     The story is well enough told, with very few obviously impossible or implausible events. The simulation of zero-gravity is the best I’ve seen. The reminder that in space you can hear only what’s picked up, transmitted, and generated within the space suit is excellent. We hear breathing, heat beats, dull thuds and thumps as the characters bump into the International Space Station. That the whole story is a string of very unlikely events is (I think) not noticed by most viewers. We may know intellectually that the probability of a space accident’s lone survivor reaching Earth is very, very small, but we are caught up in the movie nevertheless, it’s that well photographed, edited, and paced. We know that  Sandra Bullock will survive, and that does reduce the tension. But in a theatre with a huge screen, multiple speakers, and subsonics, that knowledge will not rise to consciousness. In a living room with a small screen and merely very good sound, that knowledge does nibble at your awareness, and much of the effect of the movie is lost.
     Still, a very well done space movie. Watch it. And think about the many space-farers that have died since Sputnik launched in 1956. ***
     Update 20140606: Neil deGrasse Tyson's list of what's wrong with the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzE6bKIKK3A . Enjoy!

Groundhog Day (1993)

     Groundhog Day (1993) [D: Harold Ramis. Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell] Beware: If you don’t get it right the first time, you may be condemned to do it over until you do.
     That’s what happens to Bill Collins, and egotistical, mean-spirited TV announcer, who gets stuck in a time-loop, and has to relive Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney over and over again. He wakes up each February 2nd at 6:00am, and remembers what the previous run-throughs were. He learns a lot of facts, finds out that he can use what he learns to change the new version of Groundhog Day. Eventually he comes to an answer to the most fundamental question: What makes life worth living? He tries hedonism; self-gratification; suicide; revenge; and other self-centred principles and experiments.
     Then he discovers gratuitous kindness and simple acceptance of the gift of joy. He catches a boy falling out of a tree, knowing the boy will never thank him, for Bill must relive that action when he relives February 2nd while the boy (presumably) continues on to the next day. He helps an old drunk, but cannot prevent the old drunk’s death, only only improve the quality of his life before he dies. He accepts that the brief moment of love with his producer is the happiest time he will ever have, because the next run-through will be different. But the spell is broken, and he wakes with her beside him on the day after Groundhog Day.
     I don’t think it’s possible to give a good impression of the flavour and charm of this movie. One factor in making the movie believable is Murray’s ability to play an ordinary, not very bright, not very nice, vain, too self-centred fellow who slowly becomes the best he could be. Another is the script, in which the stages of his experimentation, resignation, and acceptance are nicely captured in vignettes. Another is the way the other people react to Bill in every rerun of February 2nd; both the script and the acting make it clear that for them, this is a new and different Bill, one they have never seen before.
     The narrative pace and rhythm alternately slowing down and speeding up also helps. So does the ever-so-ordinary setting, a small town photographed so as to make it as ordinary as possible, with no attempt to glamourise it, no clever camera angles to divert our attention from the characters. The sound track includes music, but it never intrudes. Every character gets enough screen time and dialogue that we sense there is more there than we are given. And the utter absence of any distracting waffle about how or why Bill became stuck in the time loop lets us focus on its effects on him, and should remind us that we should never let mere factuality get in the way of truth.
     A great movie. It was one of Jon’s favourites. ****

MONEY Or: ECON-101 applied to the real world.

 

MONEY
Or: ECON-101 applied to the real world.

Measure of value
People talk about money as if it were some kind of stuff, like wood, or apples, or houses, or bicycles. But money is actually information about values. As taught in ECON-101: money is a measure of value. A given value denominated in a specific currency is a price. The value is (or should be) the same whether it’s specified in dollars or euros or cowrie shells. It’s like specifying a length in metres or in feet or in ells; or temperature in degrees Celsius or degrees Fahrenheit. The length and the temperature are the same regardless of the measuring units used. We expect the value of a thing to be the same whether it’s measured in dollars or euros. That’s why we want to know “How much is that in dollars?” when we buy something in a foreign country.

Cash
So money isn’t stuff. It’s a way of measuring the value of stuff. That makes it very useful for trading stuff. Before there was money, people bartered. They offered a certain amount of some stuff, say jars of oil, in exchange for other stuff, say jars of wheat. The concept of money apparently began in the Middle East when people used copies of the seals on the jars as tokens for the jars themselves. The seals were marked to show both the commodity and the owner. They broke the seals in half, and brought half-seals to market to trade for other half-seals. Then they showed up at each other’s warehouses or barns, matched the half-seals to each other, and carried off their purchases.

Eventually, people began to make tokens of value using stuff that couldn’t be used for much else. The reason gold was used is that it doesn’t rust, and that it’s almost useless. Besides money, about the only thing you can use gold for is to make pretty things. Material tokens of value are called cash; and many people still prefer cash over other forms of money because these tokens are definitely made of stuff, so cash confirms the feeling that money is some kind of stuff.

Inflation
When people began to use metal to make tokens of value, the concept of money as information was almost complete. I say almost, because many people then and now believe these metal tokens have “intrinsic value.” That is, people believe that the value of a piece of gold somehow fixed. This is the reason people want to go back to the gold standard, the assumption being that this will somehow stop shenanigans like price inflation, unbacked credit, “printing money”, and so on. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. And the reason it doesn’t work that way is that money is – wait for it! – information, not stuff. People will give away goods in exchange for tokens of value if, and only if, they believe they can exchange those tokens for goods of the same value as the goods they gave away. Once they stop believing this, we have serious trouble, perhaps even runaway inflation.

Inflation will happen regardless of what the tokens are made of. When the Spanish imported hundreds of tons of gold into Europe from South America, prices measured in gold went up: people had to give more gold for the same value of goods. The reason for this is that the amount of goods had not increased. The amount of wealth, and hence its value, remained the same. There wasn’t more wheat or timber or cloth or real estate just because there was more gold. But people believed that gold was wealth. That mistake cost them a great deal of wealth: Spain almost went bankrupt.

Types of Money
We use many forms of money in our current state of economic sophistication:

a) Cash is metal and paper tokens each of which represents a certain value: a penny, 25 cents, 5 dollars, etc. These tokens were originally fixed weights of “precious metal”. Pretty soon, they became coins of fixed size and weight that represented some value. Then came paper money, which could be “redeemed” for metal coins.

b) Cheques are pieces of paper that represent whatever value we write on them. $24.95, $1200, $75,346, etc. These evolved from “letters of credit”, which a traveller would carry from one place to another. A banker in the traveller’s home country would guarantee that the traveller’s debts in the foreign country would be covered up to the amount on the letter of credit. Related to this are bonds, which are promises to pay a certain amount of money to the person who presents the bond. Letters of credit and bonds can be traded, because they are promises to pay, as can cheques, something the pay-day loan companies exploit. "Currency trading" is actually trading promises to pay.

c) Bank book, bank statement: this represents the value of money you have “on deposit”.

But most of the money we use nowadays is pure information:

d) Digital data stored on a computer storage device on the bank’s servers. These are records of the amount of money in your accounts and investments, the amount of money you owe on your loans, and so on.

e) Digital information moving to computer storage from the card terminal on which the merchant and you press buttons so that you can pay for your purchase. This money is pure information. The only way you know the payment has been made is by another piece of information: the slip of paper on which the transfer of money has been recorded.

Public spending
The use of electronic transfers makes it crystal clear that money is information. It’s not stuff. But thinking of it as some kind of stuff causes confusions that can bring down governments. Or worse.

When major public works are proposed, a lot of people ask, “Where will the money come from?” This misses the point. The real question is, “Is there enough wealth (energy, materials, and human skill) to do what we want to do?” If there is, then “paying” for it is just a matter of recording the value of the resources used. How do you that? By issuing enough money tokens to represent that value. This freaks out some people, who see it as “printing money.” But that’s exactly what private banks do when they lend you the money to buy a car or build a house. They "deposit" a credit in your account, which means that you now have that amount of money to spend. They don’t have anywhere close to the amount of money “on deposit” that they lend out. By law, in Canada they can lend up to 200 times what they have “on deposit”. What happens when they want to lend more than that? The get a loan from another bank, and “deposit” it.

Inflation (again)
If you understand that money is a measure of wealth, then inflation is a weird thing to happen. It’s as if the measure of distance changed because there are too many metre sticks floating around, and we have to make them shorter so we can use them up to measure the distance from here to there. That’s absurd. The distance from here to London is the same no matter how long or short a metre stick is. But that’s what happens when we have inflation. Briefly, inflation happens when there is a mismatch between the actual value of a country’s total wealth and the value of that wealth as measured by money, the measure of the wealth that we have. If the total value of wealth is X, and our money totals 2X, then prices will have to double to maintain an accurate ratio between value and price. This is what happened to Spain in the 15th century. In effect, in a period of inflation money embodies false information about value, and the money system won’t work unless and until people accept the new, lower value of money.

But inflation is not the same as increasing the money supply. Inflation happens when the money supply increases faster than the amount of wealth. It does so for many reasons, one being that people raise prices beyond the value of the goods and services they offer. Another is interest beyond the cost of processing the money data. That means that more money is needed for people to maintain something close to a stable trading system, and banks oblige by issuing even more money, at interest, of course.

The money supply should increase in proportion as we create more wealth. And prices should change as different commodities increase or decrease in value relative to each other. That is, these changes in the value of wealth cannot be measured absolutely, only as ratios. That’s why the price of gold increases. The amount of gold remains about the same,  because new gold mines add very little to the total amount of gold stored in places like Fort Knox. But it must measure more wealth, and the only way to do that is make an ounce of gold measure a larger amount of wealth. So the price of gold is raised.

Prices of commodities do change as their values change. In fact, most consumer goods are cheaper than they were decades ago, but inflation tends to disguise that. We have to measure prices in “constant dollars” to see the price changes. We would have “constant dollars” if the money supply were to change exactly in proportion to the change in wealth.

Prices also change in relation to each other. Sixty years ago, you could have bought about 1,000 loaves of bread for the price of a typical TV set. Now, a typical TV set is worth only about 100 loaves of bread, and it’s a better TV set, too.

We could of course insist on a fixed price for gold, in which case a dollar would measure larger and larger values of wealth. That in turn would require prices to fall. Suppose we now have twice as much wealth as we had before, but the same number of dollars to measure its value. Then what was priced at $1 would now have to priced at 50 cents. That’s called deflation, and for some reason we don’t like it at all.

Supply and demand
Economists tend to talk as if the economy were some kind of natural phenomenon like the weather.  It is of course no such thing, but a human invention. The “law of supply and demand” demonstrates this nicely. It is considered to be a description of how prices behave when particular commodities become more or less abundant. It is actually a description of human psychology. It describes how humans behave when they believe something is scarce or abundant.

When something that we want appears to be in short supply, we will offer more of what we have a lot of in order to get the scarce commodity. This is how it works in a barter economy, and it works exactly the same way in a money economy. Advertisers know that making a product appear to be scarce will enable them to charge more for it. Perceived scarcity explains bubbles. Actual scarcity can cause revolutions and wars.

The easiest demonstration that this “law” is an abstract description of human behaviour is to observe what happens when somebody has nothing to trade for what they want, or else doesn’t want to trade. If they have the power to do so, they just steal what they want; and if the owner of the wealth objects, they beat him up or worse.

Robbery instead of trade illustrates the truth that trade both requires and builds the rule of law, that is, civilisation. You can’t trade with people who’d rather steal from you. And once you start trading, you have to have some rules, or else you or the other party will revert to stealing.

2012-09-04 & 2012-03-03

Grammar Notes 1

Some time ago, the denizens of a news group sidetracked themselves into a discussion about grammar. Here’s part of the exchange, between "Richard" and myself, slightly edited for clarity.

"Richard" posted this example of a bad sentence:

“Me and him went to see the dog wag it's tail.”
How many errors in that sentence?



I replied:
Three.


"Richard" also offered this as the corrected sentence:

“He and I went to see the dog wag its tail.”

I continued:


But there are no grammar errors whatsoever. (And that's a complete utterance, albeit not a complete sentence.)

a) Its/it's is a spelling error, not a grammar error. Just read the sentence out loud, and you'll hear why that's so. (1)

b) "Me and him" is a usage error. Not acceptable in "standard" usage, is all. "Standard usage", like any other, is in constant flux. That's why an earlier observation is spot on: "for Sue and me" is beginning to sound down-market. (2)

Want to see real grammar errors? Look at (and speak) this:

c) "He and I see a dog its tail wag went to."

Only one phrase in c) is in its correct position, and two phrases are in correct sequence. Also, all phrases are correctly formed, so (oddly enough) most native speakers of English can and will figure out what the speaker intended to say. (3)

Here's the same string of words ordered by two non-grammar rules:

d) "A I he to and dog its see wag tail went"

At this point, there's no grammar there, so it would be somewhat pointless to talk about it having errors of grammar.

Footnotes:
     (1) The focus on the written language that shows up in a newsgroup is understandable, but it leads to subtle and not so subtle errors. Writing is of course not merely a record of speech, because it has inherently fewer codable features than speech. But speech is primary, and forgetting that can cause even very clever people to make serious mistakes. For example, Noam Chomsky's positing a "surface and deep structure" to account for ambiguities is pointless. In speech there is no ambiguity in the examples he gives, because intonation, which shapes the syntax of a sentence, disambiguates what in the written language is not (and cannot) be indicated.
      The primacy of speech is the reason that so-called “computer languages” are not languages: they are written codes, with strict rules, which are necessary precisely because these "languages" are actually codes. We use actual words and conventional math symbols to make it easier for humans to decode. One could just as well replace the terms and symbols with colour terms. Or coloured shapes.

(2) Another example: For me, pronouncing "herb" as erb is a solecism. But in US  usage it's correct, and herb would be judged down-market. Unfortunately, Canadians are adopting US usage. Sigh.

(3) When we hear fractured utterances, we automatically correct them as we interpret them. Most of what we speak and hear is fractured, more or less badly. Speech formed of complete and correctly formed sentences sounds odd. When my wife first heard a colleague at the University, she said, "He sounds like a book."