Heroes, Martyrs, Knaves: Oscar Grant, Ian McKellen, the Matt Damon franchise

I inhaled a lot of drama this weekend. Didn't plan to, it just happened. I don't mean the drama that clutters up one's own life, but the sort that's played on stage and screen.

Friday night I had the great fortune to see Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Not only is the play a riveting look at male isolation and aggression, written by a modern dramatic master of same, but the lead roles were fiercely jousted by two of the finest living British actors: Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley added their Tony Award winning star power to round out the cast. Sound like a Broadway-worthy lineup? That's because the production is on its way to New York this fall, where No Man's Land will be played in rotation with Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Cort Theatre.

Saturday afternoon I watched Elysium, the latest Matt Damon might-as-well-call-him-a-superhero flick, which benefited from a setup -- the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth as IMDB has it -- that will seem sadly credible to those who follow the current trajectories of wealth distribution and environmental degradation, which are related topics, after all.

On Sunday I finally saw Fruitvale Station, a dramatization of the last day in the life of Oscar Julius Grant III, culminating in his tragic death a few BART stops from where I live, at the hands of transit police, on New Year's Day, 2009. The film was released on 12 July, and is still playing in Berkeley, at the California theatre.

In No Man's Land, the two principals circle each other warily, sometimes in thrall to each other's lies and evasions, sometimes railing against each other's deception. Truth is contested, perhaps unknowable. Each character stakes out solitary territory in the form of sketchily described history, competing claims, and slippery observation, in a single large room of the home belonging to a monied and alcoholic litterateur, Hirst (played by Stewart). The failed poet Spooner (McKellen) rises to the bait when Hirst -- honestly befuddled? deceitfully? -- first goes on about remembering Spooner from their years at Oxford, then denounces him as an imposter. Spooner eventually begs. The Crudup and Hensley characters menace throughout. Hirst retreats into alcoholic opacity, which is where he was when the curtain first lifted. Each man fears for the integrity of his territory, defends it, and ends the play as alone as he started. All of the characters are soused, none are sympathetic, yet the production is riveting. It's a house of knaves.

In Elysium, Max (Matt Damon) is an orphan,  grown-up in a Los Angeles decayed into dusty, sprawling slum. Max has spent years boosting cars and doing time, but as the film opens has taken honest work in a Dickensian factory, helping to manufacture the robots that police his world. His driving motives are muddled. For understandably selfish reasons he doesn't want to return to prison. When a risk he is forced by a callous manager to take at the factory results in his exposure to a lethal dose of radiation, Max resolves to do whatever it takes to gain access to medical technology available only on the 0.001%'s space station, called Elysium: quasi-magical machines that heal any and all illness and injury this side of death. Then -- and I'm eliding here to avoid spoiling the, um, preposterous plot -- a little girl with leukemia tells him a child's fable, and Max, exercising superhuman strength with the aid of Terminator-like technology while dying of radiation poisoning, schemes and fights his way to Elysium where he ... wait for it ... closes the movie as a Christ figure. It's Hollywood, people.

In Fruitvale Station, Oscar Grant (played by Michael B. Jordan) is portrayed as a Joycean sort of hero: like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, he's a flawed human being navigating the ordinary pleasures and perils of a single day in his hometown. Like Elysium's Max he's been in prison, but now he's not. He drops off his daughter at school and makes up with his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz); he begs the manager who fired him for another chance at his supermarket job (no dice), and later charms a shop owner into permitting the women he's out with on New Year's Eve to use his restroom. He gets in a fight on a packed BART train with a man who recognizes him from a stretch in Alameda County's jail. Amped-up police respond, pull Grant and his friends off the train, and at the culmination of escalating rounds of testosterone-inflected chest bumping, BART police officer Johannes Mehserle unholsters his sidearm and shoots Grant point-blank in the back. (In real life, Mehserle claimed he intended to reach for his taser but grabbed the 'wrong' weapon. Mass protest ensued. Mehserle is free after serving half his short sentence for an involuntary manslaughter conviction.) Fruitvale Station portrays a world in which flawed humans sometimes make it home to their loved ones, as Leopold made it home to Molly; while other flawed humans get shot in the back. You may know the place. You live there.

YMMV, but I found the most highly produced (and expensive) of these dramas to boil down to a dose of the same old same old. It was the least moving, precisely because the real world -- never mind the setting, I'm talking about the humanity -- was airbrushed and mythologized out of it. [Sony paid $115,000,000 for Elysium, according to the Hollywood Reporter (actual budget unknown), and took in just over $30M in its first weekend, including my $8 matinee ticket. Fruitvale Station was acquired by the Weinstein brothers for $2.5M, its budget was reportedly less than half that and it was filmed in 20 days. I haven't got a clue what the Pinter play cost to produce, but I'd wager it's closer to the Ryan Coogler film than to Neill Blomkamp's.]

Fruitvale Station is my weekend's clear winner; I prefer drama that adheres closely to the world outside my door, in all its varied and particular messiness. Michael B. Jordan portrays a man at human scale. Despite its departures from known truths of Oscar Grant's story -- it's drama based on not a documentary -- Coogler has given us a way to listen past the chuff we call "news," to approach the heart of what it's like to live in 21st century urban America.

The Berkeley Rep's run of No Man's Land has sold out its performances, through the end of August (the tenacious might get lucky scoring tickets returned to the box office on the days of performance). Pinter's drama is formal, not natural; but it reaches deep into the fear and loathing that animate the shrunken souls of men trapped by shriveled notions of masculinity. I regret that I believe their numbers are legion, and that they make cameo appearances in Fruitvale Station.

Anyway.

If you're in New York this Fall you have another shot at seeing actors that one Berkeley Rep staffer aptly described this weekend as "the Geilgud and Olivier of my generation": the Cort Theatre's run of No Man's Land opens on 31 October.




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Tinkering: on bookstore serendipity and novels that show what it is to be alive
Robert Redford, the Weather Underground, and why we read books
Parallel lives in fiction: Murdoch, Barnes, the Man Booker prize


Image of the cast of No Man's Land provide by Berkeley Rep: "Internationally acclaimed actors Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are joined by Tony Award-winners Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley in a special presentation of No Man’s Land at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Photograph by Jason Bell." Image of Oscar Grant from Wikimedia Commons.

The silliest art I saw in Los Angeles: Urs Fischer at MOCA

The silliest art I saw in Los Angeles last week was not the James Turrell retrospective at the LA County Museum of Art. Or at least I don't think it was. I'm almost certainly not smart enough to get James Turrell, so I just tiptoed away, shaking my lo-density cerebrum, from LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum and Resnick Pavillion, where oodles of Turrell's work is on-view until 6 April 2014.

Seven or so miles to the west, in the heart of downtown LA, you'll find the city's Museum of Contemporary Art. Perhaps you'll have had a look beforehand at the on-line blurb about MOCA's first-in-U.S. survey of Urs Fischer's work, and learned that:

Fischer's world is fluctuating and unpredictable, and the pleasure that we derive from his sculpture and painting is based on our attraction to and simultaneous repulsion by the dreamlike appearances that he constructs.

Um. So says the curator.

Another point of view: when I visited the Fischer exhibit last week I was ... bored.

See for yourself:

A cloud of rubbery blue raindrops. Okay, maybe that's whimsical (but it's also exasperating and ridiculous as soon as one thinks to compare it, say, to the somber, stately work of art I thought to compare it to: Anti-Mass by Cornelia Parker at San Francisco's de Young).

Looking around, ever so hopefully:

A log-cabin like house made out of loaves of bread, going stale and crumbling into ... breadcrumbs.

A olde-tyme lamppost made to look like a woozy pink set piece in a cartoon.

One of the pieces you don't see behind the camera's-eye view above is a 2012 sculpture called Untitled (Suspended Line of Fruit), made up of a strawberry, a lime, an apple, a grapefruit, a coconut, and a pineapple suspended from the ceiling by nylon fishline so that each piece of fruit hovers just above the floor in a straight line, like Newton's Cradle only more spacious and therefore of no conceivable use. You can see a photo on the artist's website; elsewhere we learn the fruits are replaced when they begin to rot.

Enough said.

Wikipedia tells us:

Fischers subversive approach to art is often considered to be influenced by anti-art movements like Neo-Dada, Lost Art or the Situationist International.

Okay. Anti-art movements, I can begin to see the anti-point.

What does Fischer's gallerist have to say say? Here from the Gagosian Gallery site:

Urs Fischer’s large-scale installations and sculptures posit genres traditionally evoked in painting -- such as portraits, landscapes, nudes, and still lifes -- in a profusion of rich and often impermanent sculptural materials. Whether utilizing foodstuffs (Bread House, 2004) or more self-destructive mediums, such as soft wax that simply melts away, Fischer mines the endless possibilities of a particular material to introduce an additional dimension into the work: that of time. Imbued with their own mortality, his sculptures and installations cultivate the experiential function of art. Fischer incorporates elements of performance and Pop art to create an oeuvre that is distinctly current, and as witty as it is macabre.

"Posit genres"? And how does one "introduce" time into a work that exists in a world in which time is fundamental and affects everything? One can represent time, certainly. Think Salvador Dali. But did the keepers of Vatican City introduce time into Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes when they burned candles in the chapel, or ... o, never mind.

I guess if I'd ever taken an art history class I'd have flunked it.

To be fair and balanced, I responded more positively to a piece of Fischer's displayed in the middle of the floor of a room in MOCA's permanent collection, and titled A Place Called Novosibirsk:

There's a much better photo on the artist's site, if you crave a clearer look. I don't know why I like this better than Fischer's work in the survey show. Because it's almost figurative, in a witty sort of way? Because it's not fleshy or gross or ugly?

Let's just call it a mystery, and move along.

The L.A. Weekly's Catherine Wagley had this to say, in Urs Fischer Traffics in Clichés -- But That's Not Necessarily a Bad Thing:

Fischer's folk-, pop- and consumer-inspired sculptures and paintings surround you with some of the more banal and stifling tropes from the last two decades -- Photoshop collages, a number of cats, cartoonish tableaux that appear all at once like too many open browser windows -- and offer no escape route.

Well. I'm here to tell you: I escaped.

First alongside California Plaza and down the Angels Flight funicular railway, which travels the length of a single steep block, but only costs a quarter if you've got a metro card:

Then through the Grand Central Market:

And across the street into the Bradbury Building:

Now that's purty...




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Barry McGee mid-career survey at UC Berkeley art museum
Jim Campbell's "Exploded Views" at SFMOMA
Marilyn Monroe meets the Haymarket Riot: a tale of two Chicago sculptures


Thanks to Alossix, via Wikimedia Commons, for the image of Los Angeles' Grand Central Market. The rest of the photos in this post are the author's.

Tinkering: on bookstore serendipity and novels that show what it is to be alive

I came late to the party (Paul Harding's TINKERS won the Pulitzer in 2010), but that's the way bookstore serendipity goes:

You're skimming the shelving carts -- at Moe's Books in Berkeley, for example -- and a skinny little white-spined book catches your eye, who knows how or why. You pick it up, and it has one of those gold "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" seals on the simple white cover. A tiny figure stands alone in a snowscape printed in blues and greys across the bottom quarter of the paperback. Marilynne Robinson contributed a front-cover blurb pullout and a back-cover blurb.  (You deduce from the back-cover bio that Robinson first taught and then taught alongside the author at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.) The first sentence of the novel hooks you, and the second sentence sets the hook, then the rest of the paragraph that fills the first page reels you in with its clean, spare specificity:

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster. The panes in the windows, once snugly pointed and glazed, stood loose in their sashes. The next stiff breeze would topple them all and they would flop onto the heads of his family, who sat on the couch and the love seat and the kitchen chairs his wife had brought in to accommodate everyone. The torrent of panes would drive everyone from the room, his grandchildren in from Kansas and Atlanta and Seattle, his sister in from Florida, and he would be marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass. Pollen and sparrows, rain and the intrepid squirrels he had spent half of his life keeping out of the bird feeders would breach the house.

I bought the novel in June, and read it twice through in five weeks.

TINKERS is about a man, a dying old man, whose last days are spent inhabiting, as in a fantastically vivid dream, the life and mind of his odd, eccentric, impoverished, epileptic father, whose life forked away from his own when George Washington Crosby was an eleven year old boy, or perhaps just twelve.

It's also about how clocks work, because fixing old clocks is what George did for the last thirty years of his life, after retiring from a teaching job. It's about building bird nests, in imitation of birds' techniques, with false beaks cut from tinkers' tin tied onto one's fingertips. It's about winters in New England. It's about George's father Howard selling bits and pieces of manufactured goods out of a cart fitted with wooden drawers with a brass pull-ring on each, a cart pulled by a mule named Prince Edward down "dirt tracks that ran into the deep woods to hidden clearing where a log cabin sat among sawdust and tree stumps..." It's about what epilepsy feels like from inside.

Why did this short, quiet novel, its author's first, shoulder its way to the front of my reading queue? And demand a second read so soon after the first?

I was wide open to it, I know that now, having read it: my own father passed in late November of last year. His brother, the last of his siblings, died in June. I've been anticipating the wedding of a dear cousin, granddaughter of my father's late sister, who was married this past weekend. A relative whose precise connection -- through my paternal grandfather -- isn't fully clear yet had recently been in touch from Barcelona, where she was traveling, all afire with the dim inference we share that some five centuries ago our family was shown the Spanish border after working for generations prior to the expulsion of 1492 as farm foremen (an occupation called "Masover" in Catalan, pronounced maj-o-vay, or something close to that).

All of which is to say: I've had family, generations, and the occasions of families' lives, on my mind.

So a novel treating a son seeking his long-lost father -- known only through dim memories, old diaries, the deductions made from what a son finds in his own body, heart, and mind, deeply structural artifacts that can only have lodged in him as bequeathed character -- well, a story like that had no choice but to lure me in. How do we know our fathers? Through what narrow slices of their lives do we learn of them? What do we discover about our fathers when we come around to understanding ourselves?

TINKERS is one of those novels that is less about plot and more about revelation of character through incident. Intricately interweaving glimpses of his father's life that may be imagined or inferred or drawn from the deepest well of himself, and memories of his own life, both the years lived with his father and over the many decades of their separation, Harding's George Washington Crosby opens a view, vertiginously deep, of what it means to find, and have, and lose a seemingly-autonomous identity (but, in Harding's vision, only seemingly).

It's a Pulitzer Prize winner that's well worth reading, however belatedly. It's worth reading twice. Thanks, Moe, gone but certainly not forgotten;  and thanks to every other intrepid, independent bookstore owner ... for keeping bookstore serendipity alive.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Robert Redford, the Weather Underground, and why we read books
Ursula Le Guin visits UC Berkeley
The lives of books


Thanks to Matthew Felix Sun for the photo of The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, taken during our recent visit.

Consider the ratchet spring of a retractable ballpoint pen

It started in high school, this incredulous wonder I feel every time the ink runs dry in one of my retractable ball point pens.

How often is that, you ask, in this Age of the Touchscreen? Often enough, I answer. I still keep a journal: sometimes for journalish scribbling, oftentimes for brainstorming my way into whatever bit of fiction on which I happen to be focused. I write in my journal with retractable ball point pens.

I favor the Zebra F-402 these days, and have for several years. Black ink. 0.7 mm fine point.

For a while I had a fetish for a pen I got as a gift from family friends in Japan. Boy, was that a problem. Not the pen. I loved the pen. I didn't want to write anything in any way significant with any other instrument. But. I couldn't find refills to save my life. I had to ration my use of the thing. Naturally, therefore, when my late father and his wife traveled to Tokyo I gave them the relevant info and begged them to search for refills there. Family legend, of the How I Spent My Overseas Vacation variety, was born:  repeated tellings of how a different, bewildered family friend drove the two of them across town in Tokyo traffic to some Costco-sized office supply store, in order to buy a half-dozen pen refills for yours truly.

I weaned myself from that fetish-pen with the Zebra F-402, which is considerably easier to refurbish, replicate, and replace. Local stores here in Berkeley carry them. You can buy the Zebra F-402 by the dozen on Amazon. Refills too.

But that's not what I meant to write about. What I mean to write about was ratchet springs. There are ratchet springs in a Zebra F-402, in that Japanese pen for which my father and his wife played refill courier, and in pretty much any other retractable ball point.

What's a ratchet spring, you ask? From eHow's How a Retractable Ballpoint Pen Works, by Thomas McNish:

On the inside of the pen, there are a couple springs that allow the pen to retract. The first spring (ratchet spring) is located inside the bottom half of the barrel (where the tip comes out). The reservoir is put through this spring before it's put through the open end of the barrel. On the other side of the reservoir, there's a spring that's located inside the upper half of the barrel. This spring (the button spring) is connected to a screw and a clip, which are then connected to the button at the end of the pen. When you press this button, it presses down on the button spring, which then forces the reservoir out through the pen. A locking mechanism consisting of tiny pits and teeth interlock with each other to keep the reservoir out of the pen when it's needed for writing, and when it's retracted back into the barrel, they unlock and the reservoir is sprung back inside by the ratchet spring.

A ratchet spring, then, is the spring that comes speared onto the business end of just about every retractable ballpoint pen refill for sale in the United States of 'Merica. When the ink reservoir goes dry, you need only replace it with a refill, discarding the empty innards of the pen. Including the ratchet spring.

This ritual filled and fills me with incredulous wonder and no little dismay each time I perform it (as I did last week, matter of fact, when my Zebra F-402 ran dry in mid-journal-entry). What in this ritual, particularly, filled and fills me with incredulous wonder? Why, the marvel of engineering that is the spiral of springy steel known as a ratchet spring, natch ... a marvel I am, as a compliant consumer of consumer products in these United States of 'Merica, meant to pack off to the local landfill without a second thought.

To landfill?

That's wrong. That is gravely wrong. And I have known in my heart of hearts that it is wrong for the better part of four decades, since I was a wee lad: hormonal, yes, but morally certain. Hence the collection (partial) of ratchet springs pictured above, springs I've harvested over the years from empty ink reservoirs of retractable ballpoint pens.

I can't bear to throw the things away, see. Not that I have any clear idea how to reuse these wiry marvels of engineering. I'm not a hoarder. Really, I'm not. But ...

Imagine yourself living in the forest, wearing animal skins you scraped clean with a flint blade, rubbing sticks together when you need to start a fire. If, in such a state, you were to discover an urgent need for a well-tempered, evenly wound, durably flexible steel spring ... how the heck would you go about making one?

Answer: fughedaboutit.

Q.E.D. How could anyone carelessly throw away such an elegant artifact of advanced technology? To that question, I have no answer.

When I first described to my partner the reluctance I feel at the prospect of discarding ratchet springs when I reload a retractable ballpoint pen, he stared at me like I was crazy.

"People throw them away?" he asked.

Not in China, from whence Matthew hails. No siree Bob. In China, I now understand, at least in the China of the 1980s when Matthew was growing up there, one saved the ratchet spring from a retractable ballpoint pen and reused it when inserting a new retractable ballpoint pen refill. New retractable ballpoint pen refills did NOT come with a new spring. You had no choice, really. In China, you saved and reused the ratchet spring, or your retractable ballpoint pen would no longer retract.

Come to think of it, those refills my father and his wife brought back, triumphantly, from the Far East sometime before the turn of this century -- to augment the few Pentel XBXS7-A refills our friends supplied with their original gift, which are now available, like every other purchasable thing, from Japan via Amazon -- they didn't come with springs either. See photos, above and at left.

There are, according to the CIA World Factbook, 1,476,838,913 people who live in China and Japan (combined population, July 2013 estimate). That's almost one and a half billion people who, if they use retractable ballpoint pens, and refill them when they go dry, save and reuse ratchet springs. A billion and a half individuals who reuse 'em ... or lose 'em.

Knowing that, I'll never again feel alone when I refill a Zebra F-402 and carefully, nay, lovingly warehouse its marvelous wiry spiral of a ratchet spring in a box I keep in the drawer of my desk.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Should technology shape art?
Elegy for a manual transmission
Rock, Paper, Digital Preservation
It’s new, but is it improved?

Three of the four photos included in this post are the first three photos I captured with my brand new iPad Mini. That proves I'm not a Luddite, right?

Eshelman Hall demolition: all but history

Several months ago, as crews on the UC Berkeley campus prepared to demolish Eshelman Hall, I wrote about anti-apartheid organizing headquartered there in suite 613 during the mid-1980s, when I was an activist-alum on the campus.

As I wrote in March, when Nelson Mandela toured the U.S. in 1990 after being released from the prison on Robben Island, he gave a nod to the group with which I organized, the Campaign Against Apartheid, calling us out by name to the assembled crowd at the Oakland Coliseum. I was marked deeply by the great man's acknowledgement: you never know when or where history's going to reach out and touch your life. You never know how history will gestate, then unfold.

President Obama on the topic, on the occasion of his visit this past weekend to Robben Island with his wife and daughters, from the NY Times:

Sea birds squawked as Mr. Obama talked to his daughters about the history of the prison island, and of the role it played in the political movement of nonviolence started by Gandhi.

"One thing you guys might not be aware of is that the idea of political nonviolence first took root here in South Africa because Mahatma Gandhi was a lawyer here in South Africa," the president told them. "When he went back to India the principles ultimately led to Indian independence, and what Gandhi did inspired Martin Luther King."

It makes my stomach churn to pass the ever-diminishing Eshelman Hall in these recent weeks, as the former South African President fights for his life in a hospital in Pretoria. The correspondence is trite, but I can't help but be conscious of a parallel. Time, life, history, entropy.

Here's a video of the state of demolition on 3 June, as the crew's endlessly fascinating, dragon-like grapple excavator takes bites out of suite 613, on the northwest corner of the seven-story building:



Here's another from 8 June, by which time suite 613 was history, but the building is still mostly-standing:



This weekend I walked by the building and took some still photos of little corner of Eshelman still left:

It won't be long now.

---

Correction (15 Jan 2014): In this post I mis-stated (because I misremembered) that Nelson Mandela referred to the UC Berkeley student organization Campaign Against Apartheid specifically, by name. Mandela spoke of the divestment movement on the campus, but did not name CAA. For a full transcript of Mandela's speech in Oakland, see What Nelson Mandela actually said in Oakland on 30 June 1990.

---

Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Nelson Mandela and the death of UC Berkeley's Eshleman Hall
Remembering Richie Havens: down to earth
The desire to destroy is also a creative desire
The Occupy Movement and UC Berkeley's Free Speech Monument



Thanks to Matthew Felix Sun for the June 3rd video of Eshelman Hall's demolition.

On this week's SCotUS decisions: the scrum continues

I'll keep it short, there's enough bloviating on this week's SCOtUS decisions without me piling on too high.

Bottom line: each of this week's key rulings, IMHO, challenges each and every citizen to actively work to realize the justice in which she or he believes.

With respect to the unconstitutionality of DOMA, those who believe that the law should "not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments" should be lining up to beat back the likes of Brian Brown of the ineptly-named National Organization for Marriage, who (according to the NY Times) will press for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

With respect to the SCotUS non-decision on California's Proposition 8, there's plenty of work to be done to legalize marriage equality in the states where 'the other 70%' of Americans live -- those states that do not permit same sex marriage.

And -- perhaps most importantly of all -- with respect to Tuesday's decision in Shelby County v. Holder, eviscerating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by holding it hostage to a paralyzed Congress, we are challenged from one end of the nation to the other to elect a Congress that will govern for justice rather than sit on its collective hands while hard-won progress toward racial equality is rolled backward.


Thanks to DS for reminding me of what Shakespeare thought...

Not your granddaddy's metadata: don't believe the PRISM anti-hype

There's plenty of news and pundit noise being extruded on the PRISM break, i.e., on reports originating with Glenn Greenwald of the U.K.'s Guardian about massive, broad NSA surveillance of phone and internet activity.

The thing that's burning me up about the story is not so much that the government is spying on us. As many are pointing out, this is not news, even if the smoking gun is very newsworthy corroboration of hints and suspicions that many -- and many who have never in their lives worn tinfoil headgear -- have been describing, inferring, and warning about for years.

The thing that's burning me up is the misinformation being promulgated by President Obama, Senator Feinstein, the Wall Street Journal, and others asserting that mere data mining of "metadata" is minor and unimportant and non-invasive. This is a lie. We should make an effort to understand why. And we should also understand that social media 'miracles' and conveniences coming out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere have let a very powerful genie out of its bottle. We need to have a national and international conversation about what that really means.

It's not necessarily easy, especially for people who aren't data nerds, to understand what is even meant by "metadata" ... let alone to assess the degree to which its exposure compromises privacy and (when it is stored indefinitely, and perhaps abused by a government -- whether today's or some future administration), security.

As someone who has a day job as a data nerd, I'm going to give the topic a shot.

The truth about pervasive domestic spying, revealed

From Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian article that started it all, NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

And it ain't just metadata about phone calls. It's all you and I do on the intertubes as well. Again, the Guardian's Greenwald in NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

[...]

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

And from the Washington Post, U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, where you can see slides from the PowerPoint presentation that has made apparent the scope of government snooping:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Those are rich troves of intelligence about you. And you. And you. And me.

Smoke and mirrors: misdirection about metadata

In response to this inconvenient little infoleak? We're assured by our leaders in politics and business that the collection and analysis of "metadata" is nothing to be worried about.

(What is metadata? Data about data, in a word. In the case of those phone calls, it's the caller's number, the number called, the time the call started, and the call's duration -- for every call routed by Verizon.)

No names. No credit card numbers. And therefore, our political leaders tell us, there's no real problem.

Nothing to see here. Everybody just move along...

From Elspeth Reeve in The Atlantic Wire, Washington Is Trapped in Its Own Prism of Data-Mining Self-Defense:

At a press briefing ostensibly about his health-care program and its success on Friday afternoon, President Obama defended the specificity of the NSA program that has become "the most prolific contributor" to his daily intelligence briefings. Don't worry, the president said, "No one is listening to your phone calls," and the NSA is not looking at names or their content. But metadata reveals the phone numbers, and the time, length, and location of calls. "The program does not allow the Government to listen in on anyone's phone calls," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) wrote in his two-page response to The Guardian article on Thursday night, which President Obama largely echoed on Friday. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein assured reporters on Thursday, "As you know, this is just metadata. There is no content involved. In other words, no content of a communication." The Wall Street Journal's editorial board is sure there's nothing to be worried about. "We bow to no one in our desire to limit government power, but data-mining is less intrusive on individuals than routine airport security," the Journal says, in an editorial titled "Thank You for Data-Mining."

These assertions are not only ridiculous, they're clumsy.

On May 31st, Quentin Hardy of the NY Times hosted plenary sessions on the second day of the 2nd annual DataEdge Conference on the UC Berkeley campus, which is where I happen to work. Also, as it happens, I had the good fortune to attend DataEdge. It was eye-opening couple of days, but not all in a good way.

Following the conference, the NY Times' Hardy wrote about the single most damning point (in my reckoning, anyway) made in the two days attendees spent geeking out at Sutardja Dai Hall. That point applies directly to the revelations published by the Guardian less than a week later, and goes right to the heart of the question of the innocuousness of "metadata."

Hardy's article is titled Why Big Data Is Not Truth. In it, he covers Kate Crawford's scintillating keynote address, The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologies of Big Data. (I'm told that video of the conference sessions will eventually be published on the web site of Berkeley's School of Information, which organized and hosted DataEdge; if you'd like to stay tuned, I'll circle back and link to it in the comments when I see the video come on-line.) Here's Hardy's rendering of Kate Crawford's myth #5:

Myth 5: Big Data Is Anonymous

A study published in Nature last March looked at 1.5 million phone records that had personally identifying information removed. It found that just four data points of when and where a call was made could identify 95 percent of individuals. “With just two, you can identify 50 percent of them,” Ms. Crawford said. “With a fingerprint, you need 12 data points to identify somebody.” Likewise, smart grids can spot when your friends come over. Search engine queries can yield health data that would be protected if it came up in a doctor’s office.

And here's the abstract of the study in Nature referenced by Crawford, Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility:

We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.

In a soundbyte? A little metadata goes a long way. Perhaps a lot further than somebody whose activity is described by the metadata might like.

Four spatio-temporal points (where you were when); a few "Likes" on Facebook; lingustic analysis of your tweets; a social-network analysis of the people with whom you exchange e-mail... If the "metadata" from all these can be resolved to a person, like a fingerprint, then "isolated" activities one might not worry about putting in the public record add up, in the aggregate, to a very great deal that can be known about who you are, what you do, with whom you do it, what you believe ... perhaps how you vote? Where you bank? With whom you had a "confidential" consultation or a "secret" affair (if, say, you both carried your cell phones into the same location on multiple occasions)?

The cult of social media and the generation of trackable data

George Packer wrote a fascinating article for the 27 May 2013 issue of The New Yorker, titled Change The World. His main thesis is that social media moguls in Silicon Valley are beginning to engage in politics to a degree they have not done before. (He also opens a window onto the changes Silicon Valley has undergone in the past 35 years, a nostalgic romp for me: Packer and I attended the same high school, he graduated a year after I did, and the bike route he described taking to school was the same route I rode.)

But more striking than the signs of incipient political engagement by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, or nostalgia about 1970s Palo Alto, is Packer's portrayal of the overwhelming hubris of those driving some of the most powerful culture-inflecting companies of the 21st century. From the article:

A few years ago, when Barack Obama visited one Silicon Valley campus, an employee of the company told a colleague that he wasn't going to take time from his work to go hear the President's remarks, explaining, "I'm making more of a difference than anybody in government could possibly make." In 2006, Google started its philanthropic arm, Google.org, but other tech giants did not follow its lead. At places like Facebook, it was felt that making the world a more open and connected place could do far more good than working on any charitable cause. Two of the key words in industry jargon are "impactful" and "scalable" -- rapid growth and human progress are seen as virtually indistinguishable. One of the mottoes posted on the walls at Facebook is "Move fast and break things." Government is considered slow, staffed by mediocrities, ridden with obsolete rules and inefficiencies.

Itamar Rosen of Facebook -- who manages the company's Data Science team and was interviewed at the DataEdge conference I attended late last week -- admitted that breaking things is in fact fading as a Facebook ethos. By the time you've got a billion users, Rosen explained, keeping things working starts to matter.

And as we're seeing this week, Facebook and its most successful social media peers are rather more deeply embedded with certain segments of government than Silicon Valley's freewheeling, libertarian ethos suggests.

The thing is, all the groovy connectedness social media enables leaves a trackable spoor of metadata that is in actual fact the monetizable lifeblood of the corporate entities that permit us to like, friend, share, tweet, post, and tumbl (tumbl?).

That trackable spoor of metadata is how these corporations learn enough about us to enable targeted advertising that they turn around and sell to advertisers. And, as we learned this week, that they turn over to the NSA so that the NSA too can target us for ... whatever they want, now and in the future.

By way of contextualizing the Facebook CEO's evolution into a more politically sophisticated animal, Packer describes an interview with Mark Zuckerberg five years ago:

In a 2008 interview, Mark Zuckerberg recounted how young Lebanese Muslims who might have been tempted by extremism broadened their views after going on Facebook and friending people "who have gone to Europe." He suggested that the social network could help solve the problem of terrorism. "It's not out of a deep hatred of anyone," Zuckerberg offered. "It comes from a lack of connectedness, a lack of communication, a lack of empathy, and a lack of understanding." Successive U.S. Administrations had failed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; perhaps the answer was to get as many people as possible on Facebook.

Ouch. That last bit may have been a little heavy-handed, you can just about see the smoke coming out of the author's ears. But Packer's point about breathless glorification of some inherent good in mere "connectedness" is made more carefully at two later points in his article:

Technology can be an answer to incompetence and inefficiency. But it has little to say about larger issues of justice and fairness, unless you think that political problems are bugs that can be fixed by engineering rather than fundamental conflicts of interest and value.

And, a few pages later:

The idea of a frictionless world, in which technology is a force for progress as well as a source of wealth, leaves out the fact that politics inevitably means clashing interests, with winners and losers.

Indeed. In real life, it's complicated.

And connectedness has consequences.

So?

Quentin Hardy further quotes from Kate Crawford's DataEdge keynote in a finish to his article, words that aptly warn against the news that leaked out of NSA a few days after Crawford spoke them:

Before Big Data disappears into the background as another fact of life, Ms. Crawford said, "We need to think about how we will navigate these systems. Not just individually, but as a society.""

I would say that now might be a very fine time to think about just exactly that.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Six ways your electronica owns you
Pimped by our own devices: electronica, the cloud, and privacy piracy
Four eyes: 4 ways Google Glass might change the world
Time, History, and Human Forgetting


Thanks to Camille Gévaudan via Wikimedia Commons for the image of Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with Maurice Lévy in May 2011.