A Joseph Turner Morning

Last night we had snow and this morning as it was turning warm everything was like impressionistic painting. It was a Joseph Turner morning.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was one of the most radical painters of the 19th century and maybe any century.  Known as a painter of light his works broke away from the realists and Romanticists of his times. Born in 1775 and died in 1851, Turner lived most of his life before photography was either practical or popular. 

Photography had changed the world of painting. Realistic depictions of people, places and events could be recorded with a camera. As the camera became easier and cheaper to use, artists shifted their focus from realism to impressionism. The artist began to paint the feeling, the impression the artist experienced instead of exact copy of what he saw.

Easily fifty years ahead French artists, who were to be deemed the avant garde of western art, was Joseph Turner.  His best know painting is The Fighting Tereraine, 1839. The Tereraine was the last important ship from the Battle of Trafalgar. It was being towed up the Thames by a steam tug to be broken up into scrap.

It was patriotic image but it also showed the power of the industrial revolution and how steam power was the beginning of a whole new world to come. It has been said a person from ancient Rome would be able to understand the world before the steam engine, afterwards the exponential growth of knowledge, power and wealth would have been incomprehensible unless you lived your whole life in the whirl of those changes. Unlike the Romantic artists of the early 1800's Turner both reacted to and embraced the changes that were coming. 

Turner was lucky enough to be independently wealthy which meant he could paint whatever he wanted and follow his muse where ever it took him.

Back to this morning. My old trusty digital camera is beginning to fail. It will no longer focus properly and the pictures are in a soft blur. I've taken to calling it my new porn camera. A few friends have already asked if I would take their pictures with it.  Things could get interesting.

Here's a fantasy come true, my pictures along side those of Joseph Turners.

On the left is Rain, Steam and Speed (1844); The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons (1834): The Slave Ship (1840); Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812); Ovid Banished From Rome 1838: Sunrise with Sea Monsters (1848)

Saint Valentine's Day Memo

In a busy life it's possible to forget that tomorrow is Valentine's Day. The significant other in your life will be expecting some kind of token of recognition. Like every other holiday it has evolved in modern times into an excuse to spend  Greeting cards, flowers, chocolates and jewelry are all standard iconic gifts -though I surprised the automobile companies haven't tried to cash in on the day. Just look what Lexus and Audi have done for Christmas.  Maybe it's a sign of the times, this year heart shaped pizzas are really popular.

You might ask who was this Valentine guy? There doesn't seem to be very much information available. According to church history Valentine was martyred on February 14th.  Valentine was a common name in the ancient Roman world and there could be up to three or four Saint Valentines and all their stories have been confused and combined together. One story has him executed in Rome another says it happened in North Africa.

A common story recounts Valentine was executed because he conducted secret marriages for Roman soldiers.  The Roman army was the most feared and successful military force of its time and Roman Generals felt the best army was made up of single and homosexual men -married men were not always welcomed. It was also a crime to proselytize and try to covert others to Christianity.  In one legend  the Emperor Claudius II and Valentine were on friendly terms until Valentine tried to convert him.

Some historians feel the Feast Day of Valentine was conveniently created  by the early Christian Church to take over the Roman holiday of Lupercalia.  Lupercalia commemorated the She-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. It was also a fertility festival where naked or near naked men ran through the streets with a scourge made of goat skin. Supposedly chasing the woman around with this would help them get pregnant. And last but not least it was a love festival where the names of all the single adults where put into a lottery. Each set of men and women that were randomly  paired together had to remain each other's companion for the festival.

Though Medieval times Saint Valentine's Day was a pretty sedate affair.  In European folklore, February 14 was the day that song birds picked their mates.  Geoffrey Chaucer used his poetic skills to connect the day with the ideal of romantic love, from there you had a slow steady trickle of romantic love going from the courtly to the common.

The next big step in the democratization and commercialization of Valentine's Day was the book, The Young Man's Valentine Writer (1797). It was a man own personal Cyrano and Cliffnotes, if he was unable to write his own poetry or verse.  The first Valentine cards began to appear in the early 1800's. By mid-century they were already being mass produced.

Chocolates as a Valentine give began to appear after the American Civil War. Mexico was the original home of coco but chocolate making was a skill that was brought to the United States by German candy makers.  Chocolate from  the mid 1800's is very different from what most people today would think chocolate should be. In Mexico they still make that primordial chocolate. It is darker, a bit bitter and has chalky texture -it was still good. As chocolate got sweeter and more affordable its image changed from an exotic aphrodisiac to more innocent treat -but always afterwards linked with the other Valentine rituals. 

So be it with chocolates, or poetry, a heart shaped pizzas or silly greeting cards that make you laugh -don't forget tomorrow is the day to let that special person in your life know how you feel about them.

If there is anybody in the Philadelphia that plans to celebrate a more Pagan version of the holiday please feel free to contact me. 

I leave you with a song for tomorrow when sharing a heart shaped pizza for two.

My friend Harrison sent me this, said it was the Ayn Rand Valentine.

Carnival

In my old home in the Pines Barrens of New Jersey the provincial bar troubadours were the members of the Bear Country Band. They almost signed a record contract -twice. I hope they have all done well. The Bear Country Band had nice mix of jam tunes, Grateful Dead covers and few original songs. On song was Everyday 's a Holiday, just one of those silly songs that makes you smile.   

Out on the edge of Pennsylvanian Dutch Country they take Ground Hog's Day seriously. It's funny and it's quaint -and best of all it's another holiday. Everyday should be celebrated as though it's special and if you can't find a reason why the day special then it's perfectly fine to make up a good story. Plausibility is optional. 

Being a lapsed Catholic doesn't stop me from enjoy the feast days of the saints. Why not? A few historians have pointed out that it's easier to change a person's faith than change their holidays. The Christian faith was well aware of this as they converted Pagan Europe. It was a 1,000 year effort from when Emperor Constantine made Christianity an official religion  of the Roman Empire (306 AD) and the last of the Baltic Kingdoms renounced Paganism (1448).

Many of the Catholic feast days are thinly veiled Pagan celebrations and even as the Protestant reformation tried to purge all the Pagan influences out of the faith, plenty still remain.  Thank goodness there is no religious test to see who can or can not celebrate holidays like Fat Tuesday.

The relationship we have to our holidays is our childhood memories, our current traditions, milestones of important events and a desire to create some kind of performance art legacy to pass on. People need to mark the year and show the progression of time though the appropriate (and inappropriate) rites of passage. 

We hold on to our holidays dear, even as we change. I still get Christmas cards from Atheist friends. Some friends who are agnostic Jews will travel hundreds of mile every year to take their parents to the Temple on the High Holy Days. And one group of acquaintances that go all out for Diwali though their only connection to Hinduism or India is a heartfelt love of Bollywood films.

In our household we celebrate Saint David's Day, March 1 st., as the beginning of spring. It has more to do with my dislike of winter (and have it over with) than any homage to the patron Saint of Wales.  Thought it would be okay with me to have a case of beer from the Felinfoel Brewery.  Later on in March is Saint Patrick's Day -that's become an international day of Celtic awareness, shameless marketing and a great excuse for a party.

Back to Ground Hog's Day, if the groundhog should see his shadow it means it's a cold clear day and it can be inferred that winter weather will last another six weeks -almost until April Fools Day -one more holiday with checkered past. The local German speaking population has another day connect with Ground Hog's Day, that's the feast day of Saint Matthias.

Saint Matthias was invited to become an Apostle after Judas of Iscariot betrayed Jesus. That's at least how the story goes but there is a group of heretical Christians that hold Judas in high regard and have very interesting version of relationship between Jesus, Judas and Thomas.

Originally Saint Matthias's feast day was February 24th but the Catholic Church moved it to May so it would not compete with Lent. The Lutherans kept Saint Matthias's day right where it was., I guess with the Lutherans nothing really competes with Lent. 

If it's warm on Saint Matthias Day, the month of March will be unseasonably cold and if it's frosty cold then March will be mild. As the old time farmers would say the ice will form or break on Saint Matthias Day. Even Ground Hog's Day sounds exciting and glamorous compared to that but I think with just the right spin there's a party worth throwing.  I know I will have to work ice into it. 

I'm open to any party suggestions for February 24th. Otherwise I'm going to enjoy Fat Tuesday and celebrate the flesh -the meaning behind the word carnival. 

What's In A Face?

I listen to the radio when I drive on long trips. There is almost a gambler's thrill in finding a quality program out of the static and junk on the airwaves. It is so cool to find a DJ that actually cares about music and is allowed to stray off the station playlist. Other times you have that rare broadcast that isn't centered around the 12 - 18 minutes of commercial ads every hour. There are plenty of ways to circumvent commercial radio and listen to only what I want but I really enjoy when some quite literally out of the blue surprises me.

By accident I tuned into a technology a program interviewing a team of computer scientists from Cambridge. Out of that wonderful sense of British whimsy they built a robotic head of Charles Babbage.  If your unaware of Charles Babbage, don't feel bad most people have no idea who he was. Long before the basics of electronic computing was conceived Charles Babbage devised on paper a mechanical computer. His machine was programmable, it had information storage and  information retrieval. Historically there was a real possibility the information revolution could have happen alongside the industrial revolution in Victorian England. In a past posting, Charles Babbage - father of steampunk, I wrote about how the London Museum took Babbage's plans and built the machine he could not get funding for.    

So this team from Cambridge built a robotic head so that user of the computer can have a face to interact with. Part of their research showed people had a better experience with their computers when they could relate to the machine as though it was a living person. The Charles Babbage head was not the first attempt to have a computer controlled face expressing emotions but this time, through cameras in the eyes of the robotic head, the computer is registering and evaluating the facial expressions of the person at the keyboard.  It is a two way communication.

In the back of my mind is the 1964 New York World's Fair and "Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln". It was the "best of" the 16th President presented not by a live actor but instead a robot. I could not tell what pavilion it was in but to this day I remember how the crowd gasped when it stood up to talk.  Mr. Lincoln was part of Disney's animatronics which also included It's A Small World, where hundreds of little robots sang that famous saccharine song -what the Guinness World book of Records would claim as history's most persistent earworm.    

    

The idea of creating the artificial person is an old one. Master clock makers built mechanical automatons, what were very complex dolls that mimic natural motion. Some automatons could play music or write.  People began to imagine automatons could be made to do almost anything. One of the greatest scams in history was The Great Turk, an automaton that played chess. In the early 1800's the machine went on tour and beat many human opponents. In the end it was exposed as a hoax, in the cabinet behind the gear works was hidden a real live chess master working the controls and making the moves.   

What the craftsmen and engineers of that time didn't have was an electronic computer. As gears, pulleys and other simple machines could copy the body, the computer has slowly been programmed to copy the mind. Even when electronic computers where as big as a house and had the overall computing power of a graphing calculator, that any high school student would use in Algebra 2, the pulp science fiction writers in 1950's were publishing stories of computer self-awareness and artificial intelligence spontaneously arising.  So it's only natural that computer geeks would want a home machine that could have all the personality of HAL from the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey -without the menacing one red eye.

There may come a day when the boundary between the mind and the computer will be breached. Information could be downloaded directly into the brain (the bio-cyber space) and the mind can be transferred into a digital existence.  Back in the early 1990's there was a TV mini-series -Wild Palms. For network TV it was very ambitious, it was also noteworthy because it was the only halfway descent dramatic role Jim Belushi ever played. In the end the antagonist of the story tries to escape by having his consciousness downloaded into a new type of immortality. 

The really big road block to having a computerized face to interface with, is something the Psychologists call the uncanny valley.  In short people can feel comfortable with a cartoon face because it's easily recognized as artificial. If there is no doubt the face is real then people treat it as real. In the spectrum of realism from the cartoon face to an actual face is the uncanny valley.  Somewhere between the ridiculous and the real is a creepy place where most people are uneasy. It why the Talking Tina doll in the original Twilight Zone still gives people goosebumps.

Producers of computer generated  movie effects had high hopes of bringing back Humphrey Bogart.  So far -no such luck. Having a sky full of World War 2 is so easy compared to the thousand tiny details that make a facial expression work or come off as authentic as a three dollar bill.  Or even worse -to  fall right in bottom of the uncanny valley and have ever hair on the back of your neck involuntarily stand up.

The first Final Fantasy film and the Polar Express, both big budget movies made up of computer generated content, failed to met commercial expectations. With the Final Fantasy film movie goers felt they could not identify with the flat expressionless characters. The Polar Express had young children crying in the theater. The Polar Express was re-edited to fix the dead un-blinking eyes that really bothered the audience but in the end the studios cut their losses on what should have been a new Christmas Classic.

The movie Avatar had taken the face capture technology to a new level. But putting a human face on a alien from another planet is still easy that creating a convincingly real human face from scratch.  In a generation or two will we be interacting with machines as though they are living sentient creatures? Or will people and machines be so seamlessly merge together that any distinction would be purely academic?