Frank Beacham's Journal

The 1964 World’s Fair opened 57 years ago today

When the 1964 World’s Fair opened 57 years ago today, the architectural star of the show was Philip Johnson’s soaring, futuristic New York State Pavilion.

“A sophisticated frivolity,” The Times’s architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved, “seriously and beautifully constructed. This is ‘carnival’ with class.”

Standing inside the pavilion’s Tent of Tomorrow, a multicolored canopy supported by 100-foot concrete towers, was like looking up at a spacecraft taking off. For years, the pavilion has been shuttered and in disrepair, slowly crumbling. The pavilion was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

In the fall of 2013, New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation announced plans to restore the pavilion with new landscaped paths and event spaces at an estimated cost of $73 million, as opposed to the $14 million cost to demolish the structure.

Renewed interest was shown in the pavilion's restoration in early 2014, the 50th anniversary of its opening.

In July, 2014, the pavilion received about $5.8 million for restoration. The New York Mets also donated some money for the preservation effort. However, the pavilion was damaged the same month by arsonists.

In May, 2015, the New York Structural Steel Painting Contractors Association, in conjunction with the New York City Parks department and members of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (District Council 9, Local 806), announced a project to repaint the rusty steel framework of the Tent of Tomorrow.

After testing paint chips, the color "American Cheese Yellow" was selected as the best match for the original color. The majority of the labor was done by union trainees, and materials were supplied by the contractors, constituting a $3 million donation. All work was completed by August 15th, 2015.

The Pavilion is the subject of a documentary film titled, Modern Ruin: A World's Fair Pavilion, produced by filmmaker and teacher Matthew Silva. The documentary premiered on May 22, 2015 in the Queens Theatre which was formerly the theaterama, the third component of the New York State Pavilion.

In March, 2016, People For the Pavilion and the National Trust for Historic preservation launched an international ideas competition to allow the public to reimagine possibilities for what is possible for the pavilion.

Two proposed designs for the New York State Pavilion's restoration won New York City's 2018 Annual Awards for Excellence in Design. As of June 2018, the New York City government planned to award contracts for the pavilion's restoration, set to be worth $14.25 million. The restoration was planned to take one and a half years but was delayed due to construction and pandemic issues. It is uncertain when it will be finished.

Below, Observatory Towers of the New York State Pavilion, 1964 World's Fair

Photo by Erik S. Lieber

Fifty-seven years ago today, folk singer Oscar Brand provided the music for this "film poem," a day in the life of the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, New York.

All major areas of the fair are represented — international, industrial, federal and states, transportation and amusements. The narration form gives the film its title — Oscar Brand sings the "Ballad." The song was specially written for the film.

Some of the construction leading up to opening day is contrasted to the finished appearance of the grounds later in the film. Many pavilions and the Unisphere are shown, but the Bell Pavilion is the main focus.

The "Floating Wing" pavilion of the Bell System is given a quick tour, as people ride the 17-minute moving, Disney-style slow ride through telecommunications history (with music by Morton Gould), and visit such exhibits as The Vocoder, Patterns of your Voice, Electronic Switching and the Picturephone.

The film closes with the fireworks and water show that was produced nightly in front of the Bell Pavilion at the Pool of Industry.

While the Unisphere still exists on the Queens fairgrounds (now the Flushing Meadows park), most buildings were torn down or removed following the Fair. The giant tire ferris wheel for Royal Tire is a landmark along I-94 west of Detroit, Michigan. The Skyway tower structures and gondolas were moved to Six Flags Great Adventure (at that time called Great Adventure) in New Jersey. "It's a Small World" was transferred to Disneyland.

Nothing remains of the Bell Pavilion. But many of the ideas in this pavilion about communications and the future were later transferred to the "Spaceship Earth" building at Epcot Center, which opened in 1982 sponsored by Bell, then sponsored by AT&T from 1984 to 2004.

William Gibson is 73 years old today

William Gibson is 73 years old today.

An American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and essayist who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk sub-genre, Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984).

In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web.

Having changed residence frequently with his family as a child, Gibson became a shy, ungainly teenager who often read science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he became immersed in the counterculture.

After settling in Vancouver he eventually became a full-time writer. He retains dual citizenship.

Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans — a "combination of lowlife and high tech." The short stories were published in popular science fiction magazines.

The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, effectively initiating the cyberpunk literary genre.

Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained associated with Neuromancer, his work has continued to evolve.

After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became an important author of another science fiction sub-genre — steampunk — with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling.

Gibson has written more than twenty short stories and ten critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), and has contributed articles to several major publications and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians.

His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, design, academia, cyberculture and technology.

On March 14, 1879 — 142 years ago today — Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany

On March 14, 1879 — 142 years ago today — Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany.

Einstein's theories of special and general relativity drastically altered man's view of the universe, and his work in particle and energy theory helped make possible quantum mechanics and, ultimately, the atomic bomb.

After a childhood in Germany and Italy, Einstein studied physics and mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, Switzerland. He became a Swiss citizen and in 1905 was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich while working at the Swiss patent office in Bern.

That year, which historians of Einstein's career call the annus mirabilis — the "miracle year" — he published five theoretical papers that were to have a profound effect on the development of modern physics.

In the first of these, titled "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light," Einstein theorized that light is made up of individual quanta (photons) that demonstrate particle-like properties while collectively behaving like a wave.

The hypothesis, an important step in the development of quantum theory, was arrived at through Einstein's examination of the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon in which some solids emit electrically charged particles when struck by light. This work would later earn him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the second paper, he devised a new method of counting and determining the size of the atoms and molecules in a given space, and in the third he offered a mathematical explanation for the constant erratic movement of particles suspended in a fluid, known as Brownian motion. These two papers provided indisputable evidence of the existence of atoms, which at the time was still disputed by a few scientists.

Einstein's fourth groundbreaking scientific work of 1905 addressed what he termed his special theory of relativity. In special relativity, time and space are not absolute, but relative to the motion of the observer.

Thus, two observers traveling at great speeds in regard to each other would not necessarily observe simultaneous events in time at the same moment, nor necessarily agree in their measurements of space. In Einstein's theory, the speed of light, which is the limiting speed of any body having mass, is constant in all frames of reference.

In the fifth paper that year, an exploration of the mathematics of special relativity, Einstein announced that mass and energy were equivalent and could be calculated with an equation, E=mc2.

Although the public was not quick to embrace his revolutionary science, Einstein was welcomed into the circle of Europe's most eminent physicists and given professorships in Zýrich, Prague and Berlin. In 1916, he published "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity," which proposed that gravity, as well as motion, can affect the intervals of time and of space.

According to Einstein, gravitation is not a force, as Isaac Newton had argued, but a curved field in the space-time continuum, created by the presence of mass. An object of very large gravitational mass, such as the sun, would therefore appear to warp space and time around it, which could be demonstrated by observing starlight as it skirted the sun on its way to earth.

In 1919, astronomers studying a solar eclipse verified predictions Einstein made in the general theory of relativity, and he became an overnight celebrity. Later, other predictions of general relativity, such as a shift in the orbit of the planet Mercury and the probable existence of black holes, were confirmed by scientists.

During the next decade, Einstein made continued contributions to quantum theory and began work on a unified field theory, which he hoped would encompass quantum mechanics and his own relativity theory as a grand explanation of the workings of the universe. As a world-renowned public figure, he became increasingly political, taking up the cause of Zionism and speaking out against militarism and rearmament.

In his native Germany, this made him an unpopular figure. After Nazi leader Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and left the country. He later settled in the United States, where he accepted a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

He would remain there for the rest of his life, working on his unified field theory and relaxing by sailing on a local lake or playing his violin. He became an American citizen in 1940.

In 1939, despite his lifelong pacifist beliefs, he agreed to write to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of a group of scientists who were concerned with American inaction in the field of atomic-weapons research. Like the other scientists, he feared sole German possession of such a weapon. He played no role, however, in the subsequent Manhattan Project and later deplored the use of atomic bombs against Japan.

After the war, he called for the establishment of a world government that would control nuclear technology and prevent future armed conflict.

In 1950, he published his unified field theory, which was quietly criticized as a failure. A unified explanation of gravitation, subatomic phenomena and electromagnetism remains elusive today.

Albert Einstein, one of the most creative minds in human history, died in Princeton in 1955.

Thanks History.com

The 30th Anniversary of Apple's Macintosh

The 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer probably means little to most young people today. But to me, it was a pivotal moment in my working life—one that allowed me to ditch the office job forever and truly operate independently as a productive freelancer.

I bought the first 128K Macintosh right after seeing IBM pummeled in that famous Apple Super Bowl commercial in 1984. I was angry with computers in general at the time and that commercial hit the right spot. Before that day, I owned a Xerox 820. It was a truly awful machine.

The Xerox was an 8-bit clunker that cost me about $4,000 plus the freelance consultant it took to set it up to do anything of value. It used what was known as a CP/M operating system with an unintuitive word processor called Wordstar. It had big eight-inch disks to store data. The operating manuals (there were several) took up an entire bookshelf. It was definitely BIG IRON.

The Macintosh changed all that forever. First, the money-grubbing consultant was shown the door. I had all the software I needed and it was easy to use. The mouse was pure genius. I could write documents, work with numbers and even manipulate pictures with ease.

The Mac was small, light and simple to understand and that room full of arcane documents was replaced with a very basic manual written in language “for the rest of us.” Apple had hit a chord with me.

I once thanked Steve Jobs in person for the Mac. I told him it enabled me to do what I wanted to do. He responded that’s exactly what it was designed to do. Since 1984, I’ve been through dozens of Macs and never once has a Mac let me down. It has been one hell of a run.

When I first bought my Mac, I had a professional video edit suite in Los Angeles that was valued at more than $1 million. Today, with iMovie and Final Cut Pro, my Macintosh does far more than that edit facility ever did in 1984. You just can’t beat that.

This is why the 30th anniversary of the Mac matters to me. The Mac set me free and there are few other things you can compare to it in today’s world.

The Man Who Took the Great Pictures from Outer Space

After a talk by astronaut Don Pettit at a photography conference in New York City this week, someone in the audience tweeted: “For someone who spent a year in space, Dr. Pettit is a down to earth guy.”

When the message was read, the audience burst into applaud. Many had already had one-on-one talks with Pettit at lunch at the Luminance conference and found him an incredibly accessible, ready to answer any question, and well—as said—a genuinely “down to earth guy.”


Pettit is a chemical engineer and astronaut who, in three stays over the past decade, spent more than a year on the International Space Station. He worked as a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory until 1996, when he was selected as an astronaut candidate. In addition to all his other skills and adventures, Pettit is a passionate amateur photographer.

Yes, NASA trains all astronauts in photography, but doesn’t assign photography duties in space. “It’s more of a hobby thing,” Pettit said. “There are some astronauts who—if the camera wasn't set to "P"—would never be able to take a picture. It's a personal thing for me. I enjoyed photography before becoming an astronaut and continued to grow and learn the photo equipment."


At NASA, Pettit said, the photo trainers badger the trainees by showing all of these hundreds of awful pictures that previous astronauts have taken. “They say don't take a picture like that,” he said. “Up the nose shots, where you can see how many hairs are there, are frowned upon.”


The problem with the above shot, Pettit said, is it's not reality. In a weightless environment, the members of the station crew are everywhere—attached to walls, on the ceiling and in coffin-sized beds in the floor. “You get used to seeing a humbo jumbo of crewmates in all these positions. So you might be looking into somebody's nose. As creatures on Earth, we are not used to seeing this. The pictures you take of your crewmates look perfectly normal to you, but when a normal picture gets to Earth, you get instructed to take pictures like this.

“Of course, you’d be hard pressed looking at that picture to know whether the group is in space or not. We only have some fancy backdrop.”


Pettit likes to shoot inside the cramped spacecraft with a Nikkor 8mm fisheye lens. “We have six people living in space and an Android which we are working the bugs out of. We refer to it as him or possibly her. I've been back on earth for about two months from a 192-day space mission. We started the mission referring to the Robonaut as him and somewhere in the mission we began referring to it as her.” (Big laugh from the audience.)


Among his favorite photo subjects are the approaching unmanned supply vehicles that bring food and other necessities on a periodic basic. “These are fire breathing creatures,” Pettit said. “They will belch fire and I try to record these images.

“These supply vehicles dock automatically unless the automatics break down and then we have to manually dock it. They are filled full of goodies—a chamber about two and half meters in diameter. We unload all the stuff and then fill the chamber with all of our garbage, which are mostly buckets filled with poop. You gotta do something with that stuff, right? You just don't flush it. We put it in the spacecraft and undock it and it blows up in the atmosphere. So at least it’s a sanitary way of getting rid of this stuff.”


To take pictures outside, Pettit uses the station’s Cupola, a seven window observatory module in the station that looks at Earth. It was launched aboard a Space Shuttle mission on Feb. 8, 2010 and attached to the Tranquility Node 3. The Cupola's 31-inch window is the largest ever used in space.


“We fill it with as many as eight different cameras,” Pettit said.“Earth goes by really fast. You go 24,000 miles in 90 minutes. If you want to take a picture of your hometown or whatever, you have three to five seconds to get that shot. Or you'll have to wait another 11 days before you're over your hometown again. We have all these cameras set-up because there is no time to change lenses or settings. They are never turned off.


“You have this amazing perspective of Earth—you can see it on the length-scale of half a continent. It's definitely a wide angle view. If you are over central Australia, you can see the east coast and west coast at the same time. The truly unique thing through my eyes is to capture the wide angle nature of what your views are.

“We have all kinds of telephoto lenses, but if you're not careful, you get images not as good as Google Earth. In my view, you want to capture something different from what a satellite can capture.”

Infrared

“I was able to talk NASA into taking a perfectly fine Nikon D3F body and pulling the IR blocking filter out. The reason is we stopped shooting film in my first flight in 2002. With that, we lost the ability to do color infrared photography. It was all film based. Now we can do infrared digitally with this modified Nikon camera.


"This is the Ganges river delta (a trans-boundary river of India and Bangladesh). The deep red is the mangrove wilderness. You can see on the left side where agriculture is starting to infringe into the wilderness area. 


"This is in the Bahamas. Coral reef and turquoise water and sediments give these amazing colors in the near infrared.


“If you want to go for a jaunt outside, and we all do, you'd be better be wearing a set of clothes that look like this.

"Shadows in space are really stark.


"You are either in full blown sunlight or pitch black. There is almost nothing in between. Even when you bring the camera outside, you have these shadows you have to deal with. I sent a picture home to my boy and said we had found Godzilla in space.


"One of my favorites are star trail pictures. Nighttime doesn't really look like this, but it has all of these elements in it. These are multiple 30 second exposures stacked to show the orbital motion as well as the star trail motion. The circle is made by the pitch access of the spacecraft. These are fun pictures primarily for data."

Cities at Night

“Cities at night are fascinating. You look at how human beings sprinkle their light bulbs at night. It's amazing from an orbital perspective. Nobody on earth designs their cities by how they look to space. They just happen to turn out that way. Until 2002, all these pictures were soft focused due to orbital motion.


“I was unhappy about that. So I cobbled this piece of equipment up with spare parts that were on the space station. The big black thing is an IMAX movie camera mount. It wasn't being used because we no longer had film on the station. So I figured no one would mind if I used it. I got out our drill driver. I needed a long bolt. I found one in the progress vehicle. I figured no one will miss just one bolt.” (More laughter.)

“So you drive that bolt and it pushes against the platform and you can move one axis of a gimbel in a controlled manner depending on how much you squeeze the trigger. I took a Hasselblad camera with a 70 mm film back, though we had no film anymore. I put the 350mm lens on it. It became a fancy spotting telescope. You look through that camera and squeeze the trigger on the drill driver until the images are stationary and then you take a picture with the other camera mounted on the mount.

“If you're an amateur astronomer, you realize this is nothing more than a barn door tracker. Barn door trackers are used to take pictures of space to counter Earth motion. I was in space countering orbital motion so I could take a picture of Earth.

"Times have changed. The space agency has built a computer controlled tracker. This is New Orleans taken from the mission I just got back from. Taken with a Nikon D3F we can now get down to 10 meter resolution. You can see the Mississippi River and the French Quarter and see it's a pretty hopping place at this time of night."

Pettit said it turns out there is a triangle between culture, technology and geography that dictates how humans move lighting around. One can see different types of lighting by region, he said. “Embedded in this data about our cities is something about who we are as a species. Cities at night may be one of the most beautiful unintentional consequences of human activity.”

Pettit was asked if he had ever used Photoshop on his images while in space. “Most images are downloaded from space. During my mission, we had six hard drives fail. Hard drives somehow fail when they get into weightlessness. They don't last like they do on Earth. Nobody understands why, but they just do.

So the quicker you can get your images off of a hard drive and downloaded, the better. NASA does a good just of ferreting out all the RAW files, which are stored as NEF files. I do hold some of my favorites and I do have a copy of Photoshop and I work with some of them in my spare time just because I can.

But I'd rather spend my time taking the pictures while in orbit than doing image processing. You have plenty of time to do that when you're back on Earth.”

Finally, with all the usage of his images being manipulated on YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook over the past year, Pettit was asked if had ever seen them online and what is his opinion.

“I have seen many of these time lapse movies and it does me good that people are actually using the pictures that I take,” he said. “I think whatever art form you enjoy creating the best compliment is to see somebody take it and enjoy it themselves. At NASA, I can't use copyright music unless we can arrange with the musician. But people on YouTube do that. So they make these marvelous film clips that I can't do. Some of these are so beautiful, it brings a tear to my eye.”

Don Pettit with Frank Beacham at the Luminance Conference sponsored by Photoshelter in New York City

Information Without Knowledge

Information everywhere. We are drowning in it. We are assured that information is wealth. To succeed in the new economy, we are told, we must be connected.

Why then—with so much information—are we in an age of such unenlightenment? Why is virtually any idea of substance "dumbed down" for public consumption? Why is instant gratification so important to so many of us?

Easy access to information, it would seem on the surface, should be leading to a better educated, more knowledgeable population. So why is it that as information technology improves, most people move down, not up, the knowledge chain?

Some answers to these questions emerged from a symposium where a group of major American artists tried to grapple with creative issues facing them in the age of digital media. The session, called "Digital Expression," was held at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Peter Sellars, a director of theater, opera and film, offered some insight on modern information overload.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information easily available, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful to the recipient.

"The actual act of finding something had value," he said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something.

"Now we are getting all this information with no experience attached to it," Sellars continued. "Where there is no pilgrimage the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered today. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips but we don't value anything."

Unlike some others attending the symposium, Sellars embraced the "untamed quality" of the current Internet structure because it allows the user to wander and discover information through his or her own personal experience. 

"To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," Sellars said. "To have the user making wrong turns through the information is exactly the point. That's where the juice is."

Today's mass media, said Sellars, reflects only a single voice, not the broad range of human experience. "You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized. A very narrow group of people are creating this insane (communications) gridlock," he said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Artists, he said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address.

"Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience," said Sellars. "As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How do with set up (new media) structures that show how we really feel?"

The issue of experience was also addressed by the actress Jane Alexander.  She embraced information technology as an important artist's tool but was clearly troubled by those who would use it as a substitute for experiencing reality.

"Seeing the Mona Lisa on a compact disc is not the same as seeing the real thing," she said. "Hearing 'If I Had A Hammer' on your computer speakers is not the same as hearing Pete Seeger singing it. There is no way to actually create live theater in a box or a game.

"The whole point about virtual reality is that it is virtually real, not really real," Alexander continued. "Technology cannot replace the seeing, the hearing and the experiencing of art. It doesn't replicate the doing of art. There's a big difference between a paint brush and a canvas and a mouse and a screen."

Perhaps one of the significant lessons we'll one day learn from this computer era is that information should never be confused with knowledge. Having instant access to all the world's databanks has little to do with genuine cultural progress.

Despite all the information age hype, the real information—the information that matters in life—comes only when we as human beings are ready to open ourselves to accept it. For most of us, this comes through living life, acquiring personal experience and searching for knowledge out of genuine curiosity.

---

(I wrote this column in October of 1994. I was reminded of it last night in a discussion about younger people who often use the Internet to substitute information (say from Wikipedia) for genuine knowledge. When I re-read it, it seemed as timely as ever. When it was written, Jane Alexander was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Steve Jobs Is a One-of-a-Kind Genius Very Rare in Today's World

When 20-something tech “journalists” tell you Apple Computer will be just fine without Steve Jobs, don’t believe a word they say. They know nothing. We lived through the period when John Sculley and Gil Amelio ran Apple, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.

Most corporations today are run by committees of lame—sometimes stupid—people. Most MBA-era executives are constantly fearful with little real instinct about how to make anything—much less brilliant products that people want. They always worry about the bottom line.

Steve Jobs was never like them. He is an original thinker with a singular instinct for the next great thing. Apple has never done focus groups. Jobs goes by his gut instincts and is usually right.

In an interview Jobs once said that Microsoft's Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." That statement was not a joke. It’s perhaps a dirty little secret today that psychedelic drugs pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by demonstrating that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. It was not like the government told you.

Steve Jobs could take one look at Microsoft and know exactly what was wrong. “They just have no taste,” he told PBS in 1996. “And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.”

A year later, Jobs added to the New York Times that Microsoft’s products suck. “There’s no sex in them anymore.”

After suffering through what passed as personal computers in the early 1980s, I was elated when Jobs announced the Macintosh in 1984. I bought an original Mac and haven’t looked back. It changed my life. It allowed me to make a living without working for a corporation. As Jobs once said, it was the equivalent of “a bicycle for our minds.”

When Jobs left Apple after being axed by John Sculley, the company entered dark times. But what would one expect from a computer company being run by former a Pepsi Cola salesman? It went on this way until Jobs came back and started introducing his “next insanely great things.”

Not only have I been an avid Apple user since the first Mac, I’ve also covered Apple for years as a reporter. I have interviewed all the former presidents of Apple, including Steve Jobs. I have watched Jobs repeatedly enchant audiences with his amazing keynote addresses, and smiled knowingly as Jobs used the music of our kindred spirit Bob Dylan to open and close those sessions. 

Jobs was always driven by far more than money. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me,” he once said. “Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.” How many modern CEOs would admit that?

I would like to think that Apple could continue to function as the genius company that it has been. But I know better. It will return to Earth, especially when it’s time to invent that next great thing. Real genius is very, very rare—especially in today’s world. Steve Jobs has it, while others don’t. It’s a sad fact that geniuses like him come very rarely.

Jobs has the moral compass of a man who came of age in the 60s. It’s a proud legacy, and one I understand and admire. Others might learn from it, if they only could.

  Myself and Tamara Ball, my assistant, in late 1984, at Television Matrix in Hollwood, CA. That's a vintage Apple Lisa, upgraded to a Macintosh, between us.

Leon Theremin's Magical Sounds

In Asheville, North Carolina, more than 60 bands have gathered for the three-day Moogfest—a music festival celebrating the life and inventions of Robert A, Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer. Moog died in 2005, leaving a serious legacy in the music world.

In October, 1994, I first met Moog at the New York Film Festival as I watched an extraordinary documentary by Steven M. Martin about the creation of the world's first electronic musical instrument. Billed as part biography, part social history and part detective story, the film—Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey—told the remarkable story of Leon Theremin, a Russian-born inventor whose adventures spanned the avant garde music world in New York City in the 1920s to the clandestine world of the KGB in the 1930s and 40s.

The theremin caught the imagination of Robert Moog, who started building the instruments as a teenager and began to manufacture them again for sale in 1954. A decade later Moog made music history when he invented his synthesizer, the first in a successful line of electronic music synthesizers.

This is the story of an invention with which Moog is not normally associated. In 1922, Leon Theremin demonstrated an early version of his strange new music machine for Nikolai Lenin, the U.S.S.R.'s leader. Five years later, he played his instrument for a group of American VIPs in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. It was received into America's Jazz Age culture with awe and excitement.

The original theremin (pictured at the top) resembled a wooden speakers' podium with a loop of metal extending from one side and a vertical metal antenna on the other. It was a real curiosity in the early radio days. Audiences were mesmerized by the new breed of instrument whose music was generated not from physical contact but from hand movements made in the air around the two protruding antennas.

By controlling the pitch with the right hand and the volume with the left, it was possible to create music that suggests—as the New York Times put it—“a violin or a soprano or a Martian making a landing. It is surpassingly strange."

For about two years beginning in 1929, RCA manufactured and sold 500 theremins. From 1930 until his mysterious disappearance in 1938, Leon Theremin built the instruments for customers in his New York studio on West 54th Street.

That disappearance makes the Theremin legend even more strange and fascinating. The inventor was apparently kidnapped by Soviet agents from his New York establishment and taken to Russia where, after a period of imprisonment, he was engaged by the government to design electronic eavesdropping technology for spies in World War II.

Long assumed dead in the West (a German newspaper reported his demise), he was spotted by chance one day at the Moscow Conservatory of Music by a visiting reporter for the New York Times. This led to his emotional return to the United States in 1991 (an event portrayed in the film).

Whether we realize it or not, most of us are familiar with the wavering vibrato sound of the theremin from dozens of 1950's-era science fiction and horror movies. Films like Spellbound, The Lost Weekend and The Day the Earth Stood Still used theremins on their soundtracks. The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations is perhaps the best known use of a theremin in a pop music recording.

Robert Moog continued to make theremins in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina until his death. Taking advantage of the explosion of new interest in theremins since the release of the film, Moog introduced an affordable Theremin called the Etherwave. It's was a no compromise, fully professional instrument that emulated the tone color and playing characteristics of Theremin's original. 

Nostalgic for the old Heathkit days and fascinated by the idea of owning such an oddball instrument, I purchased an Etherwave kit from Moog. It came with an unfinished wood cabinet, nickel-plated brass antennas, a pre-assembled circuit card, a power supply and several bags of parts. Also included is an instructional video and a CD of theremin music by the inventor's protégé, Clara Rockmore, who performed at the screening. 

As with Heathkits, Moog didn’t let you fail.The Etherwave Theremin worked perfectly when I first turned on the power switch. If you use reasonable care in assembly, it is pretty much a foolproof project.

When I finished the kit, I asked Moog if he could explain why such a cult-like following has developed around this instrument—with more 50 professional musical acts using theremins in performance throughout the world.

Several factors, Moog speculated, contributed to its appeal. "For one thing the instrument is responsive," he said. "With a keyboard you put your finger on a key and the note plays. That's it. This is just the opposite. The note keeps changing with every single motion of your hand. People like that. They enjoy that responsiveness.

"Another part of it," he continued, "is that's all in the air. There's something ethereal about that. Something gossamer. Back in the earlier days it was an elitist thing. It was rather sensational but there were very few people who actually got up and played it. Now that's changed. It's much better established now than in the past. People are engrossed in it. It's almost a cult thing."

In 1993, Leon Theremin died in Moscow at the age of 97. Both he and Robert Moog lived to see the popular revival of his very special instrument. Moog’s company, now called Moog Music, still sells the Etherwave Theremin kit for $359.  Go to www.moogmusic.com/.

Bobby Alt with the Street Drum Corps perform with a theremin.

Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms

 

Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms. 

Those words, the celebratory motto of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, expressed a revealing truth that by today’s standards is shocking in its honesty. 

The arguments over technology today never suggest that human conformity is part of the high-tech transaction. Personal “empowerment” is the buzzword from the technology merchants. Technology makes us more powerful and gives us greater personal freedom, the spiel goes.

BP, with its massive oil spill in the Gulf; Wall Street, with its devastating computer-generated “derivatives;” and the continuing assault on our personal privacy by Internet companies should have permanently nipped those ideas in the bud.  

Sadly, most Americans are now feeling helpless, learning they have to play along to get along in this brave new world dominated by global networks and out-of-control corporations. In a society that lives and breathes on speeding fixes of “information,” we feel more disconnected than ever before.

In his 1991 book, In the Absence of the Sacred  (Sierra Club Books), author Jerry Mander warned this would happen. He described how individual technologies would expand their impact, interlock and merge with one another. “Together, they are forming something new, almost as if they were living cells; they are becoming a single technical-economic web encircling the plant...,” Mander wrote.  He called this phenomenon “megatechnology.”  

 

Mander put in stark terms what we are facing today. He offered insight into why Americans are so susceptible to the charms of new technology while failing to recognize the dangers that lurk beneath the surface.

In our culture, Mander notes, new technology comes only from a single source: the corporation. The one and only reason a corporation introduces a new technology is to make a profit. The marketing goal of the corporation is—by any means necessary—to persuade us to “conform” to their latest technology. Once we accept and embrace a new technology as part of our life, the corporation reaps the reward of immense wealth.

The new toys of the digital age are being presented as hip, sexy and glamorous. There are always good reasons to go along. Since it’s so obvious that technology makes our daily lives easier and more fun, we find easy justification to buy in.  Why not accept it, use it and go with the flow?

What we often forget in the swirl of hype is that every technology is a two-edged sword. Mander notes that new technology is always introduced in its best light. All emphasis is on the benefits. During the sales pitch, the negative effects are hidden. Only after the technology becomes embedded in our daily lives do we begin to understand the tradeoffs we have made in embracing it. There is no better example than what's happening in the Gulf.

All this is a very deceptive business. Everyone can cite the benefits of certain technologies. We tend to take a narrow view and think of technology on a purely personal level.  Only by adopting a wider view—one that encompasses an examination of how technology works as a whole—can we get an accurate assessment of the true impact a technology is having on our way of living.

When taking a wider view of technology it becomes clear that most of us are already surrounded by a tangled web of interrelated technologies that make up our living environment. We live and work in a manufactured bubble of air conditioned apartments, offices, malls, automobiles and airplanes. Urban dwellers move about on paved sidewalks and roadways, encountering “nature” only in landscaped parks. We are dependent on electric lights, telephones, computers and a myriad of appliances that are, in turn, all dependent on fossil fuels for energy.

We live inside technology. We exist in an artificial world totally created by humans and increasingly disconnected from all that is natural. Because of its physical comfort and illusions of security, humans easily adapt to this controlled environment. Unfortunately, once inside this artificial cocoon, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to accurately detect and assess the effects of technology on our world. 

Those effects do exist because every technology has a bias and carries an inherent message. No technology is value-free. There are social and political implications inherent in the introduction of every new technology. New technologies change power arrangements and force conformity. After the introduction, there are always winners and losers. 

Yet, saying “no” to new technology is a foreign idea to most Americans. Even public debate of the social implications of a new technology is rare in our culture. Few of us consider that we have the right to prevent the deployment of a new technology that might negatively affect our lives. 

As Mander suggests in his book, the ability to question and evaluate new technology is an important survival skill.  Only by moving beyond the commercial propaganda associated with new technology introductions can one begin to cut through the distortions and define the tradeoffs in accepting a new technology. It is important to identify and examine the social, political and environmental consequences of technologies currently being deployed throughout the world. 

Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal on July 16, 1845: “Men have become the tools of their tools...” Only by beginning to question technology can we reverse the trend of conforming to it. 

 

(Photo credits: Top photo of the beach at Waveland, Mississippi by Sabrina Bradford. Bottom photo by Ellis Anderson)

iPad: The World's First Multimedia Storytelling Machine

 

As a writer, I tend to work with compelling stories over many years. In addition to words, I have always collected images—still, video and motion picture film—along with recorded audio. It has always been my future hope to create multimedia stories—using words, images and sound. Now, after decades, that day may have arrived.

Last Friday, I received a new iPad from Apple. It had caught my eye due to demonstrations I had seen showing remarkable multimedia books. Now that I have used the iPad a little, I can say it is on its way to being a truly revolutionary publishing device. Not yet, but it's headed there.

A text version of my latest book, Whitewash, was available from the iPad’s bookstore from day one. But it’s only standard text. I’m now just beginning to explore ways to incorporate other media into the book. So far, there are no easy authoring tools for individuals. That, I assume, is coming. (In the meantime, I'm looking for help.)

The iPad marks a turning point, however, where multimedia books are finally possible for distribution to the masses. It’s a day I’ve been waiting for a long, long time.