Summer has a David L. Cooper Soundtrack

My favorite Sky Lounge ear bud listening right now. I really like "Claude's Odds," in which Cooper accompanies a recording of T.S. Eliot reading Burnt Norton.

I like the arrangement order of the nineteen pieces too, the way it builds up to heavy bass tracks, as in "Harm Money." After that, "Winged Lump" feels like the theme of a Seventies t.v. show that was never made.

Probably my favorite so far is "Plane Glazed." I love the crowd laughter soundtrack at the end, after the music stops. What are those people laughing at? I imagine they represent somehow the laughter of ridicule that everyone hears who attempts to bring something of creative value to the world. This is especially true of my generation, I think, since we were so inculcated in a necessity for expressing all of our thoughts and feelings through irony. The only pure expression is to mock yourself as you are doing it, and be your own ridiculer. Somehow you have to do it anyway.

Or maybe the musician did a funny physical gag on stage with a banana right at the end of the song.

Full disclosure: Coop is a good friend of mine of many years.

The Defining Characteristic of the Global Elite

Two hundred years ago yesterday the broken armies of Napoleon retreated off the battlefield at Waterloo. So much of the French Army fell into capture by Allied hands, especially the artillery (the means by which Napoleon had originally made a name for himself as a military tactician), that his position became completely untenable. Six days later he announced his abdication as Emperor of France.

It was the second such abdication, and thus the second end of the Napoleonic wars in less than a year. Napoleon had been defeated in 1814 but had broken out of his exile in early 1815. He had then returned to France and quickly seized the leadership of the state anew. He then took his revived armies outside France to confront the nations allied against him. His revival was very short-lived. He got only as far as Belgium, in June. The defeat there was catastrophic. As quickly as it had started, it was all over once again, and this time they would make sure Napoleon could never escape. Now the peace could begin in earnest.

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)

The Napoleonic dream was dead, it seemed. But what was this dream? Was it simply about a man's ego to dominate the world? Was it for the glory of France? One could say it was partly both of these things. But even for Napoleon, and for many who supported him, and those who have studied him since then, it was about much more than that. It was a fight over the determination of the structure of the world going forward over the next century and beyond. Napoleon, after all, was the Prince of the Revolution. He believed he consciously embodied its principles in his own being, especially in bringing Europe into an age of applied reason.

Napoleon's defeat essentially marked the dawn of the global era, in which Earth would experience a planet-wide integration of its economy and political structures like never before. It was the "new world order" of its day. The Napoleonic wars had been in a sense the conflict over how that order would be structured, including of course who would be in charge of it.

Napoleon's escape from his exile had come in the midst of the continent-wide peace conference that had begun the previous autumn after Napoleon's initial defeat, that had set about to determine the structure of the world going forward.

Just as history had seen nothing like Napoleon himself, so the congress that met in September 1814 in Vienna was in a scope that was unprecedented in European history. Nearly all the nations of Europe, large and small, empires and principalities, victors and vanquished, had representatives there, because the wars had touched upon nearly every part of the continent to some degree.

They spent long months over the fall and winter hashing out what the world (that is, Europe, her colonies, and the High Seas) would look like. It was not an easy process, of course, with so many agendas at play, and potentially dozens of sides on any particular issue. The scale and complexity of intrigue and secret deal-making was probably unlike anything the world has seen since.The conflicts between the victors gave much leverage at times to the defeated French.

Some of the delegates had nearly a free hand in their negotiations in Vienna. For example, the Russian Czar came in person to the conference (who wouldn't want a vacation from St. Petersburg?). Being pretty much an absolute monarch, he didn't have to get authorization for his decisions from anyone (although in practical terms, it was often much more complicated than that. Even Emperors need support).

Others delegates needed to report to their sovereigns in their respective capitals, using the slow communication of the day.  But sometimes that wasn't much of a restriction to the flow of diplomacy. The diplomats themselves were almost universally noblemen, highly influential among their peers. The host Austrian delegate Metternich was considered the true power in Austria. Kings got bored with governing, and needed someone else to manage things. Power devolved to the well-connected who were also competent, cunning, and interested in such matters. Back then, being foreign minister was often the real power in a kingdom.

The strongest democracy of the day, that might have complicated the process of decision-making, was the United Kingdom. Yet their delegate, the Duke of Wellington, had been also granted nearly a free hand at the conference by His Majesty George III's government (the British had a very strong position there, and they also had clear objectives, which they almost completely achieved). Wellington's stature was only enhanced when he himself took to the battlefield to defeat Napoleon in person at Waterloo. Such were the diplomats of the day.

One thing to keep in mind about this, when one imagines this grand scenario playing out in Vienna for almost a year, while even interrupted by the final campaign against Napoleon: the diplomats met behind closed doors.

Not all the negotiations were necessarily secret (although many were), but they were all private. It was a private discussion and agreement among gentlemen, until the final public treaty was signed.

There was no free press at work during the conference. Once again, only Britain had anything resembling our modern concept of one. Austria certainly did not. There were no daily statements by delegates in the paper of record. There were of course no press conferences, and thus no sound bites, and certainly no viral videos. Even if one could record such things by some means, there would have been almost no means to distribute them to the people in the various countries, even to the literate folk---certainly not in any timely manner.  In most of Europe, there was not yet an expectation that such an institution should even exist. The idea that what the delegates did was accountable to the people in their home countries would have stuck them universally as silly, at least by how we use that phrase today.

All of that had to come later for Europe, in the mid Nineteenth Century, with the rise of what came to be called Liberalism---namely, the right of individuals to free expression, free opinion, and free communication. Liberalism erupted even in places without democracy, for example in Prussia. It was such a contagious idea, and ripe for the time. Liberty. The essence of liberalism.

But it was a very rocky process, and took several great efforts to establish the right to publicly oppose the sovereign. No one likes being openly criticized. Kings certainly did not.

Thankfully for them, and the nobles who served them, in 1815 all of that was yet in the future. By today's standards, the delegates in Vienna might as well have been in a mountain retreat in the Alps, guarded by security forces, with a complete press blackout even on mentioning the existence of the conference. No wonder they could get so much done. 

If you want one defining characteristic of what can been called the Global Elite, it is in the paragraph I just wrote above. It is defined by an idea, namely that the world would be much better off if the powerful people of the world, the ones who really know how the world runs,  could get together and do what they need to do in private, without the ridiculous and pointless distraction of either a (classically) liberal press nor contemporary media reporting. Nor do they want to be bound by agreements such as  (classically) liberal Constitutions (especially ones that enforce restrictions on what sovereigns can do). They prefer their own types of contracts among themselves, with no such fetters placed on them by the masses who have no idea how things actually are.

Sometimes they don't mind a little democracy, though. They have mastered that particular speed bump that once threatened to interrupt their line of control over the centuries. It doesn't seem to bother them much at all lately.

The Most Controversial Building in Portland

I came home one night in late May to find a KATU reporter standing on the sidewalk in front of my home, having people read Internet rants about how awful we were to live in our building.

Been meaning to write about this awhile, but since I leaked it on Facebook today on a friend's feed, I might as well as well come out of the closet.  We live here.

LEED-certified building in Portland designed to withstand waves of hatred

As I mentioned on Facebook, before we signed the lease,  Red and I did not see the much-despised marketing video featuring the fictitious tenants "Luke and Jess,"  but it probably would not have changed our minds (despite backwards baseball caps being the international sign of douchery).

At the time, back in early January, we were less a week back from our long trip, and I just wanted to stop paying a hundred and thirty bucks a night for the hotel in northwest Portland where we were staying at the time. I told Red that the rent at our new place seemed absurdly cheap by comparison (and by comparison to anything in New York or San Francisco, etc.). We had our pick of multiple new units.

Three days later we had our stuff moved in, and our bikes stowed in the basement room, still with some of the decorations on them from last year's Burning Man.

In the months that followed, especially while I was still working for the Big Publishing Company, I spent much of my days up in the sky lounge on the roof working on my laptop, sometimes with other residents but mostly by myself. 

Almost every day the property manager gave a tour to a prospective tenant while I am there. I felt as if I had been cast in some kind of on-going performance art piece.

The big glass windows up there in the sky lounge allow a magnificent vista throughout much of eastside Portland and across the river to the skyline of downtown. Almost nothing obstructs the view for miles around. You can even see Mount Hood most days.

A narrow walkway crosses the middle the roof. It's good for a short stroll when I am feeling restless. Supposedly there are fifty restaurants in the surrounding blocks. Off to the west, the tops of the  tallest towers of downtown blend right into the line of ragged Douglas-firs at the crest of the West Hills right behind them. I probably spend more time upon the roof than anyone in the building. Recently I told a friend by text that being up there felt like standing on the deck of ship in the "Gulf of Trendy."

That was all before I stumbled upon the marketing video of Luke and Jess (I was looking for something about the building to send to architect friend of mine in Colorado, since he designs places like this). I thought the video was rather daft because Luke and Jess supposedly have lived here for 18 months, although the building has been open less than a a year.

Then the articles startled coming out in Willamette Week, the local alternative weekly. Half a dozen about the building have popped up in my news feed since the first of May. I recognized the first one by the photo. Most have been about the "controversy."

For some reason, the building has really touched a nerve.  It became a meme on the Portland Reddit, mostly in an ironic sense about the hipster complaining about it. The local t.v. news said the marketing video has inspired "visceral hate" by many Portlanders.

Honestly when we chose this place, were just looking for a decent place to live. I wanted a place that didn't smell of mold, like every cheap room I ever had in Salem back in my college days. For some reason, that wound up putting me smack dab in the center of the gentrification drama of PDX 2015 (the year they removed the carpet).

But who can complain? A couple weeks ago, I overhead the property manager tell a prospective tenant that the unoccupied retail space on the first floor, which has been unoccupied all this time, is soon going to be the home a new hip place to eat and drink. It's going to be a coffee shop by day, and a tiki lounge by night, she said.

Last week the print edition WW had a cartoon of the building on the cover, with the title "Grow Up Portland." The cartoon has a guy waving from the roof...

The Coolness of Dutch Hardware Stores

Soon enough my new pursuit of documenting the vocabulary of the street had me facing a constant brutal triage of not only my blocks of free time, but of each passing moment whenever I walked outside the room. Even the breakfast buffet at the hotel could be a richness of little written descriptions. Each meal was one-off opportunity to find something unique.

There was too much to see and to discover. Especially in the Netherlands---the continental nation that most rivaled the richness of the vocabulary one sees in the United States---I was faced with a unceasing agonizing choice of how to parcel out my time.

The only way I would cope with this situation was to develop a set of personal rules---i.e., rules of the "game" I had invented for myself. The Law of One Shot is an example, although actually that is more of an empirical observation of transcendental truth than a personal game rule.  Most of the time I violated that particular cannon, as I did so many other of my by-laws. My score of each outing with my iPhone (and it always went with me, as fully charged as I could get it) was always horribly in the negative from the mental deductions I gave myself. But I always let myself off the hook at the end of each day, and began with fresh enthusiasm each time I left the room. Overall the rules were quite successful at relieving me of much agony.

One game rule I enforced quite well for myself that I did not take any shots that did not have unique and interesting words inside them. This helped conserve my time greatly by eliminating all manner of plain landscape shots of monuments and architecture---the kind I might have normally taken as a tourist---unless there were readable words that were in some way cool for that particular setting.
Sometimes that meant walking around for many minutes trying to find some random street om sign to put into the foreground. Often the more absurd the juxtaposition, the more satisfying the photograph felt.

I also eliminated almost all selfies. I'm not a selfie taker to begin with, so it wasn't much of a sacrifice. I never purposely took a selfie at all until the end of the trip with Red, but not infrequently I would catch myself in reflection in a shop window, or a glass door, each one of which could be a richness of little printed signs.  A tiny shuttered hardware store along a canal in Gröningen, on a Sunday afternoon when no one was in sight who might object to my extended curiosity, could keep me occupied for nearly a quarter hour as I worked down list of products, noticing ever smaller interesting words. 

That was time well spent. I confess that in such instances, I rarely sacrificed a great vocabulary acquisition even if I happened to notice the outline of my reflection in the shot.

The Law of One Shot

Incidents like the previous one helped me formulate what I call The Law of One Shot.

The law is simply this: you get one shot.

If you miss the first shot, or if you decide the first shot wasn't good enough, then you can get a second shot, but you're going to have to pay for it somehow.

At the very least, you will pay in the time it will take, to reconstruct the shot, to turn around and walk backward and plant your feet. But don't fool yourself. That's just the bare minimum price. Usually you will pay more than that.

For example you often pay just by disrupting the flow of whatever vibe you were in. Sometimes the flow of the day is strong and you can jump back in stream again, and regain your momentum. Sometimes it takes a while to marshal that kind of flow anew, particular if you get obsessed with some kind of perfection.

The best thing to do is keep walking. Don't turn back if you can help it. Be satisfied with what is behind you, even as you use each painful defeat to build a stronger will to keep walking.

The good side is that by obeying this law, one gets away cleanly in situations that might otherwise be horribly awkward.

Even taking a shot of the side of a Dutch work van in Amsterdam---electricians, plumbers, heating and AC service---with the work men straight overhead on the scaffolding outside, one is allowed to stop and plant one's feet, and to raise the phone for whatever purpose, and then pause momentarily, and to move on. That's the unwritten rule of flow.

No one cares if you do what I just described. They take notice of you only if you linger, and especially if you move slightly and try to get not only a second but a third shot. By then you are causing massive disruptions to the flow around you.  Voices come down at you from the scaffolding. You should have been halfway down the block by then, satisfied with what you got on the first shot.