Bob Schwartz

June 19, 2013

The Voice Has a Big Secret

Danielle Bradbery
The Voice has a big secret, but it has always been hiding in plain sight.

It is no secret that Danielle Bradbery won NBC’s singing competition, or that she should have or would. The overwhelming talent of this 16-year-old phenom—not just compared to her competition, but to professional singers twice her age—left the coaches/judges speechless, literally running out of superlatives. The outspoken Adam Levine on the night of the final performances essentially declared her the winner, before the public votes were cast. (On the results show, he backed off before the announcement, diplomatically offering the opinion that it was close and all the finalists were great.)

Will Danielle become a star or superstar? As with winning The Voice, she should, if there is any justice. But the music business is funny and anything but just. And yet, just like in farm fysics, cream rises, and Danielle is very heavy musical cream.

Now to that secret. The point of The Voice—in its system and even in its name—was to better itself over American Idol, which in the balance between talent and entertainment has weighed heavily towards crowd pleasing and audience building. The Voice was supposed to be, and mostly is, a little more about singing. About “the voice.”

In an instance of cleverness meeting mission, The Voice decided to begin its competition by having the coaches just listen to singers—chairs turned away, not looking. Though performing is about a raft of things, singing is about sound, even at a time when videos sit in parity with audio tracks.

And so, the secret. As much as it seems antithetical to the interests of NBC, its ratings and its sponsors, we are supposed to listen to The Voice, not watch it. We are supposed to be auditors, not viewers, not distracted by the form “the voice” takes, even though that form is obviously critical to live performance and videos. Maybe that works in somebody’s favor (not having the perfect looks or stage presence) or against it (cute does not necessarily sing as cute appears). That is the precise point of the turned around chairs and blind listening.

If you just listen to the live performances and close your eyes, you’ll see. (The studio performances of the same songs, extended, sweetened, smoothed out, are only partly representative).

People have quibbled—been downright defiant—about Danielle for a host of reasons (the internet is where reasons, sound and ridiculous, go to thrive). Maybe the biggest complaint is from those who just don’t like country music, or even claim to “hate” it, which is a legitimate preference. De gustibus non est disputandum—there is no disputing taste.

But for those non-country folk, please be open to the talent, current and historic. Here is Patsy Cline, one of the great pop singers ever, performing Crazy live. or the studio version of Sweet Dreams (more arrangement, a little chorus, but still an unadorned voice in need of no help). There are “the voices” in every genre, and if you would be willing to say “I hate opera, but she sure can sing” then you have to say the say the same about country, blues, R&B, musicals, whatever. In Patsy’s case, she was one of the first to land in the country-pop crossover space, based on the sheer appeal and power of her singing.

This isn’t meant, no way, no how, to compare Danielle to Patsy. Danielle may get close someday; time will tell, but that’s a nearly impossible standard. It’s just meant to remind us that beyond stage performance and videos, beyond human interest back stories, beyond genre fragmentation and hybrids, beyond all the chazerai—a great Yiddish word meaning the insubstantial junk that surrounds important things, there is the singing.

The Voice got that right by showing us how to just listen, chairs turned, eyes closed. The Voice voters got that right by listening to Danielle Bradbery and declaring her “the voice.” It’s no secret that she is.

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June 18, 2013

Duran Adam in Turkey

Duran Adam
He is “duran adam”—the standing man. On Monday, Erdem Gunduz stood still for hours in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, staring at a public portrait of Kemal Ataturk, to protest the latest ban on demonstrations. Others joined him, as the image went national and then global. Police moved in: he was able to walk away and escape arrest, others didn’t.

As pointed out in a previous post, we should pay attention to Turkey because it is so special and so different than our preconceptions of what the world is and how it works. It is certainly a democracy today, but has not always been, and not quite what we think of as a democracy. It is certainly a Muslim country, but has not always been, and not quite what we think of as a Muslim country.

Whether Prime Minister Erdogan has been too long in office, whether he is taking Turkey in directions that defy many citizens and the ideals of Ataturk, whether he is truly a democrat, are things to be determined.

It is clear that he has crossed the line between firm response and heavy-handed overreach. It is clear that he is facing the quandary of all reformers, real or putative: your practice of reform is never the only game in town, and others have very different ideas. Most of all, Erdogan, like many leaders, seems to have no idea what he is dealing with, so he is under the impression that power is always the trump card.

He is half right. Power is always the trump card, but it is hard to know exactly which kind of power you are talking about or having to deal with. Is one man standing a power? What about a thousand people, or a million? History tells us that you can jail the thousands and even kill the millions. But as long as there are witnesses, might still is forced to co-exist with right, even when might wins.

The difference between witnessing and watching is a fine line. As this spreads, we will see if the media have the courage to cover a bunch of people just standing still. The media seem to like their reality shows with a little more action. Fortunately, the people’s media, the social media, may have more tolerance and a longer attention span. If you look long enough, standing still starts looking like moving forward, and that gets people really excited. It is how for millennia, from Christian origins through Gandhi through the civil right movement and on and on, nothing seemed to turn into something—because it was always something.

It was a standing man, that would not be moved.

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June 14, 2013

The STR-AV1010 Is Dead

Sony STR-AV1010
Five miles out of London on the Western Avenue
Must have been a wonder when it was brand new
Talkin’ ’bout the splendour of the Hoover factory
I know that you’d agree if you had seen it too
It’s not a matter of life or death
What is, what is?
It doesn’t matter if I take another breath
Who cares? Who cares?
Elvis Costello, Hoover Factory

My audio receiver is dead. Well, not exactly dead. But without a right channel, it’s like a Reese’s Cup without the peanut butter. Chocolate is great, but only half the story.

Calling it a receiver is like calling a computer a calculator. The Sony STR-AV1010 is an “Audio/Video Control Center” with “Delayed Digital Surround”. It was the first quality audio component I bought, not inexpensive at the time. You can, if you wish, date it by the fact that it includes inputs for Phono (phonograph) and DAT (Digital Audio Tape).

Don’t let its age fool you. It has remained a powerful and capable piece of equipment. The most sophisticated devices have been added to its army, and it has controlled them like the pro it is.

That’s not to say I haven’t walked down the aisles of a store or browsed online for newer models and technology. There’s plenty out there that’s better suited to the state of the digital art. Sleeker styling and more advanced controls too. It’s not like I’m married to the equipment.

But just when I would get serious about trading up, I’d feel a tug of loyalty and nostalgia. It has sat in a place of tech honor in every house, and has been the master control for lots of great and wild times, along with some quiet and unforgettable ones. Most of all, it was working fine, pumping out awesome sound. Until today.

The sound is still awesome, at least on the left channel. On the right, not so much. Is that enough to displace it from the hub of home entertainment? Is the right half of the audio really that important?

It was a wonder when it was brand new. To me, it still is.

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June 13, 2013

DNA and the Supreme Court Reading Program

DNA Court
Today’s Supreme Court decision on the patentability of genetic material, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.  is another example of just how informative and fun these opinions can be, as opposed to just hearing the media summaries. This leads to a suggestion for a Supreme Court Reading Program.

Earlier posts have covered the value—in knowledge and entertainment—of reading current Supreme Court opinions, even if you are not a lawyer. This also includes reading the briefs in support of various positions, from a range of people and organizations. When the marriage equality cases were argued back in March, a post was devoted to The Briefs on Marriage Equality.

In this complex and significant gene case, the unanimous opinion of the Court (Justice Scalia concurred in a very short comment of his own) is that particular genetic material that isolated and identified (here, the site of mutations leading to breast and ovarian cancer) is not patentable, but that a new synthesized version of that same material, with the deletion of some parts, is.

Among the things that makes the opinion so interesting is its cogent explanation of a technical area. Genetics isn’t easy, and the opinion is really an understandable primer on a difficult topic.

Even more interesting are the array of briefs submitted in the case. Along with companies that want to be able to hold lucrative proprietary interest in genes, there are scientists and health care advocates who want nothing to stand in the way of free and open development and application. (The Humane Genome Project, for example, from the first offered all the work on the mapping the human genome to humanity.) Lawyers and intellectual property activists also chimed in, with intense interest in how patent law is a mess in these hyper-advancing times, having fallen so far behind the realities of digital and bio innovation. Also interesting is a brief from the Southern Baptist Convention, which taken from their church perspective makes a pretty good argument that, to put it bluntly, you can’t patent God.

So when you hear mention of an interesting Supreme Court case, either when it is argued or decided, step away from the media reports, even when those are reliable from experts you trust. Instead, visit the Supreme Court site to read or download the opinion (the opinion is published on the site almost immediately). Then visit the American Bar Association site that collects all the amicus briefs for each case that is argued. There will be a lot of those briefs—more than a hundred in the case of marriage equality—so you will want to pick and choose. Sometimes the name of the person or organization submitting the brief will catch your interest, just by who or what they are.

That certainly applies to the gene patent case. There among the many briefs is one identified as Brief for James D. Watson, Ph.D. in Support of Neither Party. Just in case the name isn’t familiar, James Watson, Ph.D. is the co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, for which he and Frances Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1963. Even if he wasn’t one of the most important scientists in history, his delightful and erudite 26-page brief would be worth reading. It’s just one more example of how a Supreme Court Reading Program can be an enlightening and surprising addition to whatever else you’re currently paying attention to.

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June 12, 2013

The Fig Paste Story

Fig Paste
Interest and talent for food runs a range. Some are world-class, others are moderately capable and knowledgeable, others don’t know or care. We are lucky if we are beneficiaries of those who take the making of food seriously and can follow through all the way to the table.

The artifacts of fine food are like those of any of the fine arts: you have plenty of tools and materials at hand, but some you may use only rarely. The tools are on racks or in drawers, the stable foodstuffs are on shelves, but some things are relegated to the refrigerator for freshness.

That is how the fig paste came to the refrigerator. It was purchased in December, in time for the holidays. It in fact came out of a holiday display of it and other fruit pastes, a pretty arcane category. It did end up in a very tasty dish back then. But a little container of fig paste goes a long way, and so to the fridge it went. In December.

The plastic container is quite small, about 2 by 3 inches, an inch high. It will fit easily in a refrigerator of more than 20 cubic feet. Except that in a busy, busy refrigerator, where ingredients and leftovers are always coming and going, there is a lot of rearranging to be done. So the tiny container, filled with delicious fig paste, is not so much homeless as peripatetic.

This weekend, as if to re-establish its raison d’être, the fig paste worked its way into another dish (crostini topped with fig paste and goat cheese: delicioso!). But Monday morning always comes, there’s a price to pay for all that eating, and now the fig paste is squeezed into, of all places, the butter drawer. It is in rich company (butter, cream cheese), but now the door to the drawer is challenged. Does it truly belong there? And so it has moved again, hoping it will not have to wait another five months for a role, even a very small supporting one. They also serve who sit hidden on the second glass shelf.

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June 11, 2013

Istanbul Spring

Today's Zaman
O Istanbul. Crown jewel and epicenter of Turkey. Literal crossroad of the world, east and west. Beloved city of many world travelers, who find themselves immersed in a multi-millennial mix of cultures. In Istanbul, you are simultaneously located and dislocated in geography and time.

The hours of coverage of the clashes in Taksim Square will not make this quite clear. Protests against the demolition of Gezi Park, one of the last green spaces in modern growing Istanbul, ripened into broader complaint about the direction of the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan.

Today in Taksim, Erdogan acted on his threatend lost patience, setting the police on occupying protestors, whom he believes to have been infiltrated by violent political activists and radicals. Tear gas, water cannons, and other dispersal techniques followed.

Turkey—and particularly its world-class city Istanbul—does not fit easily in any of the usual boxes. The anomaly is the work of a single man, a visionary autocrat who managed to give autocracy a good name, who took one of the most culturally rich but tradition-bound countries in the world and pushed/dragged it into the twentieth century.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) disrupted and redirected a country’s trajectory as few have ever done. First President of the Republic of Turkey, and still almost a god-like presence, he was determined to see Turkey regain its former glory not by looking backward but by moving forward and becoming a modern, secular, European-style democracy. Along with universal education and changing the way that people dressed (he banned the fez, for example), he literally changed the language, reformatting Turkish with a Roman alphabet.

It worked for the most part, though with sporadic gaps. The old and the new live comfortably and excitingly with each other, as a visit to Istanbul demonstrates. Turkey is thriving. Those whose image of Islam is informed by skewed sketches find one of the world’s most Muslim countries defying stereotypes.

Democracy has been an on-again, off-again phenomenon in Turkey. As the twentieth century crept into the twenty-first, the progress that Ataturk enabled led to expectations that would not be denied. The rise of Islamism and traditionalism under the current leadership, even as Erdogan pushed important reform, does not sit well with a generation—again particularly in Istanbul—that takes secularism, modern culture and principles of freedom very seriously.

That is how we get here today. Even as Prime Minister Erdogan was intent on ending the occupation of Taksim Square, dozens of lawyers joined in and were arrested at the courthouse. These tensions are nothing new for Turkey; the military has been in charge more than once, and was then turned out. What is new is how much of the world is watching.

This isn’t about whether a little city park in Istanbul should make way for a shopping center, or whether drinking alcohol should be restricted in Turkey (another issue that has seeped into the discussion). It isn’t the same as other “springs”, Prague or Arab, about moving from dictatorship to democracy. This is a democracy already, one of the most interesting in the world. We are watching the kind of challenges that twenty-first century democracies will be facing, and seeing whether purportedly enlightened leaders can find appropriate ways of meeting them. For the sake of Turkey, and especially for the sake of glorious Istanbul, let’s hope so.

Istanbul

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June 7, 2013

A Food Breakthrough on National Donut Day

Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich

Updated to include Donut Burger.

Today is National Donut Day. Celebrated on the first Friday in June, it was begun in 1938 to celebrate the Salvation Army’s distribution of donuts to soldiers in World War I.

Donuts, particularly glazed donuts, are quite possibly the world’s most perfect food—provided you are not concerned about health. (Bananas, which use that “perfect food” slogan, are also great, and are much healthier, but bananas are obviously not quite donuts.)

There are plenty of special deals on National Donut Day, including free donuts with or without a purchase. But something has happened to make this NDD even more special.

Today Dunkin’ Donuts rolls out its Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich:

Going Where No Breakfast Has Gone

We’ve gone and changed breakfast forever. Again. Bite into this smorgasbord of bacon slices and pepper fried egg, sandwiched by a Glazed Donut.

Let’s talk about bacon. Bacon is quite possibly both the world’s most perfect (taste) food and least perfect (health) food. The stunning brilliance of combining bacon with a glazed donut can’t be overstated. A Nobel Food Prize can’t be far behind.

On the practical side, you have a choice. You can eat glazed donuts or Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwiches once a year on National Donut Day. Or you can eat them every day. Or something in between.

Aristotle advised moderation in all things. With all the temptations he did face in ancient Greece, he still never had to withstand the allure of a Dunkin’ Donuts Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich. So as Aristotle would suggest on National Donut Day: go on, live a little.

Update:

Donut Burger

Many thanks to the reader who clued me in to Donut Burgers. Not only am I not eating enough donuts, I am also not keeping up with donut cuisine. As with all cutting-edge dishes, the origins of the donut burger are controversial. It is generally attributed to singer and producer Luther Vandross, who ran short of hamburger buns and substituted Krispy Kreme donuts, to create what is sometimes called the Luther Burger. It is now a staple of state fairs and other places where eating unusual things is essential to the experience. In all honesty, though, I’m not sure I get it, or want to get it. On the other hand, they say don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

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June 6, 2013

The Next Civil War: Religion

Lincoln Penny
A few years ago, I proposed that the American divide over abortion might one day reach the dangerous depths of a much earlier conflict over slavery. Not since slavery—not even with still-festering questions about racial and other inequalities—has an issue had such a basic and visceral impact.

The poll numbers on abortion have shifted, the judicial context may be stable (for the moment), but the legislative activity is still a battlefield: among the initiatives, just today Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett signed a law prohibiting insurers that offer abortion coverage from participating in the state’s exchange under the Affordable Care Act.

Yet even with that, abortion will not be the biggest issue that cleaves America in the next few years. It will be, much more than it is now, religion.

Not one religion against another, or one religion-based position against another. We are approaching the point where half of America has an explicit or implicit affinity with some organized religious denomination or belief, and half does not. The not includes a wide range from atheists, agnostics, areligionists or anti-religionists to those who are “spiritual but not religious.”

America is not a theocracy or, officially, a theocratic democracy. But “theocratic democracy” (see Israel) is the way a number of Americans see it approvingly. Our conventions, traditions and even our money support this, and when they didn’t support it sufficiently, it was enhanced—as when during the Cold War against godless Communism, “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance.

The dynamic between religious and secular has long played out in America in just about every official sphere. But in the past, those who fought for the secular and even succeeded (prayer in schools) were considered an aberrant and weird fringe. The fringe is now a minority, but still in some eyes, aberrant and weird. What happens when that fringe turned minority becomes an equal partner in American civics, citizens who are guided by bright moral lights, just not those that emanate from lamps they don’t believe in and refuse to support—or allow to rule their lives? What then?

Abraham Lincoln said we could not survive half-slave and half-free. The nineteenth century would not have hinted at it. but the American twenty-first may be half-God, half-not. What might Lincoln say then?

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June 5, 2013

Mountains or Molehills: How to Unflatten the News

Mt Everest - Justin Bieber
Digital access has made the news world flat. Flat as in if you use a news aggregator, there is some attempt on the site to stack the most important stories within a category, but since all categories have the same dignity, you really wouldn’t know, being from another planet, whether the civil war in Syria is more or less significant than Justin Bieber racing his Maserati through his exclusive California neighborhood (hint: it’s not Bieber).

Just as digital has created this unsortable mess and mass of news, such that Hamlet, who insane or not could tell a hawk from a handsaw/heron, would have trouble telling an important story from an inconsequential one (hint: your uncle killing your father to marry your mother is an important story).

Here is a solution. Since it is very easy to adjust type size digitally, stories that aggregators, editors or writers are willing to admit are not earthshaking might be presented in a smaller font, while those that are vital could use a larger one. This was always a convention of print news, and there is no reason that the capabilities of digital information shouldn’t be used to bring this approach up to date. As in:

Top Stories

Civil war in Syria threatens regional and global stability and peace.

Justin Bieber continues to race his Maserati around his neighborhood, despite complaints from neighbors.
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June 5, 2013

Getting and Giving a Break


Everyone is someone else’s pain, or at least pain in the ass. We don’t always know this or acknowledge it about ourselves, thinking how we are put upon or suffering at the hands of others, yet unwilling to see how others are overlooking our own silliness or meanness.

We are constantly getting breaks from family, friends and particularly from those in loving relationships. Since we can’t actually count the number of breaks we get—most are silently and even unconsciously given—the best path to balance is to give breaks to others as infinitely as possible. This can seem painful, because we are convinced it is our duty to make the world or someone we know and love “better.” Except that more than we realize, others are making the world better by allowing us to be who we are without comment or critique. Compassionate criticism has its place, but so does giving breaks, more often than we do.

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