Month: March 2022

I went the the Boston Museum of Fine Arts today to view a new exhibit of JMW Turner – “Turner’s Modern World” – and frankly didn’t enjoy it. In the moment it really bothered me, because while I’ve always thought of Turner as the most modern of pre-Impressionist painters, and have loved seeing him in the Tate and elsewhere in London, today I just didn’t enjoy the exhibit at all. It frustrated me: how can I love an artist and his (or her) work, but reject an exhibition of that work and that artist?

What I thought about on the drive back to Scarborough – it’s a good two hours depending on traffic, and despite it being a Saturday, for reasons I couldn’t figure out the traffic was lousy – listening to a mix tape I had put together but had not figured out whether to send or not, and then when that was done listening to CBC’s Saturday afternoon line up of The Debaters and Under the Influence and of course Because News, was this dichotomy. It reminded me of a previous John Singer Sargent exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago that I had been to – but it was different. The Sargent exhibit was fantastic, even though it made me question just how great a painter I thought Sargent was. The Turner exhibit today didn’t change my view of Turner, but it made me think “wow, I really wasted my time today.” Which was even worse: I love looking at beautiful art, paintings in particular. To think that my time had been wasted, that I could have been doing other things (namely, reading the next book club selection) that I’d have enjoyed that much more, but instead drove a total of four hours, spent $20 on parking, and the only thing on the plus side of the equation was a delicious omelette and a starter course of escargot at a Boston bistro, really bothered me.

The answer, of course, is all about curation. The easy answer was that there was just a ridiculous explosion of too much Turner: they should have broken it up somewhat, they should have stretched it out, let each piece live on its own, had fewer total pieces. But that’s ridiculous, and actually as the curatorial notes alluded to, would have sort of been a betrayal of JMW Turner himself. He thought rather highly of himself, was a bit of a showman, and was constantly pushing for the Royal Academy back in his day to grant him exclusive shows, even though even back then there was an awareness that too much Turner in one place was a bad idea, like eating too many fried clams on the beach in summer time. Yes, delicious; but taken to extremes, your entire being just rejects it, and ultimately you risk destroying your enjoyment of fried seafood (or the preview of Impressionism and Expressionism that Turner represents, to bring us out of the clam shack analogy) in the future.

The curatorial choices were, in that regard, actually good ones: this was designed to be a surfeit of Turner, it was built to be over the top. The lighting choices were – until the final room – chosen with an eye towards what JMW would have been showing in back in the 1840s; the stacking of paintings in line with what a Royal Academy annual would have done had they granted a wall to him without breaking it up with a Gainsborough or a generic set of Derby horseflesh in oil or a boring but well-executed and celebrity-friendly group portrait of the Regent and his birthday entourage. That solid wall of explosive colour, so modern and imaginative and ruthlessly out of keeping with Congress of Vienna era norms, though, would have never been granted Turner back then because he was so odd; had he been, it would have been a kind of violation, and probably even his fans back then like Ruskin would have said “too much”. They surely knew – intuitively if not consciously – that he could only have his genius come to the surface by comparing it to the tired sea battle scenes and portraiture and landscapes, however competently painted, of his contemporaries.

I think part of the problem was that I visited my favourite MFA gallery to kill the half hour before my timed entry ticket kicked in, the gallery with the Copleys and the Wests and the “American” portraits of the late 18th century, so precise and glossy and realistic, portraiture predecessors of the hyperrealism of Chuck Close and Richard Estes, only with powdered wigs and knit stockings which, of course, represent fantasy to us today and thus allow us to break the notion of “hyperrealism” that the painting technique implies. The MFA has an almost comical Benjamin West group portrait of the Hope family – a banking family from Boston who oddly made their money in the Netherlands – which looks strikingly like the montage portrait that freezes at the end of the intro to Soap, a totally age-inappropriate situation comedy that my grandmother loved watching with me and probably warped me for life. The Hope family portrait is stunning in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with Turner, even though it was painted roughly at the same time as Turner’s first major works. But rather than either seeming anachronistic, thought of together, they seem as relevant and perfectly capable of juxtaposition as what one might imagine as the 20th century equivalent, a Wayne Theibaud California realist cityscape against Georgia O’Keefe’s clouds above New Mexico.

The other piece that bothered me, though, was a missing work – Turner’s famous painting of early rail, Rail, Steam and Speed, which I’ve seen in the National Gallery in London regularly, often, and just always blows me away. This isn’t fair to the curators, but given the strength of the MFA collection – they have a collection which rivals that of any museum in North America with the possible exception of the New York Met and the Chicago Art Institute – they should have been able to secure it for what was proposed as a comprehensive Turner modern world representative exhibit. As it was, the only “steam” on display came in maybe a half dozen steam ships, but nothing of the power and expression of fear of the modern acceleration that marks Turner’s paintings of rail. The absence of that element of his work – and the sorry replacement of it that the MFA’s curators attempted with lesser watercolours of mine entrances and forges, or his famously indistinct seascapes with early fully-rigged steamships – was not successful.

Turner – more than any French painter of the age, more than any American painter of the age – saw that what was characteristic of his world was change. Not dynamism per se, although he is rivalled in my mind only by Winslow Homer in his ability to show the power and action of the sea, exceeding any Dutch master in his understanding of storm clouds, approached and only occasionally exceeded by the designist precision of Rockwell Kent in his understanding of the purity of the colour of sky / sea / earth in one place. But more than any of them and only really inherited by future generations by rare instances, by Ray Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns who saw the impact of media in the same way he understood the impact of speed and connection, Turner was a master. The MFA exhibit, though, missed the point. Turner saw that the world was changing, but the exhibit was less about that understanding than it was about explosions.

Maybe in a time where movies have lost their focus on ambience and dialogue and focus instead on comic book narratives and colour, and in a time where in political dialogue we ignore the potential for collaboration because its simpler to live in echo chambers of self-reinforcing violence, the MFA exhibit makes sense. But it ignores what makes Turner great.

Thinking about it a little more, part of that greatness is his prescience, which was alluded to (ironically) in a quote from a security guard that was at the end of the exhibit. The MFA, in its final gallery which had no paintings, had a wall of pictures of MFA staff, and how they’ve reacted to Turner’s work in their careers. The security guard had a posting in the room with Turners The Slave Ship; the guard is African-American, and he insightfully pointed out that the picture was painted well after the Atlantic slave trade was over: such ships no longer plied the seas. He understood that Turner was seeing a deeper, more lasting injustice that still existed, and that the muscle memory of being chattel was something with a much longer fuse than simply Wilberforce’s campaign to end the trade could put out.

Turner was, really, a prophet, whose communication was in paint. He saw over the horizon what other artists – Hopper, Kent, Dali – would have to contend with in the full force of lived reality, but he recognised it even in its birth in Birmingham and Liverpool and on the Great Western Railway viaduct. He was to visual arts what McLuhan or Walter Benjamin were to our understanding of media. And despite that, despite the name of their exhibit, the MFA just liked throwing up lots of pictures of waves and fog and ships.

On the plus side, lunch was truly special. If you’re in Boston in the near future, I highly recommend Aquitaine, on Tremont Street. And if you’re heading north to Maine, seriously, it might seem convoluted, but take I-93 North to Route 128 – the Tobin Bridge route that gets you up through Danvers always seems shorter on paper, but just don’t do it.

When I was ten years old, I asked my parents to buy me a guitar so that I could learn how to play.  I had been given a vinyl recording of classical works transcribed for the guitar, performed by Andrés Segovia, and I decided that I would learn to play like him.  I duly received a small guitar, with nylon strings suitable for a beginner, and I started going to weekly lessons to learn the basics of how to position the fingers of my left hand against the frets and how to use the fingers of my right hand to pluck the strings.  In due course, I bought some music scores for guitar – works by Bach, Sor, Villa-Lobos, and Schubert simplified for those just starting to learn to play – and I was delighted when, after much practice and having overcome many mistakes, I was able to play a few bars. 

I never achieved my goal of becoming as good as Segovia.  There were, I now understand, three reasons for this failure.  First, I did not practice often enough or long enough.  After an initial burst of enthusiasm, my desire to learn how to play scales, read music, and improve my finger technique quickly diminished, and anyway was never able to compete with my duty to complete my homework and my desire to play sport.   Second, my taste in music changed.  For a while, I imagined that I could become as good a guitarist as Carlos Santana; then I lowered my expectations and decided that it would be sufficient to become merely a competent player, so long as I could write songs that were as good as Bob Dylan’s.  I bought an acoustic guitar, with steel strings and a plectrum, and switched my attention from Baroque to Blues, but the results were not much better.  The third and most important reason for my failure to become a great guitarist was my inability to distinguish sounds accurately.  I have met people who can listen to a melody once and then play it, whereas I struggled to tune the strings of my guitar.  Generally, I have no idea what key a song is in, nor can I judge the intervals between notes, nor do I really understand how the chord sequences work.  Whether this is at root a physical problem – that the sensitivity of my ears is just not good enough – or, rather, the consequence of a lack of training of my sense of sound, I do not know.  At some point, however, it became clear to me that I was never going to become a competent musician, let alone a great one.

Continue reading “Changing the tempo”

Back when I was in seventh grade, we had to do “science projects”. I put the term in quotes because frankly, they were barely science at all, but they were assigned as part of Science class and the projects purported to engage us in the scientific method. I’ve come to realize that the scientific method is actually kind of a facade, a way of using some vaguely Baconian concepts to justify funding from the people who approve grants at universities, foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and governments, but in 1987 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the idea that we’d propose a hypothesis and then test it seemed like a good way to consume a few weeks of time and maybe engage the twenty odd kids in the class to do something other than pretend they’d read about meiosis or the carbon cycle.

My topic was “is it possible for an average American to build a workable fission device”. My hypothesis – this was a science project, ostensibly – was “yes”. My rigorous testing demonstrated that, at least in 1987, it was feasible to build a Little Boy-style U-235 gun mechanism fission device, but probably not feasible to build a Fat Man-style Pu-239 implosion device, owing not so much to the construction of the implosion shell but due to the difficulties of legally obtaining enough shaped explosives to successfully build the staging device. I then showed what I believed the likely maximum theoretical yield to be of said Average American atomic weapon, and its damage zones as superimposed on two maps, one a tourist map of Manhattan, and the other a nautical chart of Casco Bay.

I got an A-minus, which is the ideal grade in any class: the headline demonstrates you’re smart, and the by-line indicates the wisdom which made sure you only put in the bare effort to achieve the lower tier of the headline grade. Also, I think I got extra points for my presentation: seventh graders in Reagan’s America, oddly, liked thinking about nuclear war, because we had to think about it a lot for civil defense drills, and actually having some applied knowledge as to why we’d need to duck and cover when a 150 kiloton Soviet MIRV warhead hit the naval station in Brunswick helped put things in perspective.

Before you critique the project on procedural grounds, let me do the work for you. No, I never defined what an “average American” was. And I also didn’t explore at all the fact that my question wasn’t scientific at all: it was an exploration of culture and economics, with just a bare reporting of the best modelled understanding of the explosive, radioactivity, and fallout impacts of weapons as applied to US urban and (in the case of Maine) barely semi-urban centres. But I put together four really good looking large posterboard displays, ordered a small quantity of U-238 from a scientific supply catalog and displayed it with a small working model of a gun-design device, and my teacher, Mr. Plummer, thought it all well done enough. I didn’t tell my parents about it as I thought they might view my fascination with nuclear weapons to be, well, morbid. It wasn’t; I was really just fascinated with the Bohrian model of the atom and how it implied a force model I couldn’t really comprehend yet – but also I was a child of the Reagan era so yeah, I thought a lot about nuclear weapons

We were – excuse the pun – bombarded with nuclear weapons knowledge when I was a child in the 80s. This was the era of intense arms reductions talks – SALT, START, START II – and of course the steady drumbeat of missile technologies: Pershing, Pershing II, Minuteman, MX; SS-18, SS-20. Maine has always been a shipbuilding centre so of course we learned about the ships and submarines, and because I was always a bit precocious, I learned about the Deltas and Typhoons and Ohios, the submarines that made up the “third leg” of the nuclear deterrant triad. We had B-52s stationed out of northern Maine, out of Loring Air Force Base, famous for its three mile long runway that was constructed of a solid slab of concrete fifteen feet deep to be able to withstand both Maine winter potholing and Soviet ground burst attacks, so we were deeply familiar with the first leg of the triad just by going to sports and speech meets up to Aroostock county every winter. And my uncle had served in the second leg of the triad as a missile launch control officer in North Dakota, service which would eventually sterilise him and give him cancer from sitting next to poorly shielded 1.5 megaton plutonium core weapons for ten years. The Cold War ran deep and pure in my viens, and it wasn’t anything to be particularly unhappy or shameful about – indeed, it was kind of cool, hence my selection of a seventh grade science project.

This isn’t to say it wasn’t occasionally scary. I watched enough avant garde movies and television to be aware of the fact that nuclear war was both (a) unfortunately quite likely to occur in my lifetime and (b) very, very, very bad. There used to be bad gallows humour jokes about how bad it would be, and then for good measure, you’d be shown an aftermath of Hiroshima filmstrip in social studies class, or unexpectedly there would be a bad miniseries like “The Day After” when you were really just hoping to watch “Dallas” and see if JR was dead yet, and despite you being 11 or 12 years old, you’d have the full force of just how dramatically bad CBS could demonstrate nuclear war could be would be in your face. You wouldn’t sleep for a few days, but then eventually you’d recover, and go back to reassuring yourself that the combination of advanced early warning detection arrays in northern Canada and failsafe point circling B-52s would make sure that the Soviets would never hit the button first.

And you were reasonably sure that even if Ron did think that launching a first strike was the thing to do tonight, either Nancy would give him some warm milk and put him to bed early, or else George Bush (the older one) was smart enough to hide the football.

All of this came back to me the other night when, thinking a bit nervously, I checked the current deployment status of the Russian nuclear forces. I used to know it cold – I could tell you just how many of their (at the time) roughly 12,000 warheads were on active deployment and on which leg of the triad they were placed. They got down to about 5,000 warheads at some point but since the early 2000s and since Putin came into power for the second time, it’s been creeping up, back to about 9,000 at best estimates today, although that’s the best estimates of available cores, not deployed and active weapons.

The Russian nuclear triad, as the Soviet triad before, always relied slightly more on a smaller but potent first strike capability focused on both mobile and fixed ICBMs scattered through Eurasia; they never had the scale of the US for submarine based deterrant forces, and most of their subs also required coming to the surface to launch weapons, which they still do, making them more suited to second strike weapons or even third or reserve forces. Their main second strike weapons are their large, heavy, slow bomber forces, dispersed again throughout Russia but like the US B-52 forces, at least a quarter of them are designed to be airborne and circling at failsafe points when strategic threats reach a certain level. Being airborne, they would survive the first and response strikes from missile forces, and would then rumble over the pole and bomb cities and targets from above given the likely destruction of ground-based air defences.

Isn’t this fun? There’s a great book, On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn – he’s the model for Dr. Strangelove in Kubrick’s masterpiece – that I bought from a used bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in high school, and I still have the copy. Nuclear warfare strategy is fascinating as long as you don’t think about it.

Anyhoo, the Russians would be assumed to launch ground-based rocket forces first, and would then be assumed to have their bomber forces launch the second wave, roughly two to four hours after the first wave. The first wave, mind you, would be expected to destroy most of Western civilisation, but not all of it, and since the West would have destroyed most of Soviet – er, sorry, Russian, and probably Chinese – civilisation, the mop-up second wave would be vital for determining who would win the post-apocalyptic peace. But since that wouldn’t be enough either, the Russians would keep their third leg of the triad in reserve, to eliminate any last traces of humanity outside of the Eurasian steppes; the West, meanwhile, would still likely have its submarines as well, to exchange one final volley with the hated but, at that point, largely cellular enemy.

Ah, those old memories. I’d wait every month for the new issue of The Journal of Atomic Scientists, with their ticking clock getting ever closer to an armageddon midnight, and their accurate reporting on updates to warhead designs in both blocs. That was high school; things were already getting weird, with Gorbachev and Reagan agreeing to eliminate intermediate range weapons, with the clock ticking backward, with “Amerika” on ABC seeming trite and silly immediately upon release. By the time I graduated from high school, the Czechs had revolted, and the Wall was down, and Trabants could be had for a song.

Ah, those were the days.

But as I mentioned, the other night, I looked up the current Russian nuclear force deployment status, flexing memories and tactical knowledge that had lain dormant for three decades in my mind. I quickly tallied their submarine forces – 2400 active warheads at the upper range, or about 360 megatons assuming the typical warhead in a MIRV with 150 kiloton yield, enough to hit every military, command and control, and significant civilian target in the West on a first strike. Let’s assume they still bulk up their force, though, in first strike ground launched ICBMs, which would tend towards higher yields – say 400 kilotons on average, arrayed between higher yield air burst warheads for civilian and industrial targets and slightly lower yield but dirtier weapons to attack embedded military and command targets – say probably 3600 warheads, maybe 1500 megatons. And then whatever’s left in the bombers, higher yield simple gravity and medium range air-to-surface cruise missiles, maybe 1500 weapons, probably higher blockbuster yields for shock-and-terror effects, maybe 750 to 1000 megatons.

And then there’s the US and allied forces – the UK Trident deterrent force, the French weapons – and whatever the Israelis and the Chinese and the rest have. The West has fewer weapons but more of them are likely working; their yield is more targeted and has fewer targets. Let’s assume if the Russians have around 2500 to 3000 megatons of deployment capability, the West has around 2000 megatons, maybe a bit more. Enough.

Trolling the internet was a lot more efficient than what I did as an 11 year old; back then, I spent hours and hours in the government document repository in Portland, poring through declassified records, reading research books from the RAND Corporation and from university presses, months of effort obsessing over the likelihood of vaporisation given my home in southern Maine. On Monday night, it took me a few hours – I’ve learned Boolean search optimisation long ago; finding the source materials on Google and DuckDuckGo took very little time – and since I’d learned the strategy and tactics in my formational years, I really only needed to update data, not learn anything fundamentally new.

Except: I reminded myself that the Soviet Union is gone, replaced by a one-man dictatorship. Except to remind myself that the Cold War strategic consensus has vanished, replaced by bitter civil discord about whether it even makes sense to view authoritarians as enemies. That does change the calculus, doesn’t it.

New data, new frameworks, same old weapons of mass destruction.

I miss the first time around, when I was eleven, and when my confidence that I’d live to middle age was more or less unchallenged. Was this what my parents felt like, looking at their eleven year old son, and watching the nightly news, and wondering?

It’s bad déja vu in any event. Good night, and good luck.