IdeaFestival

Ray Betts

The ideaFestival has lost a good friend. Ray Betts a former history professor, Director of the Honors Program at the University of Kentucky and contributing author to this blog died this passed week. I have known, worked with and admired Ray for over 20 years. He was the consummate gentleman and scholar. Dr. Betts was also one of those truly creative thinkers who had at his disposal a vast array of knowledge, experiences and insights....that he was uniquely able to combine and recombine to create new and novel "forms" and concepts. For the benefit of our readers his IF posts will remain in our archives. More on Ray's full life may be found at the Lexington Herald-Leader. He will be missed.

Kris

Spike

When I was a small boy and my friends and I walked along the railroad tracks, we looked for unused spikes. Designed to be hammered into the wooden ties that held the rails in place so to assure rolling stock safe passage, not a single such spike was even vaguely reminiscent of the famous Golden Spike hammered ceremoniously into the track at Ogden, Utah, in 1869 and thus loudly announcing the completion of our intercontinental railroad.

Today, spikes are extrusions, not intrusions. A few decades ago, a French historian coined the term an “erupting event” to signify what we now so frequently call a “spike.”

In the debacle called the current civil war in Iraq, insurgency numbers and military casualties are spiked, tearing upward from the crazy quilt of war. 

Ours is a time of the Dominant Visual, when graphs and charts and a plethora of brilliant colors lead our eyes to conclusions heretofore left to the harsh monochromes bequeathed by the Enlightenment.

As for spikes, a railroad, industrial product and metaphor, they are fictions grounded—or uplifted--only in our peacock-colored imagination.

RayBetts

ANDY (Carnegie)

Andrew Carnegie was five feet tall.  His most recent biography (David Nasaw, “Andrew Carnegie,” 2006) is 878 pages in length.

Between these measurements the man described as “plum shaped” frequently moves between two worlds: the U.S.A., where he settled and Europe, particularly Scotland, where he was born.

If there was a businessman, philanthropist and man of letters who appeared to be a dynamic whole, it certainly was Andrew Carnegie. He also was a consummate multi-tasker, making hordes of money, writing numerous articles and books, all the while an indefatigable conversationalist and ardent self-promoter.

His major undertaking, breath taking in its own, were his articles on “The Gospel of Wealth,” the conviction that the man of means should bequeath all of his wealth to the public good. To that end Carnegie built 1,689 public libraries, at least a dozen music halls around the country, several thousand organs and many educational establishments.

David Nasaw, author of this magisterial biography, argues that no one, Bill Gates included, has given so much personal wealth to public causes.

Vain and gracious, fostering self-importance and desperately striving for world peace, convinced of continuing human betterment, Andrew Carnegie was deserving of the prodigious effort that Nasaw has brought to this remarkable biography.   

RayBetts

Car names: a Volt from the blue

And so it is called “Volt.”  This is Chevrolet’s battery-powered, concept car, disentangled from any encumbering metaphors. Shown at the January Detroit Automobile Show, “Volt” announces itself crisp and clean.  It therefore stands in contradiction to the long American tradition of automobile literary definition. 

Once upon a time Plymouth produced a “Barracuda,” Studebaker a “Dictator," Ford a “Mustang”; and for real hauteur, there was the Chrysler Crown Imperial.

Across the Pacific Ocean, on the island empire of Japan, in the 1970s, were spelled out in English, car models such as these: the Toyota “Chasser Lordly,” the Mazda “Carol,” the Toyota “Sprinter,” and, for sheer roadside comfort, the Mitsubishi “Guppy.”

Perhaps the finest automobile to zoom down a highway has been the Mercedes, named after a company dealer in southern France who wanted to—and certainly did—memorialize his daughter’s name.

The most familial sounding, endearing automobile was, of course, the “Tin Lizzy,”(Ford’s reliable Model T), so named long before automobile advertising on television showed what happens when testosterone and gasoline are mixed. 

Ray Betts

Just Initial It!

Initialization is a major literary addition to the ever-burgeoning glossary of popular culture.  From the mean and horribly destructive IEDs to the highly praised MVPs, it’s all a huge bowl of alphabet soup.

In many instances, the initials have quickly elided into acronyms that stand the test of time: NATO and RADAR, for instance; or most sinister of the lot: NAZI.

Earlier than any of these stamps was the initial as a prominent feature in the personal names of scholars and literary figures, notably those in England.  We all know C.S. Lewis (nicknamed Jack, by the way) but now should nod deferentially before the eminent historian A. J. P. Taylor; the early 20th century essayist G. K. Chesterton; and, of course, the man from St. Louis who, settled in England, became one of the most significant 20th century poets: T. S. Eliot. On the distaff side, add the novelist P.D. James.

At the end of the 19th century, the most famous initialized figure was HRH, as his ardent followers called him: His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales and soon to be King Edward VII.

Sometime in Missouri, the future President of the United States, Harry Truman, decided to add the initial “S” to his name. It signified nothing; it only provided a little balance to a name that could not otherwise approach that of the eminent Classics scholar I once knew: T. Robert S. Broughton.

RayBetts

Napoleon and His Watch

Napoleon figures frequently in New Yorker ads, but, in the December 18th issue, he regained the big time that was once regularly his.  There, on the back cover, the famous conqueror is shown in youthful (and romantic) profile, as he campaigns in Italy in 1796.

The ad, however, proudly reads “Napoleon Bonaparte, from 1798, a client of  Breguet’s.” To make its point Breguet, a renowned French watch company, engages in anachronism: the ad shows  a multitask chronometer (four faces), far moved forward in time from Napoleon’s era. 

The only portrait in which Napoleon cozens up to a time piece is an 1812 portrait of the then emperor in his study, where a wall clock, just hanging off his left shoulder, reads 4:00 a.m., certainly suggestive that he was conscious of the importance of the passing hours.

With or without a Brequet time piece immediately accessible to him, Napoleon, as military strategist, knew that success in battle depended on both space and time. “Space we can recover, but time never,” he remarked in an oft quoted epigram.

Of course, as we moderns miss an airplane connection, we need no reminders from over the grave or from the rear cover of  the New Yorker that time can only be grasped once.

Ray Betts

Towering Above All Else

Tickling the soft underbelly of the sky has been a human habit since Gustave Eiffel’s tower rose 984 feet above Paris back in 1889.  Now a consortium of Japanese television stations is planning to put up a transmission tower in Tokyo that will stretch the imagination. To be completed in 2011, this structure, dubbed the “new tower,” will rise some 2013 feet, nearly twice as high as the current Tokyo Tower that was completed in 1958.

Few world class cities are today without spiked skylines. Seattle and San Antonio, even Knoxville were given their towers as central features of world’s fairs—as was Paris’s Eiffel Tower—while the CN Tower in Toronto, standing at 1,815 feet, is currently the world’s highest free-standing tower and an early emblem (1976) of the IT age.

Along with the outbreak of a rash of skyscrapers in recent years (Dubai has one going up now that will come close to a height of 2,000 feet), the urban scene is upward bound. Eiffel’s engineering feat (2.5 million rivets and only one life lost during the construction) for the first time allowed the visitors a panoramic view of the city in which they lived.  But, as an expression of popular culture, the tower also had a fine restaurant where people could eat high on the hog. Then, during World War I, the tower served as a radio transmitter for French troops on the Western Front.

The three-fold function of the Eiffel Tower today is one most other major towers also follow. The attraction of the tower as a tourist destination spot is summed up by annual visitor statistics: over 6million at the Eiffel Tower, about 2million at the CN Tower and nearly 3million at the current (the “old”) Tokyo Tower. Eating in the sky high restaurants and other venues serving food, selling souvenirs and offering incomparable views of the city that spreads out below—and, for high utility, beaming  radio and television programs assure each of these towers its place in contemporary urban life.

The tower is the human effort to rise above the pedestrian, to build (as the once popular song lyrics go) “a stairway to the stars,” to be above it all.

At what height such high rises will level off is anyone’s guess. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once had plans for a mile-high skyscraper.  Today, ecological factors, more than technological ones, are limiting factors, and the romance of the skyscraper, whether tower or building, has been dulled by space travel and dreams of space stations, free-floating or anchored to the moon.

Not many anecdotes concern the Eiffel Tower, but one is suitable here  “I can’t find the Eiffel Tower,” comments the bewildered tourist.  “Is it lost again?” responds the Parisian.  The iconic quality of the Eiffel Tower will not be lost even after the Tokyo Tower breaks the 2,000 foot limit.

Ray Betts

 

 

Food and world affairs

No one denies the significance of food influencing the course of human affairs (think only of the time-tired identification tags of Germans as “krauts” and English as “limeys”).  However, fast food chains, a recent global phenomenon, have now been considered as  guides or measures of far-ranging human behavior.

Thomas Friedman in his best selling account of globalization, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” (1999) posited the “Golden Arches” theory of conflict.  This asserts that no two countries with McDonald’s shops on their national soil had ever engaged in war one against the other.

Less bold in assertion but of equal interest is a brief article in the October issue of “Fortune” that contends a probably good measure of American consumer concern over gas prices is the stock status of steak houses. Labeled the “Porterhouse Meat Index,” the proposed value of watching such stock fluctuations (Outback Steak House stock recently fell 23 points) rests in the fact that Americans enjoy their steak dinners. The stock index provides “a gut check on” the effect of the current economy on discretionary spending.

But not all steak stock slipped (Ruth’s Chris stock rose 6%, for instance), and Friedman’s theory about McDonald’s, which he later said was partially proposed tongue-in-cheek, was shortly after the book’s publication considered invalidated by the NATO bombing of Serbia.

If there is one well-known instance of food severely affecting social behavior, it must certainly be found in Dr. Seuss’s “Butter Battle Book.” And the particular plot of that book--involving buttered bread-- would probably not have been possible if a machine for slicing bead had not long before been invented, this ingenious development giving rise to the metaphor for some recent development as being the most important since the invention of sliced bread.

Ray Betts

Museum swagger

Not even the automobile, our popular form of transportation, has undergone as many stunning architectural changes as have some of our contemporary art museums.  These structures, forcefully disavowing the famous classical Greek order of things, zip off and sway back, lurk and lunge to stir things up, not settle them down.

The most dramatic of the many now causing public ogling is the famous Bilboa Guggenheim Museum acclaimed to be Frank Gehry’s masterpiece. Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect, interested in translating organic form into fixed form, designed a wing-like brise soleil as part of his dramatic addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Now Daniel Libeskind can smile with satisfaction as his addition to the Denver Art Museum has opened and made its various titanium forms complements to the Rocky Mountains that caught the architect’s eyes.

In a statement on the museum’s website, Libeskind says of this work: it is “an icon whose character and form will attract a wide public to the museum.”

Traditional museum architecture, like its bank building look alike, sternly impressed the visitor to tread softly and proceed with a sober demeanor.

Libeskind says his building “does not separate inside from outside.”  The “classical” forms have been laid to rest, and the new asymmetries that jut and twist suggest that building and collection share a new dynamic that causes the art viewer’s feet to tingle.

The public  reception?  Condominiums in a new building across the street from the Libeskind addition found that the condos facing the museum addition sold more quickly than those facing the Rocky Mountains.

Ray Betts

"Second Life"

Whether following the fantasies of Walter Mitty as he imagined heroic deeds or walking through a wardrobe to the entrance to Narnia, we have all followed prescribed journeys to other places, other situations.  Now Second Life, one of the most recent and unusual of the MMORPGs  (massively  multi-player online role-playing games) allows the participant who assumes an “avatar,” or alternate, virtual personality to plan and construct “from scratch” with the electronic “primitives,” small atom-like building blocks available a virtual reality of scale, form and purpose of the avatar’s fancy.

All about Second Life is well-explained in the September 30-October 6 issue of “The Economist.” Second Life invites a transcendence not found elsewhere, and its nearly one million participants can thereby out -Walter Walter Mitty or experiment with electronic possibilities capable of realization in one’s “First” or "Real" Life.

One of the master minds behind the project envisions the day when the sound of mind will spend half of the day in such a virtual reality as Second Life. The social benefits, it is averred, are obvious. “[T]he act of creation is the act of being social” comments one.

Whatever their potential and compelling power to encourage participation, MMORGs such as Second Life offer a challenging alternative to uninspiring television, whether the now time-weary sit-coms or reality shows. What lies beyond the opening in the back of the wardrobe can be, and excitingly so, a Narnia of individual creation.

The creation is, of course, visual, not literary, of images, not words.  And so, as some critics have already declared, we enter, but by electronic means, a new age of visual dominance when the old expression “I see what you mean” is no longer metaphor but an obvious reference to screened, virtual reality.

Ray Betts