Worlds, real & imagined

As a kind of prelude to what I’m going to discuss in terms of identity and the stuff of identity, I’ll point to this fine New York Times Magazine piece by Gershom Gorenberg on proving one’s Jewishness in order to marry in Israel. The pivoting grafs:

Trust — or lack of it — is the crux. Zvi Zohar of Bar-Ilan University explained to me that historically, if someone said he was a Jew, “if he lived among us, was a partner in our society and said he was one of us, we assumed he was right.” Trust was the default position. One reason was that Jews were a persecuted people; no one would claim to belong unless she really did. The leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Israel in the years before and after the state was established, Avraham Yeshayahu Karlitz (known as the Hazon Ish, the name of his magnum opus on religious law), held the classical position. If someone arrived from another country claiming to be Jewish, he should be allowed to marry another Jew, “even if nothing is known of his family,” Karlitz wrote.

Several trends have combined to change that. In an era of intermarriage, denominational disputes and secularization, Jews have ceased agreeing on who belongs to the family, or on what the word “Jew” means.

Among close communities, and especially among those with long histories of discrimination and persecution, trust is the engine of belonging. Trust is bestowed first by the say-so of trusted others, and when that’s unavailable, the fall-back is to documentation of heritage, lineage, an extrinsic point of connection. To marry in Israel, it’s not enough to be a Jew: someone with authority has to declare you Jewish.

That be itself seems problematic: being oscillates, depending upon the point from which identity is constituted. It works the other way, too, with those who apply for a visa to the land of their ancestors to be told by the consulate that they have always been citizens. (At college, I had a friend who was born and raised in Britain, but held an American passport through a parent: when visiting the US, it amused him that regardless of his accent and birthplace, the border agents would always say ‘welcome home’.)

On one level, it’s situational, a matter of utility. Not being able to prove one’s Jewishness to the satisfaction of Israel’s rabbinical judges is only an impediment to those who wish to marry or take advantage of the Law of Return; it won’t prevent you from holding a Passover seder. (Though having your identity questioned in such circumstances might have its own consequences.) Similarly, that grandfathered claim to a passport or to sporting eligibility only becomes part of who you are should the need or opportunity arise.

For the most part, we still function on trust and tokens, but the changing character of our interactions outpaces both the formal and informal structures in which they are used.

Etsy dataset. (two more: via kottke.)

The curious case of the canoeist from (Seaton) Carew reminded me of the stern notice that greeted me [mumble] years ago: ‘This passport remains the property of Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom and may be withdrawn at any time’. My passport is still a fascination: the complexity of its printing, the attempts to divine national characteristics from the stamps and visas they leave in its pages, the multilingual rubric that embraces ever more of Europe, and ever more pages, renewal upon renewal; but most of all, the way in which it pivots identity between self and state.

It’s not just the passport that’s government property, but the particular form of identity it instantiates. John Darwin isn’t charged with faking his death, but with making a false statement to obtain a passport. Put another way, he tried to give up something that wasn’t his, and that something was himself.

To those exposed to complicated books written by French sorts, the idea that identity is imposed in facets from without is hardly novel. But in this context, ‘identity theft’ seems a strange term. The elements that make it possible, tangible or intangible, may be in your possession, but they’re rarely your property in the Lockean sense, to be used and disposed of at will. Instead, they carry all the anxieties of items on extended loan: which is, in essence, what they are.

And as Ben Goldacre notes, the creep of biometrics subjects bits of your own body to this transformation. It’s a different kind of identity theft: one that takes your property and returns it on loan, reconstituted as identity data.

Here lies the paradox: the repeated instructions (and helpfully-offered subscription services) to protect your identity carry the implication that it’s yours to protect. Except that it isn’t. It might be argued that you have a duty of care, the same that would stop you from leaving your mate’s car unlocked with the keys in the ignition when you borrow it for a late-night beer run. Except that it’s not. Instead, we’re asked to protect something that’s not our own, warned not to give away something that has already been taken.

Standing on a remote hilltop some months ago, attentive to the sounds we too often dismiss as background noise — the enveloping wind brushing leaves, the rumble of a distant car — made me think about just how the world sounded before recorded music permeated, then saturated the air. The privilege of birdsong; the preciousness (and impermanence) of human performance.

Which is one reason why I’m observing No Music Day.

Returning to the topic of careers (the length of, and when to stop) inspired by a recent Saturday morning drive with the CBC as aural accompaniment (praise Sirius), it occurred to me that there are potentially two stages to the career of the typical quirky, niche-audience indie-type performer.

The ‘make records that get decent ratings, sell a few copies, and tour 500-capacity venues while sleeping in a van’ stage is one that can continue until you decide it’s too much bloody hassle.

But at some point, a fan who got into your music at student age may well end up in the advertising business, with the power to say, ‘hey, this track fits perfectly with…’ and you can insert the product here, but if you’re in the indiepop business, you’re going to be hoping beyond hope that it’s something with at least marginal credibility, and not tampons or fibre supplements. Dear gods, let it be Apple.

Consider it the musical equivalent of a mercy shag, albeit one that has the potential to get you on Saturday Night Live.

Thing is, you can’t predict when the commercial interest is going to kick in, and if you try too hard to court it, you become Moby — or worse, Liz Phair. But you don’t want to act too coy, because the last thing you want is the loyal fanboi who’s a junior producer at Creative Cokesnorters, Inc. thinking that your niche appeal is too precious to be exposed to the masses as part of a thirty-second sales pitch.

It raises a quandary: given that it generally takes a handful of years for your college-student fans to graduate and climb the ad-industry career ladder, is it worth flogging out another tour in a van before calling it a day? After all, there’s basically a point (again, hard to measure) where your commercial revival won’t happen till you’re dead.

Thus, the LFFI (not to be confused with this slightly more established financial venue) to quantify the likelihood of your favourite niche popster getting a career-enhancing, ad-fuelled moment in the limelight, and not alienating the fanbase as a result.

Picking up on what Danny said[1], some thoughts on fame. Stewart Lee’s answer gets it right, I think: fame enough to be financially comfortable and comfortable with one’s audience. The further question is whether that’s only achievable — or only recognisible in a way that brings the associated comfort — on the downslope, after you’ve tasted celebrity — and celebrity, in turn, has spit you out.

Fame has frontiers, and some you only notice when you return. There’s only a step between a comfortable, loyal fanbase and, well, this.

But I mostly wonder what happens ‘after’ fame. Not many of the bands and artists whose careers I followed (and, I suppose, helped sustain) in those formative college years are still around. The first thought is of a quiet retirement living off the royalties, perhaps a production job or similar to keep busy. But then you realise: that only happens to a few former popstrels after they put away the bleach and bad outfits. For those earnest indie types I came to love, if there was any money left at the end, it was barely enough to pay the rent, let alone relax by the pool. And that’s okay, in its own way, as long as you park the tour bus and pack away your gear knowing that the rest of your life is waiting.

Stephen Fry (now, more or less, the best blogger ever) talks expansively about what fame is. What fame was, though, is another thing entirely.

1. Ten years ago? I remember that night, not least for Charlie Brooker’s interlude. Who knows where the time goes? Anyway, keep writing, you bastard.

On my first weekend in the US, I took a town car from Manhattan to Newark airport. As we hit the Turnpike’s miles of steel and brick and smoke, (think: opening minute of The Sopranos) I joked to the driver, a middle-aged Russian man, that it felt like home. It took me the rest of the drive to explain.

The look and feel and talk of hard industrial graft is deeper in my system than anything the chimneys spewed out. The bridges and old works may be steampunk, but take the trunk road to the coast at night, and the lights lay bare something that forces itself beyond modernity. And, dear god, did we have sunsets.

Which is just to point to this interview with Ridley Scott, in the knowledge that, like him, I’ve seen the first light from the flaring.

What’s so delicious about Stephen Fry’s survey of smartphones, as deep as it is wide, isn’t the unabashed geekery, though that has generated an antiphonal ’squee!’ from all corners of my digital neignbourhood. No, it’s the unconscious connoisseurship of the thing: the sense that you (well, that he) can write about geek toys in a mode that’s neither Mossberg nor Gizmodo nor anything in-between is as exhilarating as the breeze that waves farewell to a stultifying summer.

Speaking of imaginary worlds created by cliques…

Close one eye, and you lose your depth perception, the ability to see behind things. So it is with Monocle, the Tyler Brulé pseudo-vanity project that I continue to buy in spite of itself and myself. Take the carefully arranged global pantry in ‘Shelf Life’:

While we spend a great deal of time sniffing and squeezing the fresh produce at Portobello Road market, we also spend a great deal of money on pantry staples at Globus in Zurich.

Do you bollocks.

Perhaps Tyler Brulé really does nip to Zurich for a half-kilo of coffee beans; if so, it says far more about his airmiles account than his nose for coffee. No matter what, it sums up the particular strain of globollocks in Monocle that both entices and infuriates, like a coke-fiend friend.

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There’s a point in certain forms of appreciation where value detaches from the object under scrutiny and attaches to the surrounding milieu, the ability to imbibe augmented by the means to own, the opportunity to acquire, the capacity to describe. In the world of fine wine, I’d suggest that point starts at around fifty quid a bottle; any more is essentially a exponentially-graduated entry fee into an ever more rarefied social circle.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker piece on wine counterfeiting is a case in point, a deliciously understated narrative with hints of Nabakov and Borges. It sketches out the aspirations of one millionaire collector, the intoxicating mixture of glamour and mystery concocted by Hardy Rodenstock, and the collaborative wish-fulfillment of wine masters and Merlot-tinged prose artists for whom the world of untainted vines and Jeffersonian vintages is so enticingly close that one might already have dreamed its taste. Is it surprising that such a milieu would be so ripe for deluding?

Sidling uneasily into the space reserved for unfortunate exemplars, we have the ‘Compare People’ Facebook app, as noted by Sugarrae and reported on by The Reg:

Maksimovic says he has suspended new sign ups of the premium service until he figures out a way to clarify exactly what information is given out.

He’ll have a job on, since Facebook’s third-party apps are seemingly built with components that can’t help but obfuscate. On top of that, he may well be forced to refund the $9.49 coughed up by people who hoped his ‘premium’ service was the equivalent of those old back-of-the-paper X-Ray Specs.

That a naive and clumsy solo developer exposed the opacity of Facebook’s privacy framework doubtless chafes the marketroids working on more insidious ways to procure personal data that can be converted, if you know the right people, to cash money. They’re a new kind of pickpocket, ignoring your wallet to go straight for the loose change, in the knowledge that nabbing pennies from thousands adds up to the same thing as lifting tenners from individuals, but with much less risk of being found out.

I know how much my organs might fetch on the black market. I even have a vague sense of what turning my forehead into a casino billboard would earn me. I have no idea how much my intangibles are worth, and it’s time to start asking.

In this RadioLab segment, artist David McDermott talks about his attempt to live an Edwardian existence in 21st-century Dublin. His decision when young to step back, soak up the memories of much older people — ‘I felt like they knew something I didn’t know’ — and let the bleeding edge vanish over the horizon is likely to prick the curiosity of anyone neck-deep in technological gore:

In terms of time, I do believe that we can travel in time. I’m not talking to you about actual time-travel. I’m trying to talk in practical terms that anyone can participate in, I call it, ‘time experimentation’.

All moments in time are ever-present and coexisting, he asserts: all that’s needed is a conscious choice to step into one. Escapist and contrived it may be, but in some respects our choice of place and space and engagements (and even dress) is a temporal choice, albeit one in finer gradations, like the adjustments of a clock before the railways.

All of which is backstory to this AskMefi question.

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A more scatterdash followup to the previous, based on a few related discussions and responses.
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It feels almost arrogant to start a blog by essentially saying everything you know is wrong. Oh well. The long-form title ought to be:

‘Seek permission, not forgiveness: why the web’s fundamental axioms break down when data gets personal’

but that’s a title built for an academic paper, not a blog post.

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