Ion’s blog

Entering an exam hall totally unprepared or walking the streets naked may soon become nightmares of the past. A Japanese toymaker, which has already brought us cats and dogs that “talk” said yesterday it had developed a gadget enabling people to turn fanciful daydreams into realistic night-time experiences.

Before hitting the futon, all the owners of Yumemi Kobo, or Dream Workshop, have to do is stare at a photograph of what they would like to dream about and then record, in their own words, how the dream is supposed to pan out.

Once users are in the land of nod, the gadget goes to work, combining the voice recording, lights, music and aromas to stimulate sleepers whenever it detects rapid eye movement – a sign that someone is dreaming – and directs their dreams accordingly.

Eight hours later, users are gently awakened by soft lighting and music to ensure that pleasant memories of the night before are not instantly erased.

This wave of weak voices comes at a time when singers have fewer excuses than ever: with electronic pitch control, producers can make sure every note is perfect. And listeners are getting more astute: they know that what they’re hearing on the new album by, say, Britney Spears (a closeted bad singer, though she’s not fooling anyone) is something more — or less — than an unvarnished voice.

Maybe that’s why bad singing is so popular right now: the more listeners know about pitch correction, the more fascinated they may be to hear something that’s obviously uncorrected. At a time when it seems easier than ever to become a celebrity, bad singing can create a seductive illusion of intimacy. To hear a pop star flub a note is to believe, if only for a moment, that you or I could just as easily be onstage, doing no less and no more than our best.

Tomorrow, Fox is to begin broadcasting the third season of “American Idol,” and before too long we’ll have a new cast of would-be winners, turning too-familiar songs into vocal workouts. And maybe some enterprising producer will look at the contestants, look at the pop charts and see the marketing opportunity. Never mind the winners: maybe it’s time to sign up the losers.

DATE: December 12, 1991

TO: Distribution

FR: Lawrence H. Summers

Subject: GEP

‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

Much has been written about Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, the husband and wife team whose photographic tableaus took the art world by storm more than six years ago. Creating a genre unique within the photo world, the ParkeHarrisons construct fantasies in the guise of environmental performances for their Everyman – a man dressed in a black suit and starched white shirt – who interacts with the earths landscape. Tapping into their surreal imagination, the artists combine elaborate sets (which can take up to – months to construct) and an impeccable sense of wit and irony, to address issues about the earth and mankind’s responsibility to heal the damage he has done to its landscape.

Consistently dressed in a his trademark outfit, this Everyman is earth’s protector, healer and communicator, using low-tech implements as his aid. This Everyman then takes shape as fabricated props for theatrical performances, which are staged to be photographed. Like a production reserved for the cinema, the ParkeHarrison invent their settings, which tend to look more like scenes from Metropolis or Blade Runner rather than the family photo album.

In their most well-known works, the artists built oversized objects to perform improbable acts: a huge needle repairs the cracks in the earth’s surface (Mending the Earth); a gear and propeller flying apparatus carries a man over the land so he can feed it (The Sower). In Reclamation– one of five new gravures on view – we see the suited man dragging the earth as if it were a blanket, providing a new layer for its continued existence. In Burn Season, Everyman comes upon a field of flames wearing a suite of water balloons, ready to save it from extinction. In Rain Dance,we see Everyman multiplied by four, each one carrying a branch, forming a human Stonehenge, empty water jugs on the ground ready to rescue the impending storm.

The ratio of right-handed people to left-handed people is said to be about nine to one (and this dominance goes back more than a million years, apparently), so the lost-glove theory espoused by Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist who taught at Hunter College last fall, either needs work or suggests that New York is more of a lefty town than most. Last winter, Horowitz began collecting the misplaced—trampled, forlorn, snot-slicked—mittens and gloves that she saw on the street, not for the sake of research or even, God forbid, art, but out of some deep-seated altruistic urge to see them reunited with their other halves.

“It’s an overweening concern for lost objects,” she said last week—a very cold week, a great week for gloves. “The melancholy of a lost glove sitting in the middle of a sidewalk struck me as minorly tragic, for the glove and for its owner.” Horowitz, who is tall and skinny and thirty-four years old, was in her family’s apartment on Central Park West, with her collection in shopping bags on the kitchen counter: a hundred and eighteen mittens and gloves, in varying states of deformity and decay. Black wool dominated, but there was, semi-Arkishly, one of everything: brown zippered faux leather (Lower East Side), tan elbow-length nylon (Lincoln Center), a ludicrous boxing glove (center lane, Columbus Avenue). There were dozens of children’s gloves, of course, including Horowitz’s first find, a crusty blue mitten, and some thumbless things for infants (and even one for a dog). Central Park is full of little mittens, she said, especially on snowy nights, after the sledders head home. Storefronts, pay phones, subway stairs—O city of lost gloves!