Berkeley Blog

Diebenkorn's Daughter

Last night at the Hillside Club in Berkeley I heard Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant, daughter of the artist Richard Diebenkorn, speak about her father’s art and what it was like growing up in the house of a man who made art 365 days and often nights a year.

Gretchen grew up in Berkeley in the early sixties and sometimes wished she lived in a house like those of her friends, which had matching furniture, and curtains rather than bare windows, and didn’t use bedspreads from India as tablecloths. Her father didn’t care about material possessions and either made his own furniture for his studio or picked up discarded chairs and tables from the roadside.

She compared some of his work to that of Matisse, an artist he admired, but apart from similar color and composition choices in several of his works that are now on display at SFMOMA in an exhibit comparing the two artists, the daughter didn’t have much to add except to say both painters ignored world politics as content for their art. (That exhibit seemed to me a contrivance of crowd-pleasing curators that diminished rather than articulated the painters’ respective merits.)

The daughter revealed that Diebenkorn painted from his mind. It turns out the vertiginous, colorful landscapes he painted in his Ocean Park, Santa Monica years were completely imaginary. And he didn’t use photographs or preliminary sketches: he just attacked the canvas, or in many cases, the empty backs of posters since he used any paper surface he could find. He painted directly from his mind to paper, much like a conductor’s wand evokes music from an orchestra.

Most poignant were the match boxes Diebenkorn painted meticulously for his granddaughter’s dollhouse and the Easter egg adorned with a spade – a favorite shape of the artist – created for his grandson. He also sketched a fanciful dragon but tired of filling in the creature’s scales so asked his son-in-law, Richard Grant, to complete the rest and give him co-artist credits.

Grant and his wife spent more than 22 years and a fortune -- some of it earned from the sale of Diebenkorns given to them by his wife, Phyllis – to create a four-volume catalog raisonee of all the artist’s paintings, recently published by Yale University Press. They spent two weeks and 12-hour days at a specialty color press in Verona, Italy, to insure the color quality of the paintings in the catalog, and now they are embarked on a similar catalog for all the artist’s prints.

The Diebenkorn daughter, a former actress, is an artist in her own right. With a painter’s eye, she captures the processes of her father’s artistic genius as well as the tenderness between a loving father and child.

Net Neutrality Threatened by New FCC Chair

Heather West is a senior policy manager with Mozilla, a nonprofit that makes the Firefox browser and also takes a leadership role in advocating for open access, privacy, and security for Internet users. A D.C. veteran, West spoke at the Goldman Graduate School for Public Policy February 14, 2017 about the impact of the Trump administration on regulations and practices concerning Internet usage.

Although Mozilla has always been driven by the belief that moral codes are essential to technology, she said that until recently, the tech sector was fragmented politically and disconnected from D.C. That changed suddenly with Trump’s immigration ban, which mobilized more than 140 tech companies to sign on in protest.

“When the tech sector coordinates, it does really well,” remarked West, pointing to the deluge of support during the Obama administration for establishing the FCC’s rules promoting net neutrality, which requires service providers to treat all internet traffic equally and classifies broadband providers as public utilities, giving the FCC authority to regulate them.

This same net neutrality is now under threat by Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the FCC, who has publicly stated he opposes the rules. One impact of abolishing net neutrality, said West, is that start ups would face a greater barrier to market entry than larger companies, such as Netflix, because of the higher broadband service rates providers could charge.

But she thinks that any attempt by the FCC to abolish net neutrality will face barriers, including court challenges and public outcry. In the short time he’s been chairing the FCC, however, Jai has made moves to undo the FCC’s Lifeline program, which provides subsidies to low-income families for Internet access.

Someone asked about a recent incident in which border officials at an airport forced a NASA employee to reveal his PIN number to his NASA-issued work phone. West answered that this request is not illegal but advised travelers to encrypt their smart phones, set up dummy Facebook and other social media accounts, or just get throwaway phones. She said that because the EU takes the position that privacy is a fundamental right, at some point the EU might stand up to the U.S. border patrol policies regarding phone privacy.

“Privacy is a bipartisan issue,” she added, and pointed out that libertarians agree with progressives and many Republicans on the right of digital privacy.

West, who was speaking to an audience of graduate students in public policy and information technology (the latter from UC Berkeley’s iSchool), said that what the government needs now more than ever are IT people. The government IT structure is based on broken legacy systems and built on languages like COBOL, which is quickly becoming archaic. “My personal ambition is to get more technologists to D.C.,” the policy wonk added, before heading back to the capitol to carry on the fight for Internet users.

Go Naked or Buy Your Clothes Consciously

When I was a kid growing up in post-war Bremerhaven, a bombed-out town on the North Sea in Germany then occupied by the U.S. military, my two sisters and I wore winter coats made by Mr. Tennenbaum, a tailor and friend of my mom’s who had survived Auschwitz and moved to Forest Hills, New York. Our sweaters had been knitted by our mom, a German Holocaust survivor who had met my dad, a U.S. Army bandleader right after the war. Our sturdy, all leather shoes were made in Germany and lasted long enough to be handed down from sister to sister to sister.

Today, it seems everything I wear was made in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, or Honduras. That’s why I went to hear Ayesha Barenblat speak about her startup, Remake at a NY Times Live event last year at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Basically, her site spreads the word about which clothing brands and retailers are connected to those suppliers – usually in Asia and Latin America -- that are treating their 40 million clothing makers, 80 percent of whom are girls from 18 to 24 years old, in an ethical fashion.

Even more importantly, Remake tells you which brands and retailers are connected to suppliers that employ unethical labor standards, such as child labor and unsafe working conditions.

Ayesha is a native of Pakistan who received her undergraduate and MBA degrees from UC Berkeley. She recently spoke at one of my Last Friday Ladies (and Gents) Lunches at the Hillside Club, a community-owned organization, in Berkeley. Comparing the 2013 death of 1,134 garment makers in the Rana Plaza disaster when a factory collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire death of 146 garment workers in New York City in 1911, she said that for most clothing makers, conditions have not improved.

That’s why Ayesha started Remake: to leverage the power of digital media to connect consumers, particularly millennials, with the people behind their clothing. The goal is through videos to establish empathy by consumers for makers and change their buying habits. Buy less, buy better are some of the mantras of what has become the conscious consumption meme.

Remake was seeded by the Levi Strauss Foundation, whose parent company is a global leader in upping the standards for apparel outsourcing of labor. Twenty years ago, Levi Strauss adopted a code of conduct for its suppliers encompassing standards around child labor, forced labor, working hours, wages and benefits, health and safety, and freedom of association as well as discrimination. But the company admits more needs to be done.

To check out how you can make a difference in the lives of garment makers, see Remake.world. As for the Mr. Tennenbaums of the world, they are long gone as are many of the clothes they made, unlike the new synthetic blends, which can last for 200 years and contribute to the waste fills of the world.

Why The NY Times Drives Me (and the President-Elect) Crazy Sometimes

The NY Times, its editorial board, and many of its reporters frame the news from an implicit bias. Basically, underlying its reporting is a belief in the status quo.

Sometimes the assumptions its editors make about the status of the world order goes contrary to reality, however.

Take today’s obit for Fidel Castro, which compares him to a puppet queen:

“Fidel Castro had held on to power longer than any other living national leader except Queen Elizabeth II.”

Excuse me, but what power does QEII exert except to complain about her offspring’s romantic dalliances? As for leadership, what was her role in the Brexit debacle? And how dare the Times compare the political leader, albeit a dictator, of a Communist country with a puppet monarch of a parliamentary democracy?

A more apt comparison might have been with the theocratically selected Dalai Lama, who has – until his recent political resignation – been the leader of Tibetans more than a decade longer than Castro.

The President-Elect might have a point about our mainstream media. Even fools sometimes speak the truth.

The Search for Search

Twenty years ago I took on a new client, Ask Jeeves, a search engine that was designed to answered questions about anything using natural language processing. It worked better the more people asked the same question, and if Jeeves didn’t know an answer, it tasked one of the many in-the-flesh librarians and UC Berkeley grad students sitting in cramped cubicles to find the answer.

Obviously, this approach lacked scalability – this was before tech companies outsourced its workforce overseas – so it wasn’t long before Google came up with a scalable search engine based not only on algorithmically determined popularity (Page Rank) but also on the efforts of domain holders to optimize search through SEO. Advertising (and God knows what else) later played and still plays a major role in what results show up first when you conduct a search.

Five years ago, Seymour Rubinstein, whose company launched the first commercially successful word processor, WordStar, in 1979, hired me to position and publicize Webthresher, a search engine he’d been working on for more than a decade. He claimed Webthresher could find more relevant information by scraping other search engines, which you could select, and by using a patented algorithm that identified significance by word length. Basically, the shorter the word, the less relevant.

Webthresher has not yet made it to the commercial stage although it still promises features like complete privacy, and the ability to cache searches into personal files as well as to present an automated synopsis of web sites alongside an index of other possibly related sites.

Taking a different approach is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, developed ten years ago to capture and curate the millions of web sites that might otherwise disappear, as did the Supreme Court opinions at one point. Until now, the Wayback Machine was sourced by researchers, techies, and academics who had to know the exact URL they were seeking in order to conduct a search.

As of October 26, at the Internet Archive’s 20^th anniversary celebration at its headquarters in the Richmond district of San Francisco, Brewster Kahle, founder and chief librarian, demonstrated how to search for sites – including one million Wikipedia sites whose broken links were restored by the Archive -- by using common words. Searches are totally ad free and so is use of the Wayback Machine.

The archive is a nonprofit, initially funded by Kahle, who sold his company, Alexa, to Amazon in 1996 for $400 million in stock options. The Archive – which employs 200 people at centers around the world -- is now funded by federal grants and private philanthropies as well as by the people who use it.

The Internet Archive does not like to describe its Wayback Machine as a search engine. It’s true, it’s no replacement for Google if you want to find up-to-date information. But as an engine for searching web sites of the past – such as GIFs on GeoCities and games like the Oregon Trail and recordings of famous speeches as well as music and actual newspaper articles, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is fulfilling its original mission to save, curate, and provide easy access to the world’s knowledge and culture.

OK, Eulogize Bunnell But Not Those Mac/PC World Pubs

I didn’t know David Bunnell but I did read all those pubs he and others edited through IDG, including PC World and MacWorld. Except for hilarious pieces poking holes in the ballooning tech industry by John C. Dvorak and the pseudonymous Robert Cringely, the articles seemed formulaic and banal. I read these magazines for the ads, where new product offerings and services were explained rather than hyped.

In fact my favorite computer magazine during the 80s and 90s was Computer Shopper, a hefty tome on flimsy paper full of thousands of concise product reviews.

The bevy of IDG and its rival Ziff-Davis computer magazines, like PC Magazine and PC Week, didn’t drive tech growth so much as siphon millions of dollars in advertising from the likes of Microsoft and Intuit and Adobe and Apple as well as smaller companies like the one I worked for, Software Ventures, which made the first commercially successful Macintosh telecom program, MicroPhone.

IDG also made billions in fees from attendees and exhibitors at its MacWorld and PC World conferences, filled with incredibly dull talks and workshops but enlivened by backroom parties and networking.

The only exception to the mediocrity of the IDG stable was the short-lived vanity magazine, NextWorld, which was largely subsized by Steve Jobs’s company Next, itself a vanity computer. I looked forward to every bimonthly issue of NextWorld because John Perry Barlow was a major contributor. If there ever were a Nobel for computer writing, Barlow should get it, especially after he started writing for Wired magazine, the only computer publication that decided to bring in brilliant writers with chops beyond the computer world, like Paulina Borsook and Steven Levy.

In one multi-thousand-word Wired article reminiscent of a John McPhee story on tectonic plates, Barlow raved about the potential of technology to transform African cultures and economies, just as it is doing now more than a decade later.

Wired succeeded when all the other computer magazines from IDG and Ziff Davis have become skeletons of their former selves. That’s because Wired just didn’t report on the computer revolution. Through its radical layout and print design as well as its creative in-depth reporting that often included a global perspective most of tech media ignored, it became part of that revolution itself.

We Need to Face Our Genocidal Past, Says Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, won a Supreme Court case banning mandatory life sentencing without parole for anyone age 17 or younger. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, a hinterland that officially celebrates Robert E. Lee alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., the Harvard-trained lawyer dedicated his life to serving the poor, the incarcerated, and children prosecuted as adults.

Stevenson keynoted the final day of the Conference on 2016 Adverse Childhood Experiences held October 19–21 in San Francisco and hosted by the Center for Youth Wellness, based in Bayview/Hunter’s Point, a part of San Francisco as far removed from the thriving high-tech scene as is Birmingham.

The founder of the Center for Youth Wellness, Nadine Burke-Harris, a dynamic pediatrician turned social activist, introduced Stevenson, whom she met at a dinner hosted by Alphabet (formerly known as Google) chairman, Eric Schmidt. Fortuitously seated together, they both recognized in each other a drive to create more justice in this country.

“America is the most punitive nation in the world,” Stevenson began, and then cited statistics the well known statistics. The U.S. incarcerates 2.3 million people today, upr from 300,000 in 1972. An African American himself, he said blacks suffer most, because one out of three male black babies are now expected to go to prison.

He said that part of the problem is our culture. “We use a punishment mindset that exacerbates the trauma (people have already suffered). We have to change that.”

He offered several solutions, some cultural, some policy-driven, such as having the Centers for Disease control and Prevention declare a health crisis in the 200 zip codes in the U.S. where 80 percent of the children are expected to end up in jail because of the traumatic experiences they will face, including violence in the family, the neighborhood, and schools.

To me, the child of a holocaust survivor, whose own parents and grandparents were survivors of anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe, Stephenson’s depiction of America as a “post-genocidal society,” created by “an ideology of white supremacy” rang true.

In school, we are taught that this country as shaped by the desire for equality, yet as Stephenson points out, “The demography of this nation was shaped by racial terror.

“Slavery didn’t end in 1865. It just evolved,” he added.

My parents,” he said, “were humiliated every day of their lives. We haven’t dealt with that.”

He cited examples of countries that have faced up to their genocidal history, including South Africa with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid, and Germany, where in Berlin plaques are mounted on buildings denoting former homes and businesses of Jews who were killed or forced to leave.

In his own attempt to reconcile with our past and promote healing, his institute is putting up markers at every lynching site in the U.S. He’s also written a best-selling book about his work and life, Just Mercy.

Addressing the audience of 450 clinicians, educators, social workers, therapists, and community advocates dedicated to helping develop resilience in children and adults suffering early childhood trauma, he said “I realized why I do what I do. Because I’m broken, too. It is being broken that can lead us to healing.”

As for what impels him to keep serving the poor, “The opposite of poverty is not wealth. It’s justice.”

Lakoff Deconstructs Last Presidential Debate

Last night, the Albany Community Center – situated a half mile from Berkeley – hosted a screening of the last presidential debate followed by a question and answer session with by George Lakoff, retired UC Berkeley linguistics professor, author of many books, including Moral Politics, and political consultant as well as founder of the now defunct Rockridge Institute, a progressive think tank. (The institute was a former client of mine.)

Lakoff says neuroscience shows our brains are wired early on to accept one of two world views, based on our family values. Either we were raised in a strict paternalistic family, where discipline and self-control were stressed, or we grew up in a family that showed empathy for each other as well as for the rest of the world's population. You can guess which kind of family or moral values Trump supporters adhere to versus the ones Clinton voters believe in. Of course, there are variants and gradations of this binary value system, but they help explain why Trump supporters relate to the man no matter what he says or has done. They share his belief that people who are poor deserve to be poor because they lack discipline, and that it’s not the government’s job to help them out.

Trump supporters, like children growing up in an authoritarian family, love their parents – and Trump -- even though they are harmed or constrained by them. It's a paradox many of us have experienced and struggle to reconcile with.

All politics, said Lakoff, is moral. That’s why rationality plays so little a role in any political debate. He noted that Clinton stopped citing numbers in the last debate because she – or her handlers – realized that positive words are more effective in reaching voters than statistics.

Here’s an interesting observation Lakoff made about how college educated people vote: Conservatives tend to major in business and marketing, which focus on ways to sell yourself and your ideas, whereas liberals major in history, psychology, sociology, law, and economics, all based on the Descartian premise that people are guided in making choices based on reason, not emotion.

Tens of millions of people, Lakoff, said, feel left out of the American political and economic landscape. They are not necessarily bad people, he added, and they don’t necessarily agree with everything Trump says and does, but they identify with the paternalistic strength he projects. He thinks that Clinton will win Nov. 8 but that she and her administration will be under relentless attacks from conservatives. That’s why he is still trying to set up a national organization that will help progressives frame issues in ways that reach all parts of the brain, not just the thinking part.

Berkeleyside's Uncharted Festival Touches on Trump

This year’s two-day Uncharted: Festival of Ideas, hosted by local Berkeley news site, Berkeleyside, featured an astronomer, a tree-and-water expert, a Muslim feminist standup comedian, a criminal justice reformer, Eve Ensler, and journalists Jay Rosen from NYU and Kathy Kiely, with BillMoyers.com. Despite the range of expertise these speakers represented, many touched on how this presidential election has affected every aspect of American life: from the environment to education, politics, philosophy, and our cultural values on sex, race, religion, and nationality.

Aaron James, a philosophy professor at UC Irvine, just published a book , Assholes: A theory of Donald Trump, which is selling out in Berkeley bookstores. He defines an asshole as one whose sense of moral entitlement immunizes them from any penalties they would normally suffer as a consequence of their behavior. James defined Trump as a special kind of asshole: an asshole ass clown because of his tendency to entertain rather than inform. James says Trump speaks without regard to the truth – he bullshits, in other words – just for the sake of the performance. And the scary thing is that his listeners don’t expect to hear the truth.

What do we do after the election? James – whose in-laws are all Trump supporters so he takes this issue personally – says we will have to renew our understanding of civil discourse, and reach common agreement on the right to disagree.

Already taking this approach is Scott Budnick, founder of the AntiRecidivism Coalition, a nonprofit that supports juvenile offenders in and out of prison and also campaigns for legislative reforms to rehabilitate rather than punish young people for criminal offenses. He has enlisted the support of conservatives, like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, to work for criminal justice reform because it aligns with their values of reducing government costs for prisons and a shared belief that young people are capable of change. A former producer of the Hangover films, he is raising funds to start a new film company, Good Films, to support media that can create a social impact on legislation.

As NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen spoke about the ongoing transformation of media, a headline from one of his posts flared from the stage screen: “Donald Trump is crashing the system. Journalists need to build a new one.” Rosen argued that political journalism took a wrong turn before this election, when reporters began to identify with politicians rather than address and share the concerns of their readers.

“We want journalists to point out what we should know. Journalists need to have the interests of readers, not insiders,” he said. Asked by the audience how we are going to develop a sustainable model of journalism, Rosen answered, “We’re going to have to pay more. We have to support serious journalism.” He added that this is a vital issue, because it determines “whether we want to choose democracy or not.”

Rosen thinks that Trump suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder. Accused by someone in the audience of demonizing one side over another, he responded, “I don’t know how you demonize a demon.”

Eve Ensler, dramatist and women’s activist, who created the Vagina Monologues, felt encouraged by the undercurrents of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Muslim, Mexican, Islam, anti-Semitism this election has surfaced. She said that now we can deal openly with these hatreds that have always been part of our culture. She ended by saying the most important thing in life was to take care of your body, and then she stood up full frontal (and clothed) to the audience, to say she had survived stage 4 cancer and nearly died.

Health was the concern of two other speakers: Robert Wachter, chairman of the UCSF Dept. of Medicine and author of a book about digital medicine. (He’s also the fourth husband of tech reporter and author Katie Hafner.) He predicts that medicine will look “extraordinarily different five to ten years from today,” because digitization of medical records with portable access to one’s personal medical history will become a fait accompli. And “once it’s digital, it will democratize medicine,” he says. What will make this happen is federal intervention to pressure hospitals and doctors to create interoperable health care data as well as the adoption of metrics for evaluating the quality of care. Asked why it took so long to happen, the doctor said that hospitals and practitioners had no incentive to share data until the federal government stepped in with a financial incentive in 2008.

Intentional (not unintentional, as with Trump) humor was dispensed with much relief by three speakers – including KQED radio host Michael Krasny, author of a new book on Jewish humor, and standup comedian Zahra Noorbakhsh, a Muslim feminist who started off with an anti-Trump pussy pose.

Half stand-up and half serious food critic, Mark Bittman said he came to realize that food was as political as anything else. Why does the presidential caucus begin in Iowa, for example?

“Iowa is ground zero for industrial agriculture,” he said.

Bittman says we should eliminate the USDA because it has contradictory goals: to promote agriculture – think Cargill, Monsanto, and Archer Daniels Midland – and to support health and nutrition. That’s not possible, he says because “40 to 60 percent of what’s sold in grocery stores is not food.”

He points to soda, which calls liquid candy, and says substitutes like Gatorade and Snapple are “soda without the bubbles.” He is on the line about GMOs, saying the more important issue to focus on is whether what you’re eating is supporting your health and nutrition. Asked about sugar, he said it was OK to buy real sugar because his latest book is about baking, and baking takes sugar.

There was music, dance, good food, and expressive civility in this event, a feast for the mind, and like the city of Berkeley itself, a place that welcomes and germinates progressive ideas. Uncharted is becoming a Berkeley classic.

Self-Killing Apps and More

With self-driving cars coming along the next highway and byway, how about a smartphone app for terminating one’s life when faced with a debilitating disease such as alzheimer’s or parkinson’s? Just set a timer for when the disease advances to a predetermined stage, and then have the app generate a barbiturate dispenser for your nightcap, or if you prefer, your final morning coffee.

Not being a car person, I’d rather see a self-cycling bicycle, one in which you could program a destination and have the wheels take you there via a less car-trafficked route. We’ve already got the electric part figured out, so only the navigation needs to be programmed with the bicycle’s video sensors.

Airplanes are getting closer and closer to a self-flying state and so will follow self-driving trains, buses, and of course, trucks, which are already being tested.

Of course, the possibility for automation applies to institutions as well. In the future there could be self-learning schools; self-punishing prisons; and self-healing hospitals.

What’s kind of ironic is that in all these self-generated technologies, the self is left out. The machine or the institution takes over. Or perhaps we are giving human status to machines and institutions, the way we give citizen status to corporations.

At least with a self-killing app, you yourself would set the parameters for generating your own death.