Miles's blog

I recently wrote a blog about the children of some of my former colleagues living until 2100.  Today I want to look backwards.  Recently, sound technicians recovered the contents of some recordingsmade on wax cylinders in Europe in 1889.  The voices of famous German leaders were preserved and with new technology can be taken from the old wax cylinders without the necessity of actually playing them on their original machines.  This is completely amazing to me.  At the library exhibit I talked about in yesterday's blog they displayed one of Edison's wax cylinder recording devices.

The men recorded, former chancellor Otto von Bismarck and General Helmut von Moltke were old at the time they put their voices on wax.   Von Moltke was born in 1800, and yet we can still hear his voice today.  And not just in some museum.  Go to the New York Times website and you can listen to these recordings from the comfort of your own home (or in my case, discomfort).  Again, amazing.

Think about the world von Moltke was born into.  Their homes were lit at night, if at all, by candles or maybe oil lanterns.  Travel was only by foot or horse.  Advanced communication was by post road carrying letters written with a sturdy quill pen.  Rifles were still in the future.  An ocean crossing took weeks.  America had 16 states.  Twenty signers of the Declaration of Independence were still alive.  George Washington was president.  Napoleon ruled France.  Beethoven wrote his first symphony.  People could only sit for portraits to preserve their likeness.

By the time von Moltke spoke to Edison’s employee he could turn on electric lights, talk on the telephone and take a steamship across the Atlantic in a week or so.  He could ride to the dock in a motorcar, and document his journey with a camera.  I suppose the idea of recording sound was to him just another incredible invention of which he had seen so many in his lifetime.  

And we can listen to him speak anytime we want merely by pressing a button. (Well, in addition to paying way too much for internet service, a router, a computer, etc.)  We have come to take for granted the technology we rely on, but to those born when von Moltke was their world was changed in far more dramatic ways than we can imagine. 

I spent the past weekend in New York City and had a really good time.  I went to a Broadway show, and a museums and the public library.  One of the most amazing things about New York is the incredible attraction the city contains.

On Saturday we went to the Museum of Modern Art.  I had forgotten how much world-famous and historic art MOMA contains.  First and foremost is the huge, and breathtakingly beautiful, painting of water lilies by Monet.  He painted it on three gigantic canvasses, each about six and a half feet tall by almost 14 feet long.  Merely describing it can give no real sense of how big this painting is.  Even photographs cannot come close to the visceral effect one has upon seeing this work.  It is unclear to me how Monet could have painted such a gorgeous work on this scale.  Truly, the word “masterpiece” is insufficient.  This painting, along with another by Monet—smaller, but sill big—share a single room (along with a painting by another artist whose name escapes me). 

When you walk into the room, the magnitude of what you are seeing makes you stop and stare for a few seconds.  Your mind is just not accustomed to art like this.  Sure, you have just walked through a gallery containing other masterpieces, but the sheer size of Monet’s vision, and the subtle but powerful beauty of his impressionist representation of something as mundane as flowers in a pond, sends your senses into temporary tilt.  When you finally take in all you are seeing, you are compelled to get closer; in part, I think, to assure your mind that what it is seeing really exists.  Of course, standing next to the canvas (it is not behind glass or even a rope) you can’t visualize the entire work, but you can take in the vibrancy of the colors, even 100 years after it was painted.  Like most visitors to this gallery I sat down on the bench in the middle of the room, just to let Monet’s genius wash over me.  Seriously, a trip to New York is worth it just to see works of art like this.

Of course, Monet is not the only great artist displayed at MOMA.  Picasso, whose works are everywhere it seems, is well-represented.  What is possibly Van Gogh’s most famous painting, “Starry Night,” has a prominent spot, and is surrounded by picture-taking tourists.  Still, seeing the work right there (this one is behind perhaps the cleanest piece of glass in the world, so that when you stand in front of the painting you cannot see the glass) makes you stare.  I love impressionism, and post-impressionism, so I spent a lot of time in that gallery.  Seurat, Chagall, Calder, Pollock, Braque, all the greats have at least one piece on display.  The sheer quantity of the art is imposing.

MOMA, of course, displays lots of other art, including some contemporary pieces.  While many current artists display incredible skill and creativity, other artwork I think is just a scam.  I will, maybe, grant you that a customized bag of kitty litter is art, but I fail to see how taking a canvas, putting on a coat of whitewash and then sticking it in a frame constitutes art, no matter what “statement” the artist is trying to make.  Or how about the guy who wakes up every day, paints the date, and then sells those canvasses.  I bet he is laughing hysterically at the “experts” who put one of these date paintings in a world-class museum.

But the one that took the cake for me was something that is so vacuous and lacking in any technical skill or creativity that I am convinced the museum was trying to put one over on us to see who is stupid enough to call this art.  They had on display a 100 gallon fish tank about two-thirds filled with water.  Floating in the water were three basketballs, two Dr. J brands and one Wilson.  Thatwas it.  No description, picture, nothing.  No drawings on the balls nor fish swimming in the tank.  No castle on the bottom of the tank, nor a deep sea diver.  Nothing.  Basketballs and water.  Seriously!  Monet painted his masterpiece 100 years ago. Do you think people 100 years from now will write home that they saw three basketballs floating in a tank of water (which I assume has to be replenished every day)?  

We also went to the main building of the New York Public Library.  The building itself is historic.  Built 100 years ago it contains detail which is unheard-of today.  Painted and carved ceilings and massive marble staircases.  The entry is a massive marble rotunda.  The main reading room on the third floor is perhaps my favorite place in New York. 

The library is celebrating the building’s 100-year anniversary with a display of some of its most historic artifacts.  This display is free.  You just walk into the gallery on the first floor.  There is no security screening (as indeed there is not for any museum).  The first case contains a copy of perhaps the most important book in history—a Gutenberg bible.  

Throughout the exhibit are unbelievable items to be in possession of the library:  Jack Kerouac’s journal of his experiences which he drew on extensively to write “On the Road,”  also his eyeglasses and harmonica; Beatles trading cards from the early 60s, signed by the band members and containing the only picture I have ever seen of the four of them with crewcuts; typewriter e.e. cummings’s typewriter; illustrations from the “Wizard of Oz;” and a full Ku Klux Klan robe.  

The library is displaying a handwritten score by Beethoven.  You can see his composition in his handwriting. Wow.  A few feet away rests George Washington’s final draft of his farewell address.  This is the actual paper he held in his hand while he read this famous speech.  

Were this a traveling display, cities across America would by vying for a chance to show this exhibition.  They would charge $25 or more, and people would willingly pay it and not feel ripped off.  Yet there it is on the first floor of the library.  

Susan and I were talking about the value of everything we saw.   We realize that is no way to evaluate art, history, or culture.  But when you stop and think about how incredibly valuable these items were it is mind-blowing.  A Gutenberg bible is worth about $25 million, I read on the internet.   In 2006 a Jackson Pollock painting sold for $140 million.  In 1990 a Van Gogh went for $82.5 million.  What is “Starry Night” worth?  Can a value be put on “Water Lillies?”  $200 million?  More?  We figured between the artwork and the library exhibit, what we saw had to be worth $1 billion.  Can you imagine?  

I don’t think the three basketballs in the fish tank accounted for a large percentage of that total.

When I was a child I continually heard this joke: “You know the difference between a Jew and a pizza?  A pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.”

Around 1990 I was in another deputy district attorney’s office when the chief investigator came in and told us this bit of humor:  “What did the Jewish pervert say to the little girl?  Hey, little girl, want to buy a piece of candy?”  They both laughed.  The joke was repeated again in my presence to a chief deputy who also laughed.  (None of these people are still with the office.)

These are not wackos who blame 9/11 on the Elders of Zion, or Islamic extremists who are sword to Jihad against Jews.  Perhaps these are isolated incidents, but all of these articles are from a single month.  

I think about these comments, actions, crimes and beliefs at times.  While I no longer practice Judaism, my ethnic background is still that of a Jew.  I cannot avoid at times feeling that this undercurrent of anti-Semitism can still perhaps blossom into something more dangerous.  A nightmare scenario was imagined by Phillip Roth in his book “The Plot Against America” where a pro-Nazi Charles Lindburgh gets elected president in 1940 while World War II rages in Europe and turns America into a virulently anti-Semitic nation.  The story is fiction, but Lindburgh’s admiration for the Nazis was not.  

As someone from a Jewish background, I feel the sting of these things, even though I no longer practice my parents’ religion.  I am a Jew, both in the eyes of the world and inside my head.  Judiasm is as much ethnicity as religion.  My family were reform Jews—not keeping kosher, working on Saturday, services predominantly in English—but nevertheless my family on both sides comes from East European Jews.  Had I lived during the Holocaust, I would have gone to the camps.  Certainly I am not one who would have survived.

I cannot say I have been subject to discrimination to any significant degree.  I am sure most Jews have not.  Still, when influential people where you work are willing to tell a joke in your presence, demonstrating a bias against your ethnicity (and they did know I was Jewish), it gives you pause.  Harmless insensitivity?  Perhaps.  But what if I decided to ask for a raise?  Would I be seen as just another money-grubbing Jew? 

It is difficult for me to write this blog, because I am not sure exactly the point I am trying to make.  I guess I just wanted to make people aware that even though it is easy to forget some of the hate, it is still out there.

 

As everyone knows, I am extremely proud of my daughter Megan.  She has been working hard to make it as a professional dancer in New York, and now we have something to celebrate.  Meg has been selected to be a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company.  This is a major achievement.  Trisha Brown is one of the most acclaimed modern dance choreographers in the world.  Her company tours the world and performs at some of dance’s greatest venues.

To get an idea of the caliber of this company, check out the art auction they are having for their annual fund raiser.  The tickets to attend start at $500.  (No, I will not be going, but Meg will attend as a member of the company.)  Artists include the world-famous Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, and pieces are valued at thousands of dollars.  

Meg leaves next month to perform in Phoenix and Tucson.  A nice jaunt for the middle of February.  Looking at the calendar, they are scheduled to perform in the first half of 2012 in Chile, Scotland, and Ireland.  Wow.  Good thing Meg likes to travel, having spent an extensive amount of time in Europe.  What great experiences she has to look forward to.  

Hopefully there will be a performance in New York City at some point so I can see her.  Watching the videos of this company it looks like the kind of dancing I enjoy.  That has not always been true of the work Meg has been in, so I am really glad she has been accepted into this company.   

I can’t help but reflect on Meg’s journey to this place.  How she decided at age 12 that she wanted to take dance lessons, an age when most people who become professional dancers have already been through years of lessons and dozens of shows.  Only a short time later she auditioned for the Denver School for the Arts, and I was convinced she had insufficient experience.  The dance teacher saw something more.  At first she was put in the back while more experienced dancers got bigger parts, but by her senior year Meg was the best dancer there.  

Still, I wondered about her future.  I was not sure if dance was a good choice for a major in college.  Meg is smart and could have majored in lots of subjects.  But she told us she wanted to be a dance major and set her sights on New York University.  We went to visit NYU when Meg was a junior and the performance we saw was terrific.  The dancers were so good, and the dancing was so fast compared to what Meg was doing in high school, I doubted whether she had the talent to be accepted into such a program.  I will never forget running into the DSA dance teacher in the bathroom after we returned from New York, and asking him whether he thought Meg was good enough to be accepted to NYU.  “Yeah,” he said, “I think she is.”  That was the first time it dawned on me that Meg was really talented.

Still, the audition process was stressful.  Meg and I went to Florida State together where she auditioned with dozens of others in one of a series of auditions.  She was not asked to perform a solo, which was problematic.  They said solos were not asked of those who either were not being considered or who were so good such an additional performance was deemed unnecessary.  The questions were answered two weeks later when Florida State accepted Meg before their audition process was even finished.  But NYU remained.

Meg auditioned for other schools, but NYU was always her first choice.  From our visit the year before Meg felt comfortable in the building and with the people.  Her mother was with her for the audition.  She called me from the bathroom to tell me Meg had gotten a callback, for NYU a required step to acceptance.  Meg said she felt good about her audition.  The letter of acceptance triggered a celebration.

NYU was no picnic.  Meg worked hard, but so did most everyone there.  Watching her on stage I was always impressed with her skill, but I was with everyone else, too.  Obviously, the old man has no eye for dance talent.  Meg had spent a summer at a dance program in Austria as an exchange student, and opted to spend a year there post-graduate.  It was not a degree program, and she does not have a master’s, but the year in Austria really helped Meg a lot.  She worked hard on her dancing, and had a chance to travel around Europe.  She made connections with people from all over the world, and she gained a lot of confidence.

When she returned she entered the life of a professional dancer.  Classes, odd jobs, dance work where she could find it, often for little or no pay.  But she continued to work hard, and try to improve.  

The audition for Trisha Brown was a grueling, three-week process, starting with about 100 women (the men audition sepately), and going through a series of cut-downs, each stage cause for trepidation.  But Meg stayed strong and confident.  She concentrated on being in the moment, enjoying the movement, and having a good time.  Fortunately Meg knows some members of the company so she could see familiar faces, which helped calm her down.  

When Meg called to tell me she was offered the full time position (there were two apprenticeships also available) we were overjoyed.  Meg will be doing movement she loves all over the world with people she really enjoys.  And really, who could ask for a better job than that?

A little while ago I blogged about my disagreement with the way the war on drugs is fought, mostly because it is ineffective.  The United States Supreme Court yesterday reminded us of another problem—drug investigation is driving search and seizure law.  In a drug prosecution the Court found that a warrant is required before the police can place a tracking device on a vehicle.  (I have not read the opinion and don’t plan to.  Why not? I don’t have to.)

I am not surprised.  The prior cases that said a warrant was not necessary to place a tracking device made no sense to me.  (Colorado law always required warrants for these so this won’t affect my prior employment, but this can have a major impact nationally.)  From the newspaper reports it seems clear the Court is in no mood to split constitutional hairs about what is or is not protected based upon tortured legal theories and outdated precedent.  Obviously, a person has an expectation of privacy in his car.  Trying to say tracking the car with a beeper is no different than following it on the street with surveillance is just absurd.

I expect the court will look at privacy interests from the point of view of the defendant.  The cops and aggressive prosecutors want to look at it in much more limited terms.  For example, that a customer of a cell phone company has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell phone records.  Judges have always been much more protective of privacy than the executive branch has wanted.  I expect that in the 21^st century they will continue to protect privacy rights.  I doubt this will present an overwhelming problem for investigation of violent crimes, although certainly it will have some impact.  But it will cause problems for drug investigators.

Regulatory prosecutions have driven search and seizure law for a long time.  The case which created the exclusionary rule, Weeks v. United States was a gambling prosecution.  Mapp v. Ohio which applied it to the states was a pornography case.  Katz v. United States, establishing “reasonable expectation of privacy” as the standard for application of the law was another gambling case.  Those cases all went against the government.  

I have always been convinced that one of the reasons is that judges are much more likely to suppress drugs or gambling receipts than the murder weapon.  However, I don’t think that affects the US Supreme Court much.  The main reason is the manner in which regulatory crimes are investigated, rather than other crimes.  Most crimes are investigated following their occurrence, so detectives seek to find already-existing evidence.  There is always probable cause a crime has been committed, for example.  Regulatory crime investigations, however, are very difficult to investigate after they happen.  They occur in secret with only the participants involved, leaving virtually no reliable witnesses and almost no evidence.  The police seek to prevent these crimes from happening, or often allow them to happen with themselves as witnesses.  This requires them to be proactive in seeking out information.  So they need to intercept phone calls and track offenders.  Narcotics officers are the most aggressive in trying to intercept drugs.

Possessory crimes like drugs will always create search and seizure nightmares because by definition the thing is the crime.  This leaves most defendants with little defense on the facts.  Suppression of the evidence ends the case, giving defense counsel great incentive to contest searches.  Finally, police officers are always searching for things.  Much of the time it is for their own protection, to make sure the person they are dealing with is not armed, but sometimes it is just because that is what they do.  Often on the street an officer either forgets, misunderstands, or chooses to disregard his training about searches.  

I used to always say when I was a prosecutor that we should never appeal the suppression of drugs, that drug cases make bad law.  I am uncomfortable with the search and seizure law being dictated by drug cases.  I think the issues would be clearer and the precedents cleaner if violent crimes were the subject of these cases. 

Sometimes when I can’t think of what to blog about I turn to the internet, the repository of all the world’s information.  I use a website called “stumbleupon.com” which brings up random websites based upon interests of mine which I put in when I signed up.  Today, I found this fascinating website that purports to have a list of phobias.  I have no idea if these are real phobias or just some words some moron dug up, but it is pretty interesting if they really exist.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1keilg/phobialist.com/

·        Agliophobia – Fear of pain. Yeah, don’t we all have that?

·        Atomosophobia- Fear of atomic explosions. See above.

·        Barophobia- Fear of gravity.  You can only live in the space station?

·        Catagelophobia- Fear of being ridiculed. Obviously I do not suffer from this one or else I would not write this blog, or at least not post it.

·        Coitophobia- Fear of coitus. Obviously, not hereditary.

·        Counterphobia- The preference by a phobic for fearful situations.  Explain this one.  I mean really, this sounds like just straight mental illness to me.

·        Dentophobia- Fear of dentists. See the first two.

·        Dikephobia- Fear of justice.  Maybe we should rename this to “The Public Defenders’ Disease.”

·        Ephebiphobia- Fear of teenagers.  Or pretty much the state of anyone with teenage children.

·        Euphobia- Fear of hearing good news.  No way. This does not exist.  Strangely, there is no phobia for hearing bad news.

·        Kathisophobia- Fear of sitting down.  Useful when getting tickets to sold out events, but very difficult when you have to go to the bathroom.  However, if you also suffer from Scatophobia- Fear of fecal matter maybe you can figure out a solution.

·        Medomalacuphobia- Fear of losing an erection.  Or what we call “Viagra syndrome”

·        Neopharmaphobia- Fear of new drugs.  Which makes this one very difficult to treat.

·        Octophobia - Fear of the figure 8. 13 and 666 also have phobias. 

·        Peccatophobia- Fear of sinning or imaginary crimes. Imaginary crimes?   

·        Pteronophobia- Fear of being tickled by feathers.  Apparently other types of tickling is ok.

·        Rhytiphobia- Fear of getting wrinkles. This must be pretty common as there is an entire industry fighting wrinkles.

·        Venustraphobia- Fear of beautiful women.  Based upon my experience, this is not a phobia, just self defense.

·        Walloonphobia- Fear of the Walloons.  Walloons?  I had to look it up.  They are a French-speaking people who live in Belgium.  They seemed to be pretty active in the Belgian revolution, which must have put some fear into the royal family.

·        Zemmiphobia- Fear of the great mole rat. See the first entry on the list.

If this list is freaking you out you might have phobophobia- fear of phobias.