Alan Jacobs

Academics think a public intellectual is an academic who comments on current events. 

Journalists think a public intellectual is a journalist who quotes from books. 

Happy birthday to Willie Nelson, 89 years young today. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. The Texas Monthly podcast One By Willie — in which musicians talk with John Spong about a Willie song of their choice — is consistently terrific. Why not listen to an episode or two in commemoration of the great man? 

Skyscraper (1959) is a 20-minute documentary film — mainly in black-and-white, though color enters in an interesting way near the end — about the construction of a building in Manhattan called the Tishman Building, then carrying the address 666 Fifth Avenue. The number was recently changed to 660, which it could have been all along, since the building occupies several lots, including both 660 and 666. Perhaps its current owner, one of Jared Kushner’s companies, thought the association of a Trump family member with the Mark of the Beast was subject to unfortunate interpretation. But when it was completed in 1957 the three big sixes were quite prominently displayed on the façade. 

You can see the film here, though that’s a bad print — if you happen to subscribe to the Criterion Channel you can see a much better version. It’s fascinating in a number of ways. 

Some of the filming takes place high above the streets, and certain shots look down on St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The narrator comments that St. Paddy’s had seen three buildings go up at 666, but the real story is more complicated. The first buildings on that stretch of Fifth Avenue were a series of mansions — one of which was designed by the famous architect and infamous human being Stanford White — built for the Vanderbilt family.

This one came earlier and was designed by Richard Morris Hunt: 

They called it Le Petit Château, isn’t that cute. A château with no green thing in sight is no château at all, in my book.   

Gradually these were torn down; by the time the Tishman Building started construction, the area had been reduced, as far as I can tell, to a 12-story office building and a parking lot. (The various histories are a little vague on these points.) 

In any case, in 1957 construction was preceded by demolition, and when the dump trucks carried away load after load of rubble they took it to New Jersey, where it was used to reclaim marshland. So there are who knows how many buildings in New Jersey built on ex-Manhattan rocks. 

When the building opened, among its most notable features was its lobby, which featured two artworks by the great Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, a flowing ceiling and a differently flowing waterfall-wall. 

These were removed in 2020. Thanks a lot, Jared. 

For a while, plans were ongoing to demolish the 41-story building — stripping it down to its steel frame and then rebuilding it twice as high, to a design by Zaha Hadid. These proved too ambitious. But surely it won’t be long before St. Patrick’s Cathedral watches yet another building on those lots come down and yet another rise up. 

Anyway: the documentary is cool, you should watch it. 

Thanks for the kind words on my post, folks!

I generally dislike unsolicited advice, but over at my macro blog I wrote a post offering some advice to people who are coming to micro.blog from Twitter.

Elon Musk’s imminent purchase of Twitter has a good many people scurrying for the exits, and some of them are coming to micro.blog — which is awesome! I’ve written often here about micro.blog, and here’s a selection:

• Micro.blog and the open web
• Why a social network that scales up is a bad thing
• On Cal Newport’s New Yorker essay that described micro.blog
• Some “hidden” features of micro.blog

But let me add a bit of advice for those who are coming to micro.blog from Twitter: You need to leave Twitter behind altogether. Micro.blog isn’t Twitter and doesn’t want to be.

Let’s start with this: on Twitter it’s hard not to be aware of your follower count; on micro.blog you cannot know how many people are following you. Moreover, there is no re-post button. If people want to link to your micro-post they have to do so manually, by copying the link and inserting it into their own post. Similarly: there is no like button. If you like someone’s post you have to reply to them to say so. And: there is no algorithmic feed — it’s just chronological, there’s no other option.

What all this adds up to: On micro.blog, you have absolutely no incentive to flex, shitpost, self-promote, or troll. You’re there to post interesting things and/or chat with people. Nothing else makes sense.

And that’s why it’s great.

So if you’re coming over from Twitter, please try to leave your Twitter habits and reflexes behind. They won’t help you at micro.blog.

UPDATE: Here are some brief thoughts about Mastodon, which, by contrast, is exactly like Twitter, in all the bad ways.

There’s a lot going on in Edward Yang’s masterful Yi Yi (2000), but I just want to focus on one theme here: how an eight-year-old boy named Yang-Yang is confronted by an epistemological conundrum. He realizes, first, that he can’t be sure that other people see what he sees; and second, that he can only know half of the truth about the world, because he can only see what’s in front of him — what’s behind him remains always invisible. 

Yang-Yang responds to this difficulty by getting a camera. It takes him a while to learn how to use it properly: at school a teacher confiscates a stack of blurry, uncomposed photos and mocks them as “avant-garde art.” But gradually he gets the hang of his new device, and finds his true subject: the backs of heads — as many of them as he can photograph. Late in the movie he hands his uncle a photo. The uncle is confused at first, but then realizes that it’s the back of his own head. “You can't see it so I help you,” Yang-Yang says, to which his father replies, “So that’s what this is all about.” (It may not be irrelevant that the uncle is notable for his complete lack of self-knowledge.) 

Yang-Yang’s father, NJ, has troubles of his own, including conflict with his co-workers; a wife, Min-Min, who has fallen into deep depression when her stroke-afflicted mother becomes comatose; and the sudden reappearance in his life of his first love, a woman named Sherry. When NJ and Sherry talk we typically see him from behind — we see only the back of his head. What message his face carries is not for us to know. 

There is one exception to this rule, though. When Min-Min’s mother is brought home in a coma, the doctors tell the family to speak to her every day. Tell her what they’ve been doing, whatever, but speak to her because maybe — the doctors don’t have much hope of this, but still — maybe that will help bring her back. When they do this we see their faces; the blanket-covered lower body of the unconscious old lady is visible just at the edge of the frame. At one point NJ visits, in the midst of his struggle with what to do about Sherry’s reappearance, and says, in highly general terms, that he’s having a tough time. We see his full face throughout this scene. Also: he comments, “This is like praying, you don't know whether the person you're talking to hears you.” But we know she doesn’t see him. 

Late in the movie, when Min-Min returns from an extended period of retreat in a Buddhist monastery, she tries to tell NJ what she has learned — and what she has not learned. She sits, distressed, at the foot of their bed, while he sits near the head of it — behind her. He sees only the back of her head; she doesn’t see him at all. Yet they speak words of remarkable honesty to one another; perhaps some things are easier to say when you’re not looking into someone’s eyes. Perhaps also that’s why it can be easier to talk to a comatose person who probably can’t hear you than to talk to an angry or unhappy member of your family. 

It’s noteworthy, perhaps, that Yang-Yang shares part of a name with the film’s director, because Edward Yang repeatedly films his characters through glass, in such a way that we see those characters but also reflections in the glass — reflections that show us what is behind the camera. Maybe, then, this is one of the roles of movies: to show us that half of the truth that we don’t ordinarily see, that we’re debarred from seeing. (One teenage character: “My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies…. It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.” I’d like to know his uncle’s name.) 

One more note: In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes: “For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex — to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head…. A true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling.” 

I was so annoyed by the size and heft of my iPhone 13 Pro that I traded it to my son for an SE – which is dramatically more comfortable to carry around but yikes, the camera is also dramatically inferior to the 13 Pro’s. Tempted to ask for a tradeback….