¶ Matins: Ben Flanner’s Rooftop Farms, in Greenpoint, is six thousand square feet of vegetables — atop an industrial building.

¶ Lauds: At Speakeasy, Jim Fusilli asks if there will ever be another Michael Jackson. He’s not talking about artistry, really, but rather about the business. His answer is that not even Michael Jackson at his prime could sell 750 million albums today.

¶ Prime: Malcolm Gladwell reviews Chris Anderson’s Free; Tom Scocca and Choire Sicha have a laff.

¶ Tierce: Bernard Madoff was sentenced to one hundred fifty years in prison today, but as far as victim Burt Ross is concerned, that’s not even the beginning of what’s appropriate. “When he leaves this earth vitually unmourned, may Satan grow a fourth mouth…” The reference is to Canto XXXIV of Inferno.

¶ Sext: Being Tyler Brûlé, a blog that makes exquisite fun of (Jayson) Tyler Brûlé. (via Things Magazine)

¶ Nones: It’s rather maddening, but I can’t confirm my hunch that the ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was engineered by the “European” elites that own most of the property in Central America. Update

¶ Vespers: John Self writes about Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1981). If you missed it, Mr Self may whet your appetite for a fine novel.

¶ Compline: V X Sterne is back, at Outer Life, and it will surprise none of his regular readers that he unplugged the second flat-screen monitor that was recently installed at his place of business.

Oremus…

§ Matins. This is the sort of thing that can’t be happening fast enough.

Flanner used to work at E-Trade, but decided he had had enough of the corporate life: “About a year ago I came to the conclusion that I’d learned what I needed to learn from the jobs that I’d had,” he says. “And I decided that it was time to put together a plan to move on and continue my learning in a new realm.” He had always had an interest in farming, but the recent wave of interest in local produce and sustainable agriculture helped give him the courage to go out on his own. With the help of Annie Novak, his partner on the farm who also works at the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and visits to other farms to learn from more experienced farmers, he has started to master the techniques and knowledge necessary for a working farm.

Built with the help and support of Goode Green, a green roof design and installation firm, found the building and helped Flanner with the logistics. In addition to being a working farm, the farm is also a green roof for the building. It occasionally holds volunteer days where people from the community can help contribute, as well as workshops, led by Novak, on topics like how to bring the lessons of the rooftop farm into individual homes.

Thinking ahead a bit: why not turn Queens back into the farming county that it was at the beginning of the Twentieth Century?

§ Lauds. Jackson’s timing was impeccable in one way: he arrived at the dawn of the music video — one of the shorter waves in art history, at least on its first go-round.

Jackson dominated pop culture in the mid-‘80s and early ‘90s via his presence in the new medium of music television: MTV was reluctant to give black entertainers ample airtime until Jackson’s “Thriller” arrived. Today, there is no single central distributor of music videos. Countless videos, old and new, as well as concert footage, documentaries and TV programs, are available on YouTube, where it’s the viewer, not a network, who decides what’s presented.

Similarly, the new paradigm in rock discourages the establishment of a mega-star hierarchy. Neither the industry nor the media influences the music consumer as it once did: Even singers developed on “American Idol” have an expiration date – the program’s next season –- and a limited number of consumers for such calculated music. One new way of encouraging sales –- the licensing of recorded performances to films, TV shows and commercials –- seem to build popularity for songs, rather than loyalty to the artists who’ve released them.

§ Prime. The proponents of free intellectual property (an oxymoron) have a great deal of faith in everyone’s ability to do first-rate thinking on the side.

His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?

But intellectual property, free or not, has to be distributed. In some cases (drugs), it has to be tested. Maintaining safe and effective access to information is Not Free. 

This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system. Strauss went on to forecast “an age of peace,” jumping from atoms to human hearts. “As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world,” Kevin Kelly, another Wired visionary, proclaimed at the start of his 1998 digital manifesto, “New Rules for the New Economy,” offering up the same non sequitur. And now comes Anderson. “The more products are made of ideas, rather than stuff, the faster they can get cheap,” he writes, and we know what’s coming next: “However, this is not limited to digital products.” Just look at the pharmaceutical industry, he says. Genetic engineering means that drug development is poised to follow the same learning curve of the digital world, to “accelerate in performance while it drops in price.”

But, like Strauss, he’s forgotten about the plants and the power lines. The expensive part of making drugs has never been what happens in the laboratory. It’s what happens after the laboratory, like the clinical testing, which can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In the pharmaceutical world, what’s more, companies have chosen to use the potential of new technology to do something very different from their counterparts in Silicon Valley. They’ve been trying to find a way to serve smaller and smaller markets—to create medicines tailored to very specific subpopulations and strains of diseases—and smaller markets often mean higher prices. The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

I make some related commentary about the glut of information at the end of today’s Compline.

§ Tierce. In case you don’t have the original at home:

Da ogne bocca dirompea co’ denti
    un peccatore, a guisa di maciulla,
    si che tre ne facea così dolenti.

A quel dinanzi il mordere era nulla
    verso ‘l graffiar, che tal volta la schiena
    rimanea de la pelle tutta brulla.

“Quell’ anima là sù c’ha maggior pena,”
    disse ‘l maestro, “è Giuda Scarïotto,
    che ‘l cap ha dentro e fuor le gambe mena.

De li altri due c’hanno il capo di sotto,
    quel che pende dal nero ceffo è Brutto:
    vedi come si storce, e non fa morto!;

e l’altro è Cassio, che par si membruto.
    Ma la notte risurge…

§ Sext. I bought an issue of Monocle last year. It was very expensive, and, while very handsomely designed, full of stuff that didn’t concern me. Things, I mean. The articles made me miss the old Esquire.

The Monocle Weekly is a mix of smart discussion, previews, field reports and feature interviews. From our studio in London and our bureaux in Tokyo and New York, Monocle’s editors focus on the horizon and explore the looming stories within the five areas that define our editorial agenda: global affairs, business, culture, design and consumer culture.

Hosted by editor in chief Tyler Brûlé, The Monocle Weekly also offers fresh angles on stories in the current issue and delivers in-depth follow-ups from past assignments. Culture editor Robert Bound is a regular with his weekly playlist of artists established and obscure.

Editor Andrew Tuck pulls in contributions from our correspondents in far flung corners and moderates debates. And from Tokyo and New York editors Fiona Wilson and Ann Marie Gardner deliver features and perspectives from Asia and the Americas.

Town and Country meets The Economist?

§ Nones.  Even the Q & A at BBC News is vague.

Honduras is a poor country beset by corruption, with a huge wealth gap and widespread gang violence. However, it had been politically-stable since the 1980s.

But Mr Zelaya, who came to office in 2006, had been moving the country steadily leftwards, enjoying the support of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other left-wing leaders in the region.

This appears to have alarmed certain sectors, who decried his plans for constitutional change as an attempt to stay in power.

For his part Mr Zelaya argued that the consultation on Sunday would merely have been a survey: a canvassing of public opinion not a legally-binding election. He told the BBC that legal disputes and political differences were no excuse for staging a coup.

The unwillingness of observers to be frank about Central American racism — those of “pure European” descent appear unwilling to regard pure or mixed “natives” as altogether human — always surprises me.

A member of Honduras’s landed oligarchy, Mr. Zelaya came to power in 2006 as the leader of the Liberal Party, a center-right organization. He was a product of the establishment: an heir to the family fortune, he had devoted decades to his agriculture and forestry enterprises, supported the Central America Free Trade Agreement with the United States, and ran for president on a conservative platform, promising to be tough on crime and to cut the budget.

Around halfway into his term, however, Mr. Zelaya had an apparent ideological epiphany and became an admirer of Mr. Chávez. He signed a deal for a generous oil subsidy from Venezuela; last year he incorporated Honduras into the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Soon enough, power went to his head.

§ Update: Writing in today’s Times, Alvaro Vargas Llosa provides some background on the ousted president.

A member of Honduras’s landed oligarchy, Mr. Zelaya came to power in 2006 as the leader of the Liberal Party, a center-right organization. He was a product of the establishment: an heir to the family fortune, he had devoted decades to his agriculture and forestry enterprises, supported the Central America Free Trade Agreement with the United States, and ran for president on a conservative platform, promising to be tough on crime and to cut the budget.

Around halfway into his term, however, Mr. Zelaya had an apparent ideological epiphany and became an admirer of Mr. Chávez. He signed a deal for a generous oil subsidy from Venezuela; last year he incorporated Honduras into the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Soon enough, power went to his head.

§ Vespers. The last line is the keeper.

The accumulation of all these elements is impressive, because the writing remains low-key enough for it not to look like showing off. (Though perhaps such literary coquettishness is itself a form of showing off.) When the people and the town are associated so closely, it’s obvious that Robinson is pulling out another literary trick – foreshadowing – as when Ruth tells us, “There was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. It flooded yearly, and had burned once.”

What that leads to is a pretty dramatic last few scenes, particularly so for a book others have described as one where not much happens. One might say that the way events accumulate in the story is the same way that Housekeeping became a modern classic: gradually, and then suddenly.

I’m due for a re-read.

§ Compline. Unplugging the extra monitor was, of course, only the start of a techno-slimming régime.

That helped, but I have to say it wasn’t enough. It was still too easy to switch back and forth between programs, toggling with the ALT-TAB combo, so I had to take a more drastic step: I returned to the land of paper.

Now I can’t eliminate the computer from my work life, and I don’t want to, but I have come to the realization that my little mind is incapable of multi-tasking and, more importantly, incapable of realizing that it is incapable of multi-tasking. So to avoid getting sucked into the void I have to treat my computer like a limited-purpose tool, basically just a card-catalog to the library of the world and a communication delivery device.

Each time I find something to read, or receive an email I need to read, I print it out. Once I am finished finding and printing, I have a stack of paper I can read offline, preferably far from the blinking allure of my computer screen.

It’s old school, and it’s not environmentally friendly, but I find reading on paper suits my uni-tasking mind very well. I have no problem focusing on one page at a time, and when I look up from my reading material I see a blank wall, which is much more conducive to reflection than a flashing screen.

Whether you print everything out, like VX, or read from a portrait-mode monitor, as i do, you have to develop a régime for living with a computer. They are no longer coolio toys to be turned on and fiddled with.

I’m bemused by Chris Anderson’s thoughts about the “inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things ‘made of ideas’,” as Malcolm Gladwell puts it. Because as the price of raw information drops  toward zero, the cost of using it rises sharply. Who has the time to decide what information is truly useful? Even the search for information (much less “consuming” it) can take a great deal of time and thought.

Good grief, I’m still trying to figure out the principles that guide my choice of links in these entries — if any. What is the point of my aggregations? i don’t really have the time to consider the question — not today, anyway!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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