We Robot 2012 – UAVs and a Pilot-Free World

Day Two at the We Robot 2012 conference at the University of Miami Law School.

Amir Rahmani‘s presentation Micro Aerial Vehicles: Opportunity or Liability? prompted a set of thoughts sparked by the idea of planes not flown by human beings, and in turn, the idea of an aviator-free world.  It has been some 109 years since Kitty Hawk, and in that time we have come to the point that we might seriously consider the idea of all aircraft being exclusively robotic (I should hasten to add that I doubt man will ever stop flying but at the least, a very significant attenuation of the role of the pilot looks likely. Peter W. Singer’s Wired for War notes, for instance, that UAV operations in Afghanistan, which account for a significant percentage of all aerial operations in that theater of operations, are carried out by desk-pilots working from home bases in the US. The culture that has sprung up around that community is interestingly different from that of pilots who fly combat aircraft from front-line bases.) While I generally welcome the idea of a ‘robotic uprising,’ i.e., a  greater role for robots in our society as a means of spurring greater introspection about ourselves and our place in this world, in this domain I find the idea of a pilot-free world curiously melancholic. And it is entirely unsurprising that such a thought is sparked by a set of deeply personal interests: After all, I did grow up on air force bases, watching jets take off, and admiring, like only young boys can, all those impossibly dashing, crew-cut, sunglasses-wearing aviators (then, they were exclusively men; now, women have joined the ranks of armed forces aviators as well).

The twentieth-century might have been the century of the pilot, and all the imaginative possibilities associated with the image of man borne aloft on wings, above this grubby world, into the skies, placed in a position, as John Gillespie Magee put it, to ‘reach out and touch the face of God.’  It was a century that saw the rich flowering of  a literature born from  the radically different viewpoint of man that aviation  afforded its practitioners (and those who admired them).  Antoine Saint-Exupery was a product of that century, as was Michael Collins (whose Carrying The Fire still remains one of most literate and passionate books about aviation and manned space flight).

So my concern here is not so much the loss of employment for pilots, a rather mundane economic worry. Rather, it is the idea that a whole domain of creative imagination might be lost. Hopefully, new creative possibilities might spring into being. Perhaps the little flying that will be done by humans in the future will generate a new form of literature, one that sees the aviator’s role not as a ‘worker’ flying airlines or as a ‘soldier’ flying combat aircraft, but returns perhaps to the original role of the aviator as an adventurer trying out and flying radically new craft. Perhaps. More on this possibility later.

We Robot 2012 – Day One

I am posting today from the University of Miami Law School, which is staging the We Robot 2012 conference. I presented and discussed Patrick Hubbard’s (University of South Carolina Law School) Regulation of Liability for Risks of Physical Injury From “Sophisticated Robots”. Presenting someone else’s work presents a difficult challenge; thanks to being an academic I have perfected the dark arts of bullshitting about my own work but doing so about someone else’s work is far more difficult.  I tried my best to present Patrick’s work as comprehensively and fairly as possible and to raise some questions that could spur on some discussion. (I will place the slides online very soon so you can see what I got up to.)

One of the points I raised in response to Patrick’s claim that robots that displayed ’emergent behavior’ would occasion changes in tort doctrine was: How should we understand such emergence? Might we need to see if robots, for instance, displayed  stability, homeostasis and evolvability–all often held to be features of living systems, paradigmatic examples of entities that display emergent behavior. Would robots be judged to display emergent behavior if it was not just a function of its parts but also of the holistic and relational properties of the system. I also asked Patrick how the law should understand autonomy given that some philosophical definitions of autonomy–like Kant’s for instance–would rule out some humans as being autonomous. (Earlier in the morning during discussions in another talk, I suggested another related benchmark that could be useful: Draw upon the suggestion made in Daniel Dennett’s The Case for Rorts that robots  could be viewed as intentional agents when we trust robots as authorities in reporting on their inner states, when its programmers and designers  lose epistemic hegemony.) An interesting section of the discussion that followed my presentation centered on how useful analogizing robots to animals or children or other kinds of entities was likely to be, and if useful, which analogies could work best. (This kind of analogizing was done in Chapter 4 of A Legal Theory of Autonomous Artificial Agents.)

Earlier in the day in discussing automated law enforcement–perhaps done by fleets of Robocops–I was glad to note that one of its positive outcomes was highlighted: that such automation could bring about a reduction of bias in law enforcement. In my comment following the talk, I noted that a fleet of Robocops aware of the Fourth Amendment might be be very welcome news for all those who were the targets of the almost seven hundred thousand Stop-n-Frisk searches in New York City.

As was noted in discussions in the morning, some common threads have already emerged: the suggestion that robots are ‘just tools,’ (which I continue to find bizarre), the not-so-clear distinction–and reliance on–true and apparent autonomy, the concerns about the need to avoid ‘projecting’ human will and agency onto robots and treating them like people (i.e., that we need to avoid the so-called ‘android fallacy.’) I personally don’t think warnings about the android fallacy are very useful; contemporary robots are not sophisticated enough to be people and there is no impossibility proof against them being sophisticated enough to be persons in the future.

Hopefully, I will have another–much more detailed–report from this very interesting and wonderfully well-organized conference tomorrow. (I really haven’t done justice to the rich discussions and presentations yet; for that I need a little more time.)

RIP Levon Helm, Thanks For The Memories

Levon Helm, drummer and singer for The Band, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71. The only live performances of his that I have witnessed were on film, or rather, in one movie, The Last Waltz. And in particular, there was one that stood out, whose memories have endured, clearly, distinctly, across the many, many years that have passed between that day and this one: Helm’s rendition of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Some of what was distinctive about that song and Helm’s take on it  is alluded to by Jon Pareles’ in yesterday’s New York Times:

In the Band, lead vocals changed from song to song and sometimes within songs, and harmonies were elaborately communal. But particularly when lyrics turned to myths and tall tales of the American South — like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Ophelia” and “Rag Mama Rag” — the lead went to Mr. Helm, with his Arkansas twang and a voice that could sound desperate, ornery and amused at the same time.

But let’s back up for a second. I saw The Last Waltz in the company of high-school mates, at what might be termed a pre-matinee show, the so-called “morning shows” that used to be so common in Indian movie-houses in the 1970s and 1980s (and possibly before). The tickets were often sold at marked-down prices, and many off-beat gems could be found there. So off-beat in fact that there was often little publicity or hype associated with their release. The Last Waltz saw its release in such a time-slot. We knew little about the movie; we didn’t know it had been made by Martin Scorsese, and had no idea either, that its cast included  Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Ronnie Wood, and Neil Young. All we knew was that it was a concert movie featuring a band called, well, The Band. So we played hooky, scraped together the money required for the tickets, caught the right buses, traveled to the movie-house, bought our tickets, and filed in.

When Helm began singing “The Night..”, I was surprised; I had never seen a drummer do the vocals for a rock band before. And it quickly became clear to me that this was not just a fill-in gig; this man knew how to sing, and he sang with a ‘desperate’ passion that showed, in the urgency of his voice (and facial expression!), in the intensity of his pathos every time he sang “The night they drove old Dixie down/And the bells were ringing/The night they drove old Dixie down/And the people were singing.”

Truth be told, I didn’t understand what the lyrics meant, I didn’t understand, then, what time and place they had as their referents. All I knew, all I could sense, was that I was in the presence of a spirit pushed to the edge of his tether, brought to the brink of heartbreak by circumstance. That much I could somehow identify with, even if I was just a young Indian schoolboy, and the man inducing that feeling in me was from Arkansas, singing about a land, a people, and a time, very far away.

RIP Levon.

Anders Behring Breivik: An Argument Against The Death Penalty

Anders Behring Breivik has complicated matters for us. Most killers like him are not brought to justice; they kill themselves or are killed in the fracas following their murders. They do not create the opportunities that Breivik has created for us to think about appropriate punishments for those accused of heinous crimes. Breivik is now on the stand, equipped with a megaphone with which to articulate his homicidal world view. And one prominent reaction–at least in the US–to the cold-blooded pronouncements of this racist mass-killer is, ‘If anyone deserves the chair (or the injection or whatever) it’s this guy’.

But I think Breivik provides us with a very good argument against the death penalty. (Norway does not have the death penalty; it is unclear at this point what the maximum sentence for Brevik could be.)

Breivik committed his murders in the service of an ideology: quite simply, he was killing on the basis of principle. These principles had as their consequence the conclusion that some people deserved to die, that their actions–or intellectual subscriptions–made them unworthy of living. The death penalty functions in much the same way: We take retribution, we seek to deter, we ensure the killer does not kill again. No matter what the motivation, the killer has died for his actions. And in order to make this happen, a massive, often opaque, expensive, and cumbersome machinery of policing and law swings into action; the state deploys its considerable energies and monies to make this come about. But in doing so, the state and its criminal justice resembles nothing quite as much as it does the killers that it puts to death. For in so acting, the state has acted to instantiate some ideology or the other: perhaps that of retribution, perhaps that of a theory of deterrence growing out our criminological theorizing. The death penalty is these ideologies put into effect and brought to bear on some human being.

The law makes distinctions in its reckonings of homicide by distinguishing the premeditated murder from the crime of passion, by distinguishing conspiracy from second-degree murder. It is the deliberateness of the killing that makes the conspiratorial or premeditated murder more punishment-worthy. In carrying out the death penalty, the state and its people engage in an act of pre-meditated killing, carried out for a purpose, to make a point. We can dress it up in retribution or deterrence but it remains premeditated killing. (Declarations of war lead to mass murders too.)

So send Breivik to jail; lock him up; prevent him from impinging on the freedoms of others; don’t let him interrupt the lives of others, or disrupt the projects that people have made for themselves; study him in a pyschiatric ward if needed in order to understand how this mind works; but stay away from the business of ‘putting to death’. The moment that step is taken, the state and Breivik land up in the same docket: they are both guilty of taking deadly action on behalf of an argument, of killing for the sake of principle.

Ann Patchett is Wrong About the Pulitzers

Ann Patchett has an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times, which waxes angsty over the failure of the Pulitzer committee to award a prize in fiction this year: This decision, besides affecting book sales, might lead readers to think there wasn’t any good fiction around. For as Patchett puts it, the Pulitzers are indispensable in drumming up the excitement that sends readers to bookstores, and play the same role in the literary world that the Oscars play in the world of cinema:

Unfortunately, the world of literature lacks the scandal, hype and pretty dresses that draw people to the Academy Awards, which, by the way, is not an institution devoted to choosing the best movie every year as much as it is an institution designed to get people excited about going to the movies. The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction. This was the year we all lost.

So presumably, having failed to receive a directive from the Pulitzer prize committee on which books to purchase the next time they are at Barnes and Noble or browsing on Amazon, people will read less fiction. Oh, the horror!

I’m genuinely perplexed by this. I can understand Patchett’s angst from the perspective of authors. The Pulitzers do provide a massive marketing boost to a book, and bump up sales. And thus, one easily understands her angst from the bookseller’s perspective. But as a reader, pardon my French, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Pulitzers. I read plenty of fiction, and I have not once, never, ever, ever, felt more excited or pumped up on reading about the Pulitzer award for fiction. (I watch a lot of movies too, and I remain resolutely unexcited by the announcement of the Oscars.)

I read fiction because, to quote Patchett, I realize that

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

I started reading fiction as a child, and haven’t stopped yet; in my universe of reading  the Pulitzers exert no influence whatsoever. I’m not saying this as a snob; I imagine it is the same for many other readers. Patchett is genuinely confused: The Pulitzers don’t make people read more; rather they channel that reading into particular directions, towards particular locations of influence and connections in the world of writing and publishing (If you imagine the Pulitzers are free of lobbying influence, I have a bridge to sell you.) Readers read fiction for the reasons Patchett cites above; those reasons will not go away just because a Pulitzer was not awarded this year.

Patchett’s argument is an economic one; she should keep it that level, and not make the crucial mistake of imagining that somehow readers’ lives have been impoverished by the failure of the Pulitzer prize committee to award a prize. Patchett should feel free to speak as an industry spokesperson, for the machinery of publishers and authors. But she should leave readers out of it.

Six Years of Walking To Work

This past weekend, I completed six years of walking to work. My daily commute is a thirty-minute walk, give or take a few minutes depending on whether I’m trying to get to class on time, or perhaps lugging a slightly heavier backpack than usual. Somehow, miraculously, my walking commute has ensured that while living in New York City, I can evoke for myself some of the sensations of a campus town; somehow, incredibly enough, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of a city of eight million souls, I have been able to find this mobile oasis of relative calm. My walk takes me through Ditmas Park into Midwood (home to Brooklyn College); I try not to take the same route every day so that I can sample more of the neighborhood’s beautiful Victorian homes (I don’t live in one unfortunately), but I’ve noticed certain routes show up more often than others (we are creatures of habit after all).

While walking to work is pleasant enough, it is when I walk back home in the evenings that the pleasure of the walking commute really manifests itself. For no matter how stressful the workday, a thirty-minute walk, away from the office, away from workday demands, through tree-lined streets and past magnificent testimonials to a time when beautiful homes were still being built, is often enough to bring me back to a far more quiescent mental state. While a walk does mean exposure to the misanthropic antics of car drivers, I’ve sheltered myself reasonably well from the indignities that they most commonly visit on pedestrians (refusing to yield when I have the Walk signal or at pedestrian crossings marked with a stop sign, or most irritatingly of all, blowing their horns loudly and persistently at a minor delay).

Rain,  snow, and extreme heat, all unfortunately features of the New York weather, often make me wish I had a more convenient way to get to campus, but their interruptions are not severe enough to make me do anything more than find a raincoat, bundle up a bit better or think about the air-conditioner waiting for me.  (If I had to pick my most implacable foe on these walks it would be rain, and especially in the early spring and late fall; there is nothing quite as miserable as a cold, grey, East Coast shower at these times of the year.) And of course, nothing quite puts my walk, and these minor discomforts, in perspective than the misery inflicted on those millions who brave traffic jams to drive to workplaces.

Perhaps more than anything else, this walk to work feels like a throwback, back to a perhaps imagined time, when ‘workzones’ were not so centralized, when city spaces were not clogged with fume-spewing monsters that killed thousands every year, when work schedules were not so tightly calibrated. This walk of mine functions then, like a little time-machine; I leave behind in my office (and home), my usual technological accompaniments, and head out the door to indulge in the most basic of human activities.

Note: Unbelievably enough, yesterday, after I posted this, and started my morning commute, this happened: I stopped at the corner of Argyle and Dorchester (I think), and stared; the streets and blossoms looked incredibly beautiful, the dappled shade making each street even more inviting. I hesitated: which route should I take? A lady in a car pulled up and asked, “Are you lost?” I said, “No, just checking out these beautiful streets!”. She smiled, waved, and took off. And I kept walking.

David Simon is a Little Too Proprietary About The Wire

David Simon has made some waves recently in a series of interviews regarding the Wire (here; here; and here), viewer’s relationships to it (and its characters). I’m not going to repeat or reproduce Simon’s remarks here; please do chase down the links. But in a nutshell: Simon (was) is unhappy about the ‘pop’ understanding of the Wire that seems to have made its way into our broader culture, a function, he thinks of its late uptake by a whole viewer demographic that wasn’t around when the show was struggling with ratings, an understanding that is obsessed about characters rather than the overarching theme or narrative, and that ‘misunderstands’ the show.

Simon’s remarks are peculiar for several reasons. For one, there is something rather quaint and old-fashioned in the suggestion that viewers are getting it wrong, that they misconceived the show, that there is, so to speak, some sort of gap between their understanding and take on the show and the meaning that Simon intended, and that this is a crucial lacunae. I hate to break the news to Simon, but once the show was made and released, any kind of control that he might have exerted over its meaning was gone. The show doesn’t exist in some autonomous region of meaning that Simon controls access to; it is in a place where its meaning is constructed actively by its spectators and in many ways by the larger world that it is embedded in.

What if, during the fourth season,  a fierce Diane Ravitch—Michelle Rhee-type debate had been  dominating airwaves elsewhere? Wouldn’t viewers of the Wire have had a very different interpretation of the show’s characters and action in that period? Is this something Simon could control or even cater for in his writing and direction? What if California and Washington had legalized marijuana during the third season? Would that not have affected viewers’ understandings of that season’s themes? This co-construction of meaning is a well-established trope in our understanding of how artworks acquire and establish traction. Simon might have had a vision and meaning for the show but having decided to give it to  viewers he must realize the work isn’t his anymore in any meaningful sense of the word.

The other peculiar point in Simon’s interview is his insistence that the Wire is a long-form story, that it is a coherent whole, and that it be understood as such and that the episodic reaction to it so typical of the long-running series relationship with its fans, gets it wrong. But Simon chose to work in a particular medium that afforded him freedom for lengthy development of character and plot.  The periodic release of the episodes meant–just as above–that their meaning was always going to be constructed over a period of time, subject always to those sort of short-term reactions typical of the television show. Why would Simon be surprised or upset by this? The Wire was the best television show ever and a great story. But those that watched also made it.

Side note: Much as I liked the Wire, I think Simon needs a reality check if he thinks his work was nothing but gritty realism (not that he ever makes any such claim in those interviews above but there is a kind of insistence on his having provided a social documentary). McNulty is a cliché in some ways; Omar, no matter how fascinating a character, is an implausible one; the drug markets in season three were ridiculous; the fifth season’s McNulty-creation of the serial killer was by far some of the most contrived story-telling I’ve ever seen. Simon might think he had transcended every single genre in making the Wire but he didn’t.

Record Albums, Artwork, and Physical Immediacy

At the corner of 7th Avenue and Flatbush in Brooklyn, a sidewalk entrepreneur has set up a vinyl LP sale. This has gone on for a few weeks now (and possibly longer). There’s a pretty wide selection on display, ranging from Johnny Mathis to Lil Wayne. I’ve never bothered to inquire about prices; I don’t own a record player any more; I’m always in a rush; and honestly, not that much in that catalog is of interest to this self of mine. But the stacked jackets and the artwork still serve to remind me of what we’ve lost in the transition from vinyl to the alphabet soup of MP3, AAC, OGG or whatever.

By this I don’t mean the standard audiophilic complaint of a loss of quality in the recorded sound and the resultant poorer listening experience. Rather, I mean the absence of a very particular kind of physical contact with the composite artefact consisting of vinyl long play record and its jacket with artwork. Part of the pleasure of purchasing an album–I purchased my last one back in mid-1980s–was the perusal, in the record shop, of a dazzling array of covers. I might only have purchased one–indeed, back in those days, I would have had to saved diligently to afford even that–but in getting to that point, I’d spent considerable time enjoying a great deal of eye-candy. (As a pre-pubescent lad, I remember staring goggle-eyed at Uriah Heep’s Fallen Angel! But do check out the ‘worst album covers of all time‘ too.) As Bill Walsh from albumcovers.net notes,

For a while, there was a true ‘marriage’ of two very distinct and different media — art and music. In their heyday, LP covers were an outlet for experimentation, art, fun, social comment, and the power of the visual image to sell you the music that was contained therein….The ‘cover’ of a CD is about 14% of the size of a record album; the artwork on the cassette box is just 7% as big. That’s barely enough space to put the name of the artist, much less some breathtaking or unusual artwork.

Now, of course, we don’t have CD’s either. (Or do we? I haven’t been to a record store in years so I have no idea whether these things are still out there or not.)

More to the point, the album was something I lovingly brought home, and then, following my father’s carefully drilled-technique (you would not believe the pristine state of his record collection back then!), removed the record from its sleeve, not touching its grooved surface, before gingerly setting the diamond-tipped stylus needle  on it. Something about that kind of physical contact with the music ensured a relationship with the music I struggle to find now, as I stare at the gigantic playlists on Grooveshark or at my list of Pandora stations. The convenience of playlists, queues, on-demand access and the like are not being disparaged here; not one bit. I’m merely noting the loss of a very particular kind of entanglement with the music that made it less remote, less ephemeral. Physical object fetishization at its worst, perhaps, but there you have it.

‘A Ramble of Banalities’: Hitler’s Table-Talk

In his review of Heike B. Görtemaker’s biography of Eva Braun (Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, Knopf, translated by Damion Searls, reviewed in The New York Review of Books, April 26 2012, Vol LIX, Number 7), Anthony Beevor notes:

Hitler’s “table-talk,” a ramble of banalities and crassly sweeping judgments on history and art, recorded as if he were a latter-day Goethe by a would-be Eckermann, revealed his hatreds quite plainly.

Two notes:

1. The Goethe-Eckermann reference is, of course, to Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann, the book famously referred to by Nietzsche in the following section (#109) from The Wanderer and his Shadow:

The Treasure of German Prose.  Apart from Goethe’s writings and especially Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann (the best German book in existence), what German prose literature remains that is worth reading over and over again?  Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms, the first book of Jung Stilling’s Story of My Life, Adalbert Stifter’s St.  Martin’s Summer and Gottfried Keller’s People of Seldwyla — and there, for the time being, it comes to an end.

2. I’ve never read anything by Hitler, but I have seen videos of his speeches, where he does not seem to ramble.  But in The Mask of Command, John Keegan does us all a service by providing us a sample of Hitler’s “table-talk.” As Keegan notes, these transcripts were recorded by a note-maker, Heinrich Heim, who was ordered to do so by Martin Bormann. Here is an excerpt:

When all’s said, we should be grateful to the Jesuits. Who knows if, but for them, we might have abandoned Gothic architecture for the light, airy, bright architecture of the Counter-Reformation? In the face of Luther’s efforts to lead an upper clergy that had acquired profane habits back to mysticism, the Jesuits restored to the world the joy of the senses….Fanaticism is a matter of climate—for Protestantism, too, has burnt its witches. Nothing of that sort in Italy, The Southerner has a lighter attitude towards matters of faith….It’s remarkable to observe the resemblances between the evolution of Germany and that of Italy. The creators of the language, Dante and Luther, rose against the ecumenical desires of the papacy….I must say, I always enjoy meeting the Duce. He’s a great personality. It’s curious to think that, at the same period as myself, he was working in the building trade in Germany. Our programme was worked out in 1919, and at that time I knew nothing about him….If the Duce were to die, it would be a great misfortune for Italy. As I walked with him in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I could easily compare his profile with that of the Roman busts, and I realised he was one of the Caesars….Italy is the country where intelligence created the notion of the State. The Roman Empire is a great political creation, the greatest of all. The Italian people’s musical sense, its liking for harmonious proportions, the beauty of its race! The Renaissance was the dawn of a new era, in which Aryan man found himself anew.

And on and on and on. Albert Speer notes, ‘[T]he collection includes only those thought significant. Complete transcripts would reinforce the sense of stifling boredom’. Phew.

Incidentally, I’ve only just discovered Hitler’s Table-Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations (Translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Introduced and with a new Preface by H.R. Trevor-Roper, Enigma Books 2000). I certainly don’t have the time or the inclination to read the whole thing, but there is plenty of material in there to strike us numb.

The Sneaker Pimps as Accompaniment for the Morning Newspaper

I’ve written before on this blog about the ability of music to recall specific memories: working as a bartender in a jazz bar, or suffering through a hot Brooklyn summer while working on a book. Today’s recalled memories are about a  simpler time that might have felt hectic then but feels positively bucolic compared to today.

As the summer of 1997 ended, I found myself, within the confines of New York City, a nomad. A break-up with my girlfriend meant I had to find new accommodations, and it had resulted in my moving thrice in three months. Finally I settled on the Lower East Side, renting a room in an apartment still under construction. I was broke; the moving had cost me; I had lost apartment deposits and spent too much money eating out, drinking beer, whiling away my time in bars playing pool. My meager summer employment hadn’t kept pace with my reckless expenditures and I found myself skimping, saving, borrowing money from friends, just to get by and pay rent. Even more problematically, my doctoral oral examinations awaited; I had an ambitious reading list–in philosophy of language, logic, and science–to get through.

As the fall semester began, I found myself caught, willy-nilly, in a form of monastic discipline. I had wasted enough time over the summer; I had to buckle down now. I had two section of Introductory Philosophy to teach, a long list of journal articles to get through, and very little money to spend. So I did what all abstainers do: I enforced a routine. I tried to wake up at the same time everyday, avoided my old haunts, and kept my nose to the wheel. I felt isolated, cut adrift, even in the midst of the bustling Lower East Side.

There was some relief though. I had borrowed a CD from a friend: the Sneaker Pimps‘ Becoming X. (Wait, ‘borrowed’? Yes, Virginia, there was a time when people loaned and borrowed CDs, passing them around, get this, by hand!) Two tracks, in particular, got ample play-time: Six Underground and Low Place Like Home. I was captivated  by Kelli Dayton‘s voice, by the Pimps’ trip-hop, and obsessively played those two tracks again and again. (Incidentally, the Pimps’ decision to fire Kelli Dayton after this album must rank as one of the worst personnel decisions ever; compare Dayton’s version of Low Place like Home with this Chris Corner version; ’nuff said.)

And for some still unfathomable reason my favorite time to listen to them was in the mornings, shortly after waking, with my morning coffee and a newspaper. A newspaper? Yes, because back in 1997, I did not own a computer; and even if I did, I would not have had a viable Internet connection at home. So in sharp contrast to my current habit of sitting down at my desk in the morning, my cuppa Joe handy as I check emails, read blogs, (and blog), instead, I walked out onto Avenue A, bought myself a copy of the New York Times (and sometimes the Daily News when I was keen to concentrate on sports instead), a cup of low-grade fifty-cent coffee from the bodega down the street (the kitchen in my apartment was still under construction and there were no espresso bars, not that I could have afforded one), walked back to my apartment, drank my coffee, read the paper. While being serenaded by Kelli Dayton.

I’m not sure why a pair of trip-hop tracks should have been such a perfect soundtrack for these attempts of mine to calm myself before I walked out to face a day full of teaching recalcitrant undergraduates, reading alone in a dingy office, and returning late at night to that forlorn room of mine, but it worked. Thanks Kelli.