Oxford University Press's Blog, page 616

Beyond the page: music students and emotion

Even though I recently turned sixty and have taught at colleges and conservatories, when I hear the words “back to school,” the image that springs to mind is of my teenage self as a Juilliard student in the 1970s. If I ask that self what my main educational breakthrough from those years was, the answer surprises me: discovering what actors learn. Actors study their own emotions.

In 1972, a drama student told me she was jealous of us music students. Why? Because an out-of-work musician can still make music at home. But what should out-of-work actors do, recite lines from Ibsen to themselves while they set the table? This led to a discussion of what musicians and actors learn, and suddenly I became jealous. Yes, just as musicians learn the techniques of playing an instrument, actors learn the techniques of speech and movement, but actors also explore their emotions systematically as part of technique. Musicians may bring great passion to their playing, and teachers or coaches may say, “play it again but this time with feeling,” but what feeling, and whose — the composer’s or the performer’s — and how do you channel the feeling if you are not in the mood?

We all know this scenario: a violinist plays a piece perfectly in tune, with clear phrasing, precisely as marked; the dynamics and articulations are exactly what is on the page and the tempo is perfect according to the metronome mark. But it is neither convincing nor artistic.

What if an actor spoke lines with excellent diction, good timing, with an appropriate facial expression, and even with vocal inflection that matched the character’s mood, and yet the performance was unconvincing? It would be unacceptable because the audience must be convinced. They don’t want to see the acting through the character.

When a musician plays perfectly correctly but unartistically, what is missing? The missing link is the connection to the performer’s inner life, to lived experience. Can we as music teachers address this problem? We can and should do it from day one. Think about drama students…

Motivation is a fundamental aspect of an actor’s craft. By playing theater games about motivation with music students, the concept itself is illuminated and may well inspire introspection when it matters. In a workshop I led many years ago, a young violinist played a solo Bach movement extremely well, but that deeper something was not present. The class knew it. Using a theater-game approach to the problem, I asked the student to imagine that she was an international spy whose “cover” was that of a traveling violinist. The music she played was actually code for a life-and-death message that only certain other agents could understand. When she played this Bach movement on stage, one person in the audience would interpret the code, and then make a phone call that would ultimately save the lives of some political prisoners.

With that suggestion, the young violinist became thoughtful and serious. After a long moment of reflection, she played it again. It was nearly the same but in a crucial way it was far superior. It was artistically fulfilling; it was profound. What had that suggestion done for her playing?

The class discussed what had happened. The first time she played, her audience sensed her ego on display: she was proud of her playing; she used the music to prove her competency on the instrument; she was outside the music. As a spy who could save lives – and because she took the acting challenge seriously – she no longer thought of herself, but rather of the life-saving message encoded in the music, a message that had to be communicated with clarity for a higher purpose than showing off her technique.

I then asked the class: is there a message encoded in the music? Is it possible that others might understand the music’s meaning when it is played so as to project that message? Might music save lives?

The answer to all of those questions is yes. We played a theater game that changed the focus of the player’s attention. The game was about the intrinsic meaning of the music, which speaks in its own untranslatable language, a kind of code we musicians understand on its own terms. The theater game opened the door to emotional authenticity.

That’s performance. What about composition? Studying octatonicism, serialism, world music, polyrhythms, counterpoint, extended harmonic techniques, Carnatic rhythm, jazz harmony, computer music, or set theory opens a world of ideas for a young composer, and knowledge of techniques is absolutely necessary. But without the authentic connection to one’s inner life, all these techniques serve no meaningful purpose. That message encoded in the music we spoke of must be there. How to find it? The composer must remember to dream before thinking.

To dream is to allow the flow of ideas–uncensored and unsolicited–to appear in the mind, seemingly of their own accord. Where do these sonic dreams come from? It is a mix of memory and imagination.

A useful sonic dream is emotionally and viscerally intense. Select a good one from among the various sonic images and begin to think. To think is to use some of those compositional techniques to explore the idea, to extend it and communicate it, to encode it.

It’s back to school time, an opportunity to try something new; perhaps theater games. Let’s encourage our students to feel, to dream, and help them get beyond the page.

Featured image: Amp. By Juan Di Nella. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Wading through an endless field, or, still gleaning

In the house

What is the origin of the now popular phrase in the house, as in “Ladies and gentlemen, Bobby Brown is in the house”? I don’t know, but a short explanation should be added to my response. A good deal depends on the meaning of the question “What is the origin of a certain phrase?” If the querist wonders when the phrase surfaced in writing, the date, given our resources, is usually ascertainable. But the circumstances in which that phrase first occurred are most often beyond recovery. Hence the endless discussion about the origin of a whole nine yards (why nine and nine yards of what?) and other outwardly transparent idioms. The hardest case is what one might call “nonsense idioms.” They must have been clear once, at least to some group of speakers, but today they only puzzle. Consider pay through the nose, rain cats and dogs, and even put a spoke in one’s wheel, all of them once discussed in this blog. The phrase in the house is not metaphorical, because it means what it says, that is, “present.” Perhaps its popularity goes back to the 1995 American sitcom TV comedy of that name. But long before that there was a British comedy titled Is There a Doctor in the House? Apparently, we have to look to popular culture for the origin of this idiom, and it is not even obvious that we are dealing with an idiom in the proper sense of the term.

Cut the mustard

This is almost as hopeless as a whole nine yards. Apparently, people found it hard to cut the mustard (which is not a surprise) or, as Stephen Goranson suggested, they had great trouble cutting their way through overgrown mustard weeds, for mustard plants could reach eleven feet high. The idiom is American. It seems to have been coined close to the end of the nineteenth century. At the time when the first edition of the OED (the volumes with the letters C and M) was being compiled, James Murray and his team received no citations for cut the mustard, even though it enjoyed some popularity in the United States. The earliest examples found so far turned up in railway slang, but it does not follow that the phrase originated in that environment (Freeman H. Hubbard, quite naturally, left it out of his Dictionary of Railroad Lingo). Later the idiom attached itself to a negation, as in He does not cut the mustard in this role, that is, “does not succeed,” though it started without not: something and somebody were just allowed to cut the mustard. Since mustard has the slangy meaning “the right thing,” the idiom may not even be connected with cutting the plant, though cut certainly needs an explanation. The idea that cut the mustard turned up in military usage, where mustard is a folk etymological alteration of mustered, has nothing to recommend it. So where are we with this phrase? Nowhere, I am afraid. This is the most common case in historical phraseology.

Cutting the mustard in an exemplary way.

Cool as a cucumber

In a recent talk show, I said that this simile is based on alliteration (tomatoes, for instance, would not do because the initial sounds don’t match) and received a letter from Mr. David Houg, who has no objections to my reasoning but adds the following: “Cucumbers are cooler than tomatoes because they lie on the ground and are very moist, as opposed to hanging on a vine…. So during the night they lose heat, cool down, and, when picked up in the morning, will be close to the overnight temp, rather than the morning temp.” Here then is a perfect union of the thing and its name (“Wörter und Sachen”: there was a fruitful trend in etymology—“Words and Things”—that insisted on a detailed study of “objects” in dealing with word origins).

No one will call this cucumber uncool!
Apropos whipping the cat

A recent post was devoted to the idioms whip the cat and not enough room to swing a cat. (It is raining cats and dogs has been mentioned above.) Some time ago I ran into a quotation from Addison (The Spectator, April 1712, No. 361). In his essay, this instrument means “cat-call”: “It is certain that the roasting of a cat does not call together a greater audience of that species than this instrument, if dexterously played upon in proper time and place.” Is this a rather ponderous joke or should we add roasting the cat to other (proverbial) indignities offered to this animal? The Internet gives plenty of advice on cat meat and on roasting it, but I doubt that Addison had some culinary recipe in mind.

The word buggy

In the post of June 3, 2015 (“Bugs: A Postscript”), I mentioned in passing that buggy “a vehicle” is hardly a word borrowed from India. In response I received a quotation from The Century Dictionary [CD] that says: “Of Anglo-Indian origin.” Since I am a great admirer of Charles P. G. Scott, the etymologist for CD, I naturally consulted that dictionary before writing the post. The quotation sent me was from the first edition (which is available online), but there was a revised edition, and I have access to both. The later version offered a different etymology of buggy, but first I should mention Scott’s 1911 publication, titled “Bogus and His Crew.” In it, he discusses buggy in great detail. He mentions bogie, a word for a small truck used in and about the mines and later applied to other small trucks and other light vehicles. “There came into use in the middle of the 18th century a carriage that was lighter and more convenient than the hevy [sic: Scott used reformed spelling! Cf. his wheeld and speld below] coaches that had long been in use. It was two-wheeld or four-wheeld. It could be drawn by one horse or by two. It became known as a *bogie, speld, in the plural, bougées.” The neologism caught on in India, and many people thought, erroneously as it seems, that it originated there. “The word buggy in part displaced the synonym gig, which as applied to a light vehicle had also a trivial rustic origin—a name without any near relevancy to a vehicle, adopted because of a remote relevancy, and because it made no strain on the intellectual faculties…. In England a man was respectable if he kept a gig. In America a man was respectable if he kept a buggy.” In Scott’s opinion, bogus goes back to boghest, in which bo– is a syllable intended to arouse terror, and –ghest is “ghost.” However, the origin of bogus will not concern us here. In the second edition of CD, the conclusion of the 1911 publication is summarized in a few lines. In The New Century Dictionary, a two-volume reference work, the word’s origin is called obscure.

Don’t miss the statement that gig made no strain on the intellectual faculties! The “ultimate” origin of gig and its likes (the first consonant is the same or almost the same as the last, with a vowel in the middle, more often a short one: compare gag, jig, jog, pip, pap, pup, pop, poop, bob, etc.) is destined to remain “unknown.” They are expressive (humorous, sound symbolic) and inherently meaningless.

Image Credits: (1) “Horse and Buggy” by angel_shark. CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr. (2) Field of Rape[seed] by Peter Dutton and (3) Prolific Cucumbers by OakleyOriginals. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Text analysis for comparative politics

Introduction
By R. Michael Alvarez

Text has long been an important, but difficult to use, source of data for social scientists. Back when I wrote my Ph.D. thesis, for example, I sat for weeks with abstracts from the New York Times — finding newspaper articles relating to past presidential campaigns, and content-analyzing those articles to determine whether they had substantive or “horse-race” information in them. Back in the day, most scholars analyzed text like this manually, and despite the fact that vast amounts of text were available for study, very little of that information became data that was amenable to sophisticated quantitative analysis.

How the world has changed! Because of vast improvements in computational capabilities (both in terms of data accessibility, storage, and analytic power), tools and methods for the automated analysis of text have proliferated. Some of the most innovative new tools and methods are being developed by social scientists, and in recent years we have seen many important papers on the analysis of text published in Political Analysis.

One of the important developments in this area is the Structural Topic Model. This methodology for analyzing text has recently seen rapid development, and I asked the authors of “Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics” (Christopher Lucas, Richard A. Nielsen, Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart, Alex Storer, and Dustin Tingley) to discuss in a bit more detail their paper and its contribution to the field. Their essay is below.

* * * * *

Text Analysis for Comparative Politics
By Christopher Lucas, Richard A. Nielsen, Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart, Alex Storer, and Dustin Tingley

Every two days, humans produce more textual information than the combined output of humanity from the dawn of recorded history up through the year 2003. Much of this text is directly relevant to questions in political science. Governments, politicians, and average citizens regularly communicate their thoughts and opinions in writing, providing new data from which to understand the political world and suggesting new avenues of study in areas that were previously thought intractable. However, in order to access the value in this textual data we need methods to conduct a principled, systematic analysis.

Preparing textual data for analysis presents unique challenges, particularly for comparativists working with non-English text. Though statistical methods for text analysis are often language agnostic, tools for pre-processing the texts are not. We provide software packages to help users preprocess text in multiple languages and translate text, accompanied by an overview of the various steps necessary to prepare textual data for analysis. Because the Structural Topic Model (STM) allows users to incorporate document metadata into the analysis, investigators can treat the language in which the document was written as a variable and can model systematic differences in topical content across languages.

As a proof of concept, we examined thousands of social media posts in Arabic and Chinese in June 2013 about Edward Snowden. Our analysis reveals that Chinese posts about Snowden during this time period are more likely to address issues of hypocrisy in US foreign policy, suggesting that the United States violates the human rights of its citizens while simultaneously advocating for better human rights protection abroad. By contrast, Arabic posts were more likely to deal with the issue of asylum, addressing the question: where will Snowden go next?

Work on Structural Topic Models continues to evolve. A forthcoming book chapter “Navigating the Local Modes of Big Data: The Case of Topic Models” addresses model stability in the STM and provides support for the use of a deterministic initialization strategy based on spectral methods. A recent working paper “Matching Methods for High-Dimensional Data with Applications to Text” demonstrates how the STM machinery can be used to facilitate causal inference from observational data where the pre-treatment confounders are documents. Two new software packages on CRAN have been released; stmBrowser and stmCorrViz provide interactive visualizations of STM models. The core software package stm has also been updated to increase speed and introduce numerous new features described in the papers above. The papers, software, and vignette detailing how to get started are available at structuraltopicmodel.com.

These methods open the world of text analysis to scholars of international relations and comparative politics. The possibilities are many, and we demonstrate but a few.

Featured image: Folded newspapers. (c) Mitrija via iStock.

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Yes, maths can be for the amateur too

Over the past weeks Snezana Lawrence, co-author of Mathematicians and their Gods, introduced us into a Summer journey around the beauty of mathematics; including secret maths witches and wizards, and trying to answer the question: will we ever need maths after school? In this last post, Snezana tells us the story of bright amateurs in mathematics that had great influence on scientific discoveries, from multidimensionality to the fourth dimension.

A friend of mine picked an argument with me the other day about how people go on about the beauty of mathematics, but this is only not obvious to non-mathematicians, it cannot be accessed by those outside the field. Unlike, for example, the modern art, which is also not always obvious, mathematical beauty is elusive to all but the mathematicians. Or so he said. He mused further that a non-mathematician can never bring anything new to mathematics, unlike art: in art, from time to time you get shifts, paradigm changes, contributions from people who don’t necessarily belong to the old establishment, who bring a new insight, that may change art and influence further developments at a profound level. This is how movements in art happen and so, the thinking goes, there is a possibility of an outsider making a contribution to bring about such a change or a shift. Furthermore, this in effect means that people generally engage with art on a much greater scale, as there is always a potential of making a contribution to it.

Is this really the case? Is mathematics really a discipline so insular that no amateur or admirer can never play a role in its development? I wrecked my brains to come up with a counter-example, hoping that, at least, I would be able to persuade him of the beauty of mathematical techniques. My master plan was to use the argument of the form reductio ad absurdum, an old trick that would finish by ‘aha!’ on my part.

Image credit: Advanced Theoretical Physics, by Marvin (PA). CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

But I think it ended up many dimensions more nicely. I came up with the concept that I have investigated recently, of the amateurs making not only a huge contribution to the field, but actually enriching a view of mathematics itself. There was one development, that took place at the turn of the 20th century, that involved mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike in the development of the concept of multidimensionality. I am talking about, on one side, mathematicians such as Bernhard Riemann and Hermann Günther. Their work and lives were devoted to the development of this concept. On the other hand though, there were others whose work included philosophizing on the multidimensionality. People such as Edwin Abbott Abbott, the Shakespearean scholar and the London schoolmaster who wrote one of the most famous and popular novellas of all time, the Flatland, and Alicia Boole-Stott, whose three-dimensional models of four-dimensional polytopes contributed to the development of mathematics immensely for example. Alicia had no official mathematical education, apart from being the daughter of the famous George Boole (but earnt her honorary doctorate at the University of Gro¨ningenn in 1914).

How did this happen? By very unorthodox means in fact. Abbott wrote Flatland at the time when he was still working at the City of London School and lived in Marylebone. Mary, Alicia’s mother, also lived in Marylebone and was writing mathematics books for children, but also contributed to theology and science. Her interests extended to Darwinian theory, philosophy and psychology, organizing discussion groups on all of these from time to time. Mary Boole was also at one time a personal secretary to James Hinton, a famous spiritualist, whose son Charles wrote some very interesting books on the fourth dimension, invented the term ‘tesseract’, and also married Mary’s oldest daughter, called also Mary. Charles apparently believed in multi-dimensionality of time too, which may explain his bigamous marriage within three years of his marriage to Mary (but to whom he later returned) and taught Alicia to visualize four dimensional polytopes (polytope is an object in different dimensions – for example in two dimensions polytopes are triangles, squares etc., in three polytopes are cube, octahedron, etc. and so on) as they would pass through the third dimension. There is strong circumstantial evidence to show that there was a strong link with spiritualism that linked all of these people together, the belief that there is some other, higher dimension, from which the dimensions of our world could be seen at once. Mary Boole and Edwin Abbott Abbott even wrote apologies about spiritualism, none of course forthcoming from Charles Hinton.

So there! I managed to come across a group of people who were not mathematicians – they had some links to it, in their various ways, but none,were actually mathematicians,  apart from the weirdest of them all, Charles Hinton, who ended his life as a mathematics instructor at Princeton University. Yet their work, both in terms of writing and their social involvement and communication, made a lasting influence on the development of the concept of the fourth dimension in mathematics, and from thereon, on the concept of multidimensionality.

Perhaps this type of mathematics comes very close to abstract art, but so be it. We can all enjoy the many representations of the tesseract, the word Charles Hinton coined, and Alicia Boole-Stott so beautifully represented with her many models. And we can certainly attempt to venture from the world of Flatland to the world of the fourth, and many more dimensions.

Featured image credit: Math Castle by Gabriel Molina. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Greek wages in crisis: Whose loss and whose hope?

Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the crisis in Greece must be aware of its record-high unemployment. From an already elevated value of 8% in 2008, the Greek unemployment rate rocketed to 27% in 2013 and has since remained in that ballpark. The vast majority of lost jobs came from the private sector, as public sector jobs are either permanent by constitution or safeguarded by any politician interested in re-election. Does this mean that workers in the private sector lost the most during the crisis? The casual observer may object. After all, it is a widely held belief that public employees paid the price of the crisis with wage cuts. Over 2010-2012, public wages were sliced three times, accompanied by three waves of massive strikes and demonstrations. The government also intervened in private pay-setting by decentralizing wage bargaining in 2011, and cutting the mandated minimum wage by 22% in 2012. Still, by common perception, most of Greece’s wage adjustment concerned public sector workers.

We question this common perception in a study covering the period 2009 to 2013, during which the government implemented the bulk of labor market reforms. We find that wages in the private sector declined faster and overall more deeply than in the public sector, even prior to the measures that deregulated wage bargaining and lowered minimum wages. In fact, the premium of a public sector job for workers with the same characteristics (age, education, work experience, marital status, number of children, occupation, sector of employment, type of contract, etc.) increased in the early phase of the crisis and only started declining after 2011, though never falling below its pre-crisis level (of 9.3%).

Thus, it appears that private sector workers did all the heavy lifting of the crisis: they lost the jobs and they lost the wages. Did they also lose hope? Our results suggest that, despite the overall gloomy picture, there is some good news coming out of the crisis for private employment. In the private sector, the adjustment has been large in size but qualitatively constructive. In the public sector, the adjustment has been moderate but potentially destructive.

“It appears that private sector workers did all the heavy lifting of the crisis: they lost the jobs and they lost the wages. Did they also lose hope?”

Specifically, although the pressures on the private economy were strong and continuous (the Greek GDP contracted by 32% within five years impacting wages of all skilly levels), these pressures also resulted in a rationalization of the ‘structure of returns’; i.e. the way in which the sector rewarded different labor market characteristics. Private jobs that survived the crisis now paid higher returns to marketable workforce characteristics, most notably schooling. This development is rather positive, given that the returns to skills in the private sector have been low relative to the public sector for decades, inducing the educated and experienced workers to queue for public sector jobs. Attracting the most able and skilled professionals in the private sector may be an important feature in the prospective recovery of the Greek economy.

In contrast, the wage losses in the public sector were lowest for the low skilled and highest for the most skilled. By implication and without any substantial incentive schemes to increase productivity, the public sector will struggle in the future to keep its executives motivated, if it retains them at all. This is the reason behind the urgency expressed by Greece’s lenders about further public wage reforms.

The third memorandum of understanding that the Greek government signed this month was for a brand-new three-year ESM program, which clearly states that it will reform the public wage grid, effective 1 January 2016, by “decompressing the wage distribution across the wage spectrum in connection with the skill, performance, responsibility and position of staff”. As that government has now resigned and the country is heading to new elections, it remains to be seen whether the new government will deliver on this commitment.

Featured image credit: Photo by martaposemuckel, CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Amartya Sen on poverty in India

Just before the release of his new book, The Country of First Boys, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen talks exclusively to the Hindustan Times‘ Manjula Narayan about our blindness to poverty, flaws of the Gujarat model, miniaturisation of great ideas by the Hindu right wing and interference in academia.

In your introduction to your new book, you talk about our general bias which makes us blind to the divide (between rich and poor Indians), which is what is at the root of all our problems.

Absolutely. Not just one divide; there is more than one. But the big divide is between the comfortably off, which includes not very rich people and also very comfortably off, and the masses of people who don’t have decent schools, decent health care, and often not immunised. That is a very big divide. And I won’t say the lack of outrage about it but lack of knowledge, almost lack of understanding about it — about how big this division is which is one of the major problems for a democratic country like India. I think, for us, development has to be a kind of comprehensive social engagement and so it’s not just the fault of the government but also the lack of pressure from the public to see the defects in the thinking of governance, to make sure that they are rectified.

Sometimes, I think, perhaps (the divisions in the country) are impossible to overcome.

No, it’s not impossible to overcome. I think we have to address that issue constantly. You see, some issues are very easy to make media friendly, that media take an interest and you know … places are like that … it’s good that they did. Similarly, what’s going on about the other Modi … What’s his name? The one who is fleeing the law of the country? Lalit Modi! I mean these things are very easy to politicise and it’s right that they should be, but it’s not right that issues of varieties of deprivation from which the underprivileged in India massively suffer don’t get that attention. It’s not at the top of the mind; it’s not at the top of the newspaper.

Poverty is not sexy.

Exactly!

You talk of the narrowness of identifying people by a single identity, just religion, following from your ideas on Partition. But increasingly, we are moving towards that again, towards identifying yourself by your religion or your caste.

I’m worried about it too. You see some of these partitions are archaic and not particularly productive ways of thinking about anything. In addition to the problem that any one Partition would never capture the complexity of human beings. But some of these distinction between a Hindu or a Muslim, upper caste or lower caste at the level of understanding who to respect, who to not respect, is really a deluding division. On the other hand, the distinction between rich and poor, between women and men, and even between upper caste and lower caste, if we see it not just in terms of who to respect but who to worry about, then I think the same division can be made to have a more productive role. But when somebody writes in favour of the caste system saying it’s not exploitative, as I think the new head of the Indian Council of Historical Research had said (laughs)… I think the caste division can be made to play an important role in our thinking if we see it as a mechanism of perpetuating inequality in India as opposed to a way of generating a good society, which I think that gentleman was presenting.

A recent report says the number of poor children in India is much higher than many countries in Africa.

Yes, and the undernourishment is enormously worse. The immunisation rate is not worse than Africa but not much better and certainly much worse than Bangladesh, and dramatically less than Southeast Asia.

Why are we still grappling with this after so many years?

I don’t think we have got the seriousness of the issue. I mean when people say that Gujarat was a successful economic model, they overlook the fact that, in terms of undernourishment, illiteracy, lack of immunisation, Gujarat has one of the worst records, and as the Economist magazine points out, under Modi’s chief-ministership, Gujarat’s position slipped down rather than slid up. It was slightly better than Bihar earlier and it became worse than Bihar. In some ways newspapers allow people to get away with this, as if infrastructure is just physical infrastructure; just roads and power. In fact, infrastructure is also education and health care. India is trying to be the first country to become an industrial giant with an illiterate and unhealthy labour force. I don’t think it can be done. To me, it’s one of the biggest problems.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Hindustan Times. Used with permission.

Featured image: Beggar child. (c) Nikhil Gangavane via iStock.

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The desnudas of Times Square

Because nothing noteworthy occurred anywhere in the world through the month of August and the first half of September, the local news in New York City turned its attentions to a few women who have apparently been bothering people in the otherwise calm, decent section of Manhattan known as Times Square. If you’ve been distracted by lesser news about displacement, misery, and Republican presidential candidates, and have missed out on this hard-biting story, I’ll fill you in: the desnudas, or painted ladies, are a group of women who paint their naked torsos (red, white and blue is popular, presumably because Americans love the flag and also boobs), slip on thongs (for modesty), and hit the streets to solicit tips in exchange for photographs. Concentrated in Times Square since summer 2013, the number of desnudas now working among the throngs of costumed cartoon characters, superheroes, and bronze or silver standing-still-guys making a living greeting tourists has apparently grown to about a dozen in the past two years. This alarming rash of approximately 12 women with their approximately 24 painted breasts has prompted tourists, locals, less buxom street performers, and city officials to wring their hands in collective despair. Since there is clearly no better use for the police in this boring little town, undercover cops have been unleashed in Times Square to babysit the desnudas, especially once news broke that some of them have been rubbing up against or grabbing male passersby. The uptick of cops has paid off big time: one whole desnuda was recently arrested for agreeing to have sex with a plainclothes officer for money.

The tits, in short, have hit the fan. Clearly, Times Square is not the place for shenanigans, especially not from the likes of about 12 highly threatening women in thongs, the occasional feathered headdress, and totally, completely, densely opaque paint covering their breasts. Despite the fact that you can’t see anything revealing under the paint (not like I’ve tried, really hard, on several occasions or anything), city officials are hung up about the desnudas, and suggestions about how to address them have ranged from inventing creative, loopholey ways to arrest them (public toplessness is legal in New York), to doing away with the Bloomberg-instigated pedestrian plazas that have attracted street performers and other tip-seekers in the first place.

But, come now, good gentlemen who watch over our city and seem to fear the very suggestion of breasts more than, say, men dressed as Elmo or Spider Man who turn out to be prone to anti-Semitic rants or random acts of physical violence. Times Square is never going to be the tidy, perfectly regulated playground for timid tourists you all seem to desperately want it to be. The sordidness of the neighborhood—which seeped indelibly into the very spirit of the place at least a century before a few entrepreneurs with paint-covered nipples started earning tips there—never went away, even during the mid-nineties when Mayor Guiliani insisted that it had. Sure, the establishments that most loudly touted the sordidness of the neighborhood are no longer centrally located. But darker, edgier, sexier forces remain. It’s just that now, they’ve taken the form of creatures who transform before your eyes from women in bikinis into women who are not actually wearing bikinis, or from men dressed as superheroes into brutes who beat the shit out of your dad when he doesn’t pay up after snapping a vacation pic.

Granted, over the past 15 years, city officials been especially aggressive in their efforts to remake Times Square into a sexless (if apparently still sexist), G-rated tourist attraction. Broadway theaters, after all, pump billions—that’s right, billions—of dollars into the city’s economy every year, so protection from street breasts is certainly a priority. But a particular brand of edgy raunchiness became part of the neighborhood—and part of the appeal of the neighborhood—long before the theaters got there, and even before it was dubbed Times Square. That happened in 1904, when The New York Times built and moved into the building that the New Year’s Eve ball still drops from, and under which the then-new subway system began bringing thousands of visitors to the neighborhood.

Before 1904, the neighborhood wasn’t officially called anything, though when locals bothered to discuss it, they referred to it as Longacre Square, merely because it, like Long Acre Square in London, was the center for the city’s carriage industry. Until the turn of the 20th century, Longacre Square was unlit, unpaved, lined with stables, and strewn with broken carriages and wagon wheels. It reeked of manure, which made it unappealing to everyone except the thieves and prostitutes who tolerated the stench, since they were guaranteed a flow of people who were largely unfamiliar with the area and thus targets for paid sex, a good con, or both.

In the first decades of the 20th century, as Manhattan and its subway system developed northward, the newly electrified Times Square replaced Union Square as the city’s most concentrated live entertainment center. Broadway—the artery whose name became synonymous with the commercial theater district—became lined with grandly ornate theaters, luxury hotels, upscale bars, and sumptuous restaurants. But if you’re thinking that during the Gilded Age, Times Square was solely a place for posh venues patronized by fancy people who didn’t like sex, you’re fooling yourself. The neighborhood’s side streets teemed with cheaper joints in which to eat, drink, carouse, and get down with the hookers. Times Square no longer stank of horse poop, but it remained a transient place, where people from all walks of life came in search of a good time. The prostitutes and thieves who inhabited the area when it was Longacre Square might have been sinners, but they weren’t morons. They stuck around because for lots of people, a good time involved getting sozzled and laid, even if a little hustling happened in the process.

The commercial theater knew that sex sells, too. Producer Flo Ziegfeld’s driving obsession with beautiful women willing to parade around in various stages of undress in his legendary Follies was part of what made him one of the most emulated producers in Broadway’s young history—especially since he was genius at convincing the middle- and upper classes that the “tasteful” nudity in his shows in the New Amsterdam Theatre was somehow representative of a classier brand of commodified sex than the kind you could find just outside on the street.

The balance that was struck between commerce and sex in Times Square was disrupted by the Depression. Ziegfeld lost his empire, the commercial theater industry shrank, many of the area’s businesses closed, and landlords scrambled to lease their venues. The city couldn’t afford to knock empty buildings down, so many spaces that survived became humbler versions of themselves. Theaters became burlesque houses or 24-hour second-run movie palaces (known as “grinders”); related shops and eateries became pawnshops, dive bars, cheap restaurants, penny arcades, wax museums. The tough but prudish Fiorello LaGuardia drove burlesque out of the city by the early 1940s, but Times Square hardly lost its edge absent a few women in pasties.

The general scuzziness of Times Square became an issue of growing concern in the 1950s, when a series of legal rulings on the nature of obscenity placed new emphasis on community standards and social value, and less on the belief that obscene material caused moral corruption. The shifting interpretation of the law resulted in more freedom of expression—and justification for the sex trade—in Times Square. Suddenly, all proprietors of massage parlors, XXX theaters, and dirty bookstores needed to do to defend their existence was hang a sign out front proclaiming their products or services to be good marital aids or great for your circulation. Following more obscenity rulings in the late 1950s and 1960s—all of which left the term open to interpretation—the neighborhood became a notorious sex bazaar, where rows of huge XXX marquees and ads for sex shops and girlie shows were occasionally interrupted by plaintive announcements peddling comparatively tame entertainments like Tiny Alice, Hello, Dolly!, or Hair (which featured a scene with totally naked actors in it, and which no one in charge of New York ever got their panties in a bunch over, even once.).

Following the financial crisis in the mid-1970s, during which thousands of city employees lost their jobs and New York suffered messily and in full view of millions of horrified potential visitors, officials stepped up efforts to address Times Square’s sleaze factor. By this point, the Broadway industry had become increasingly vociferous in its attempts to make the neighborhood’s theaters more accessible. The state’s “I Love New York” campaign, unveiled in 1977 in an effort to win back tourists, emphasized the magic of Broadway theaters. As visitors returned to New York through the 1980s and early 1990s, ideas were floated around as to how to make Times Square more inviting to people who weren’t pimps, con artists, drug addicts, or porn freaks. Plans for the neighborhood varied from leveling most of it and rebuilding it, to enclosing part of it and making it a huge mall, to using it as an extension of the midtown business district.

In the early 1990s, Dinkins, and then Giuliani, began to seriously court Disney, which had been hoping to gain a foothold on Broadway since the late 1980s. By the middle of the decade, a deal was struck in which Disney would renovate the dilapidated New Amsterdam—once home to Ziegfeld’s Follies and subsequently a leaky swamp housing a host of urban flora and fauna—in exchange for a cheap, long-term lease on the venue and an expanded presence in the neighborhood in the form of stores, billboards, and a studio for CBS. Once other corporations—including Tussaud’s Group, AMC Cinemas, and SFX (now Live Nation)—learned of the city’s sweetheart deal with Disney, they, too, came sniffing around.

Corporations are never sleazy or immoral in any way, so their presence improved Times Square’s image—and justified the eviction of numerous porn theaters, peepshows, adult video stores, and massage parlors, which were replaced by enormous candy stores, live versions of Disney movies, the flagship Toys R Us store, a giant (and fancier!) wax museum, and many slightly less scuzzy chain restaurants. Times Square now has a safer, friendlier reputation.

But absent sex, the world would be a boring (and ultimately empty) place, and so too would Times Square, which has retained its baseness, no matter what the travel pamphlets promise. You can still find sex shops and peepshows there; they’re just no longer smack in the middle of the neighborhood. (Hint: Walk up Eighth Avenue, or west toward Port Authority, which hasn’t benefited one bit from the renovation.) I swear I haven’t gone looking, but I’d bet my best sequined thong that drugs and sex are still easily procured in the area too. Times Square’s underbelly might be tauter than it was in the Midnight Cowboy days, but believe me, it remains.

The city can do what it will. Arrest every person with breasts in an undercover sting operation. Create a designated space for street performers to get (partially) naked, juggle, stilt-walk, stand still while covered in silver spray paint, or dress like Minnie Mouse and recite The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Replace the pedestrian plazas with moving sidewalks, jet skis, or boring old city streets. My guess is that nothing will magically transform Times Square from the Crossroads of the World into the Crossroads of Effete Middle-Class Respectability. Which is a good thing, really, if you think of it this way: when the zombie apocalypse is upon us, it’s totally going to start in Times Square. I would hope that before groaning masses of zombies wreak havoc on the nation, the desnudas will stop them, (un)dead in their tracks, by shaking their painted breasts at them and making them cower in fear—like so many elected officials.

Featured image: Times Square north at night, New York City (1934). Public domain via Library of Congress.

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Res gestae: The prosecutor’s backdoor

One of the principal dangers of admitting hearsay evidence in court is that a witness’s veracity cannot be tested by cross-examination. Notwithstanding that, where a witness is dead, or it is impractical for the witness to attend because she is out of the country, we may recognise the case for admitting hearsay under the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Similarly, the necessity of admitting hearsay may be evident where the witness is proved to be frightened of testifying because of the defendant’s threats. However, what if the witness was said to be frightened at the time of the alleged offence, but is in the court building on the first day of the trial? And what if the witness isn’t called by the Crown and the court doesn’t hear evidence about her reasons for not giving evidence, but admits her hearsay evidence anyway? The case for admitting the evidence appears weaker. All the more so if the Crown is relying on the res gestae principle, a common law exception to the hearsay rule described by David Ormerod as “redundant,” but preserved by the 2003 Act where “the statement was made by a person so emotionally overpowered by an event that the possibility of concoction or distortion can be disregarded.”

This was the position in the recent case of Barnaby v DPP, a relatively rare example of a res gestae case coming before the appeal courts. It was a domestic violence case concerned with a man’s alleged assault on his girlfriend and the admissibility of her hearsay statements. When the police arrived at the scene they observed marks around the complainant’s throat and on her cheek. She informed them, as she had the 999 emergency call operator, that the defendant had strangled her. However, she refused to provide a statement or sign the police officer’s pocket book, apparently out of fear of the defendant, who she said had “beaten her up” on the last occasion she provided a statement. Although the complainant was present at court on the first day of the trial, the prosecution declined to call her to give evidence or tender her to the defence. Instead, they relied on hearsay evidence in the form of the 999 call transcripts and the account she gave to the police who arrived shortly after her calls.

The Divisional Court found little difficulty in holding that the complainant’s evidence fell under the res gestae principle. On the facts of the case, this seems correct. The more troubling issue was the Crown’s failure to call the complainant or tender her evidence to the defence. The report doesn’t state expressly why she wasn’t called. The most likely explanation is that she was frightened of her boyfriend. That being so, one might have thought that, rather than res gestae, the most logical avenue for admission of this evidence would have been the 2003 Act provision regarding frightened witnesses, with its “interests of justice” test. Lord Justice Fulford also held that, where evidence was admissible under the res gestae principle, the Crown wasn’t obliged to rely on the statutory “interests of justice” gateway, which would have triggered consideration of the s.114(2) safeguards. These would also have been brought into play if the defendant had sought to exclude the evidence under s.78 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (Riat). However, inexplicably, the defence didn’t make the application.

Image credit: Photo by gluecksaktivist. CC-BY-ND-2.0 via Flickr.

In the absence of a s.78 application, it’s perhaps understandable that the Divisional Court wasn’t overly concerned about dismissing an appeal where the police, on the scene within 6 minutes, had observed the complainant’s injuries and the defendant remained silent in his police interview. Nevertheless, it is concerning that the complainant’s hearsay evidence was admitted even though she was at court. The Court of Appeal in Shabir stated that the law should reflect the decisions in Horncastle and Riat that “all possible efforts” should be made to secure the attendance of absent witnesses, and that the court should be satisfied to the criminal standard of proof that the witness didn’t testify out of fear. In Barnaby, the court simply accepted the Crown’s assertion, without testing it in court, that fear of her boyfriend, rather than fear of being found to be untruthful, was the reason for the complainant not testifying. This is particularly concerning because there was evidence that the complainant wasn’t of entirely unimpeachable character herself and misled the police over the defendant’s previous conviction. And, as she was at court, one might have thought that there was some doubt as to whether she really was frightened of the defendant.

Arguably, the Crown’s reliance on the res gestae principle in Barnaby doesn’t sit easily with judgments in Horncastle and Riat, or the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Al-Khawaja and Tahery v United Kingdom, that reliance on hearsay should be a “last resort.” Where a witness is said to be in fear of the defendant, reliance on the res gestae principle allows admission of hearsay “through the backdoor,” without the need for that fear to be proved and without reference to the considerations that apply under statute. It also overlooks the “right to confront” witnesses, which was described recently as the “cornerstone of a fair trial” (Adeojo).

So, following Barnaby, what conclusions can we reach? It’s suggested that in all such cases, where the res gestae principle is relied upon to admit the evidence of absent witnesses, said to be in fear of giving evidence, the following should apply:

(1) a hearing should be held to establish whether the absent witness is omitting to give evidence out of fear; and

(2) “interests of justice” safeguards that relate to the statutory admission of hearsay, should also be applied to the admission of evidence under the res gestae exception, where a witness is said to be “in fear.”

Featured image credit: ‘The labor of memory’ by Jonathan Cohen. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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Police shootings and the black community

In a recent Huffington Post piece entitled “Police Shootings Are About Class as Well as Race,” Jesse Jackson argued that the specific issue of police violence, alongside an unjust and excessive criminal justice system, disproportionately affects the poor, irrespective of race. “While African-Americans are at disproportionate risk from the structural and human biases of our criminal justice system,” he wrote, “we should not forget that working and poor people of all races suffer from police excessive use of force. Police kill more whites than blacks.” Citing statistics from 2015, he went on to explain that “95 percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family incomes under $100,000,” while neighborhoods with median incomes over $200,000 experienced none at all. Based on these numbers, he concluded, “excessive force puts white lives at risk, as well as those of blacks and Hispanics.”

This discourse is nothing new and is certainly not limited to discussions of policing. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, scholars and commentators alike have debated whether racism or class inequality was to blame for the lost lives, shattered dreams, and poor rescue and rebuilding efforts in New Orleans. These debates are important, yet they so often imagine race and class in distinct terms, failing to account for history, intersectionality, and the dehumanizing realities of anti-black racism. For example, to understand the poverty of the 9th Ward in New Orleans, or how the inability of many to evacuate the city on the eve of Katrina was about having access to a car, one must consider the connection between race and class. To evaluate the effects of the storm, one must look at the history of racial segregation, housing discrimination, and a race-divided labor force in that city. Likewise, one must identify mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and blue-on-black shootings as issues with anti-black racism at their core.

As Jackson notes, power and privilege are assuredly class-bound. While he acknowledges that the class divisions are imprecise in the statistics that he cites–all neighborhoods with median incomes under $100,000 are lumped together–he effectively highlights the class component in the culture and practices of the criminal justice system. Militarized policing and the war on drugs have been directed at poor communities, particularly African American, Latino, and Indigenous communities.

Class matters, and policing the poor is business as usual in America, but anti-black racism cuts across these lines.

Yet race, too, is always at work. Hyper policing and entrenched ideas about black criminality are grounded in racial and class stereotypes. The label of “thug” and the signifiers associated with “ghetto” embody the ways that race and class work together. NFL star Richard Sherman, notwithstanding his Stanford education, his multimillion-dollar income, and his celebrity fame, found that even he could not outrun the “thug” label. When we examine countless studies about implicit bias and the criminalization of black bodies, not to mention frequent reports of workplace racism and the profiling of black celebrities, it is easy to see how anti-black racism infects the experiences of African Americans across class lines.

While excessive and violent policing takes place in working-class and poor communities across racial lines, research points to how black communities across class lines are confined to neighborhoods defined by depleted resources and hyper policing. A recent study from Stanford, discussed in the New York Times, found:

Even among white and black families with similar incomes, white families are much more likely to live in good neighborhoods—with high-quality schools, day-care options, parks, playgrounds and transportation options. The study comes to this conclusion by mining census data and uncovering a striking pattern: White (and Asian-American) middle-income families tend to live in middle-income neighborhoods. Black middle-income families tend to live in distinctly lower-income ones. Most strikingly, the typical middle-income black family lives in a neighborhood with lower incomes than the typical low-income white family.

Similarly, according to Professor Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at NYU, 62 percent of African Americans born between 1955 and 1970 were raised in poor communities; a generation later, this has not changed. Despite growth in the black middle-class, increased access to better-paying jobs, and higher educational attainment, black families are still confined to the poorest communities. Sharkey found that black families making $100,000 lived in neighborhoods in which whites were making $30,000.

Though hyper policing and “poverty penalties” target “poor” communities, their impact is felt collectively by the black poor, the black working-class, the black middle-class, and the black upper middle-class. In other words, structural violence—manifesting itself in segregation, wealth disparities, housing discrimination, the unfulfilled promises of the benefits of attaining a college degree, and countless other indices of systemic racism— is still often experienced by the black middle-class.

In the end, a narrative that sees police violence as only directed at the poor reinforces the idea that class mobility, professionalism, and respectability can and have protected black America—that a new car, fancy clothes, and a well-paying job can allow an African American to transcend race. As we look at the headlines, from Sandra Bland to Christian Taylor, from Trayvon Martin to Jonathan Ferrell, it is apparent that class mobility and access to middle-class neighborhoods are not protectors from the deadly consequences of racism.

The idea that violence, whether street violence or police violence, is unique and exceptional to poor communities of color inadvertently recycles a narrative that blames the victim. Implicit is the idea that a culture of poverty leads to hyper policing, cultural practices (the hoodie, loud music, etc.), and lack of respect for authority, which contribute to blue-on-black shootings.

In looking at the criminalization of all black bodies, the costs and consequences of excessive and militarized policing across class-based communities, the illusive security and safety resulting from a “better” zip code, and most importantly, the lives lost to police violence, we begin to see how race and racism are at the core of these issues. Yes, class matters, and policing the poor is business as usual in America, but anti-black racism cuts across these lines.

Image Credit: “Photo from the Million Hoodies Union Square protest against Trayvon Martin’s shooting death in Sanford, Florida” by David Shankbone. CCBY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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All Will and No Grace – The Drama of Family Provision

The legal wishes of the dead have long been fertile ground for domestic drama. Shakespeare’s As You Like It opens on the theme: “As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will”. That drama proceeded from a father’s unequal testamentary provision for his sons. The litigation in Ilott v Mitson [2015] EWCA Civ 797 began with a mother’s failure to make testamentary provision for her only daughter. When Melita Jackson died in 2004, her daughter Heather Ilott was then 43 years old with five children of her own. She was living with the support of state welfare and her husband’s income from part-time work. Heather had left home at the age of 17 to marry her husband, and that marriage, strongly opposed by her mother, led to the estrangement of mother and daughter ever after. By her last will, Mrs Jackson left her entire £486,000 estate to charity (the vast majority to animal charities in which Mrs Jackson had previously shown no significant interest). She also drew up a letter of wishes expressing her reasons for excluding her daughter from any benefit in the estate. Following Mrs Jackson’s death, Mrs Illot claimed financial provision under The Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975. The claim was opposed by the animal charities and by the executors of the will (Mr Mitson and Mr Land).

Section 3(1) of the 1975 Act lists the matters that the court shall have regard to when exercising its discretion, each of which “may be of infinitely variable weight, on the particular facts of any given case” (Lilleyman v Lilleyman [2012] EWHC 821 (Ch); [2013] Ch. 225). The factors include such things as resources, needs and obligations and the size of the estate, but also, as the court thinks relevant, “any other matter, including the conduct” of the parties (s.3(1)(g)). This encourages value judgments on the behaviour of the applicant and the deceased. Thus, in the first decision in the protracted series of hearings, District Judge Ian Million held in 2007 that “Mrs Jackson had acted in an unreasonable, capricious and harsh way” [para 22]. The mother’s decision to give her daughter nothing was not “reasonable financial provision” under s.2 of the Act, even though it was supported by an express statement of reasons. The decision to make an award was upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2011 and the case was sent to the High Court to determine quantum (DJ Million had awarded £50,000). It was on the question of quantum that it recently came again to the Court of Appeal ([2015] EWCA Civ 797). Arden LJ asked “whether reasonable financial provision can and should be made for the appellant’s maintenance which relieves her everyday living expenses without affecting her state benefits” (para [1]). The Court of Appeal concluded that the daughter should be awarded £164,000 to be used to enable her to buy her home from a housing association, plus a lump sum of £20,000 to produce an income small enough to leave her means-tested welfare benefits undisturbed. Arden LJ purported to make no finding on fault, but did note evidence “of Mrs Jackson’s inability to make lasting relationships with anyone” (para [51]).

Cases will continue to be decided on their own facts. In Ilott the truly relevant fact – though the court did not say so in express terms – may have been the financial competition between needy grandchildren and large animal welfare charities. Change those facts in any small degree – suppose, for example, that there were no grandchildren or that the charity had been a charity for homeless humans – and the decision might have been different. Cases decided on their own facts beg the question of the limits of the 1975 Act, and the more fundamental question “what is the purpose of the statute?” In Illot, the statute served to redistribute wealth on no basis known in property law. It did not discharge a legal obligation or reward an expectation or compensate reliance. Neither did it purport to meet dependency, since the daughter was an independent adult. It did not even relieve the burden on the welfare state (indeed, it was expressly designed to keep that burden on foot). To judge from Illot v Mitson, the purpose of the 1975 Act is to provide for reasonable need if there is no good reason not to.

It may be that the decision sets no precedent, but it certainly sets a challenge. The challenge is to know what, if anything, a parent can do to ensure that their estranged adult child will take no interest in their estate. A clause in the will excluding interference can prevent variation of the will in favour of a claimant but cannot exclude the 1975 Act since it operates outside the will. A letter of wishes would also appear to hold limited weight. The only sound advice might be to give it all away before you die (six years before should suffice to escape the statute: s.10), but even that might not be enough to keep it out of the hands of a well-intentioned Court of Appeal. In Pennington v Waine [2002] 1 WLR 2075, Arden LJ perfected a lifetime transfer (that had been commenced by the transferor but not completed before she died) on the doubtful ground that the deceased “donor” had been conscience-bound to make the donation. One is bound to question whether the good will of a judge is preferable to the ill will of an owner in the matter of wealth allocation. Whatever the legal position, the domestic drama is unavoidable when a living parent diverts their estate away from an estranged daughter. In Shakespeare’s King Lear it was the start of the whole tragic tale.

Featured image: “Lady Justice” by AJEL, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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