12.29.03
New Archive Format
After months of careful preparation and design, I've changed the permalinks so they point to a single page for each post, rather than using page anchors. You can still see the entries in their glorious original context by clicking on the "view in context" link below any archived post, but now at least you won't have to download sixty megabytes of Iceland photos just to read about the Wright brothers.
Please report bugs, send cakes baked in gratitude etc. to the usual address.
5:46 PM12.29.03
Going to Poland
I will be in Poland for the first nineteen days of next year, and as always, I'd be delighted to meet any readers of this site. If you live near Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, or the Tatra Mountains, drop me a line! (Mozna po polsku)
Special thanks to the better half, who is once again putting up with a European absence, and lending me her digital camera.
4:57 PM12.26.03
Attack of the Flying Weasels
Foiled terrorist plot or major freak-out? The American and French press have been abuzz with the story of three Paris-Los Angeles Air France flights cancelled because of hijacking fears.
On the American side, the story got play in the Washington Post and several Reuters pieces, but most of the details seem confined to the French press.
Le Figaro describes the initial events that led to the grounding:
Suspicion resting on Air France flights appeared at the start of the week, when American intelligence services intercepted a "chat" (dialogue over the Internet) between presumed islamists. There was an allusion made to the possible hijacking of an Air France flight around Christmas, and the flight number was given: AF068 between Paris and Los Angeles.
And from a companion article:
"In examining the manifest of AF068 for December 24, the American police were able to identify a half-dozen "suspected" names. The first of these strongly resembled that of a pilot with connections to islamist networks, and the five others were similar to names of presumed members of al-Qaeda included on the FBI's list of wanted persons."
A small bit of contextual salt - as Bruce Schneier has pointed out in an earlier critique, the FBI's terrorist watch list includes 13 million names. And as anyone who tried to do a Google search on Muammar Gadaffi knows, Arabic names can transliterate into a forest of variants. So it is unclear just how many passengers on a given flight would fall into the "suspected" category, even if you assume terrorists will be sporting enough not use an alias. To be honest, the cynic within me fears the FBI just applies a Perl script:
foreach $name ( @manifest ) {
if ($name =~ /^(al-|ibn|bin)/ ) {
send_to_guantanamo();
}
}
But I digress...
Le Monde covers the flurry of events following the initial intercept:
"In Paris, the precautionary principle and the desire to not envenom Franco-American relations outweighted the doubts of French intelligence services about the reality of the threat. Especially because the most senior American officials took pains to confirm the fears of their intelligence services.The first phone call between Washington and Paris dates from Sunday night, December 21. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, called his French counterpart, Dominique de Villepin, to advise him of the growing uneasiness of the American intelligence agencies. Later that night, these agencies sent supplementary material backing up their apprehensions. These materials came from "technical intercepts", although it is not clear yet - not even at the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST) - whether this means an Internet discussion forum, an intercepted letter, or telephone surveillance. [...]
On the afternoon of Monday, December 22, an interministerial meeting was held at Matignon [the Prime Minister's palace] chaired by the head of [Prime Minister] Raffarin's cabinet, Michel Boyon. At the conclusion of this meeting, it was decided to increase security inspections. At the same time, the Minister of Transportation, Gilles de Robien, was receiving a phone call from his American counterpart, who strongly suggested that armed police be placed on all at-risk flights on the routes Paris-Los Angeles, Paris-Papeete with a stopover at Los Angeles, and Paris-Newark.
SUSPECT PASSENGERS
That night, it was American Ambassador Howard Leach's turn to present the same request to Nicolas Sarkozy. Towards 9 PM, the government decided to have multiple soldiers from the national gendarmerie intervention group (GIGN) on board the Tuesday flights to Newark and Los Angeles [dressed in plainclothes - M].
On Wednesday, December 24, the mobilization took a more dramatic note when the American ambassador visited the Minister of the Interior. After being received by Claude Guant, Mr. Sarkozy's chief of staff, Howard Leach explained that the degree of the terrorist threat, as estimated by American intelligence services, was so high that he strongly suggested that the French government cancel all of the at-risk flights.
Incidentally, some press reports suggest that the intended target of these planes was Las Vegas. This doesn't appear to come from raw intelligence data (at least any that got leaked), but from an analysis of the CDG->LAX flight path. Las Vegas and Los Angeles are the only cities on that route that prospective hijackers could attack without veering substantially off their flight plan. Assuming that hijackers would want to have as much fuel and airspeed going for them as possible, and considering that Las Vegas is likely to be high on the Wahhabi shit list, our boys in blue drew the obvious conclusion (but they didn't share it).
The decision to cancel the flights was taken before the departure of the 1:35 PM flight. Border patrol agents, members of the DST and the Parisian criminal service were asked to question passengers considered suspects by the American authorities on this flight, as well as on the 7 PM flight. Having obtained access to the reservation lists, the Americans had compiled a list of some dozen "suspects" on the two flights headed to Los Angeles. The police searched the baggage, checked all specialized databases, interrogated passengers as to their point of origin and the reasons for their trip to the United States. No suspect profiles were found, and no passengers were detained.One of the names provided by the Americans was that of a Tunisian, expected on the 1:35 PM flight. He was making a trip from Tunis to Los Angeles, with a transfer at Paris. His frequent trips to the United States and especially his pilot's license had attracted suspicion. But he was not present at check-in in Tunis. After making further inquiries, in collaboration with Tunisian authorities, no compromising factors were found. The man is unknown to anti-terrorism agencies and is not included on any list of islamist activists.
As if additional proof of the paucity of credit accorded to American fears by the French authorities were necessary, due to the absence of material evidence, the anti-terrorist section of the Parisian police did not deem it necessary to open a preliminary investigation. The decision to cancel flights was made based on other factors. "We were mindful of the quality of their intelligence services, and of the active engagement of Washington with this issue", explained a source at the Ministry of the Interior. "The United States is still experiencing the trauma of September 11, something that in France one often forgets to take into consideration." [...]
Some observations:
First, hindsight changes everything. If these flights had not been stopped, and had in fact been hijacked, the failure to act on the intelligence in hand would rightly be seen as inexcusable.
Second, as a plain old citizen, I have no way to second-guess this kind of decision. We're in the same position as a poker player who can't see the hole cards - depending on what else the American spooks are holding, this could be a dumb mistake or a genuine near-miss. The press accounts are an epistemological hall of mirrors.
Third, as a plain old citizen without the information I need to evaluate the decisions of my government's intelligence services, I need to have a certain degree of trust in those services' ability to gather information, analyze it, and act on it with celerity, competence, and without political interference.
This has become a bit of a tall order. In the past few years, we've seen our intelligence services demonstrate both serial incompetence (9/11, anthrax, Indian and Pakistani nukes, the hunt for Bin Laden) and a disturbing lack of resistance to political pressure. And this pressure has become intense, as the top levels of our government have not hesitated to cherry-pick whatever intelligence best fits their ideological agenda. In the process, they have shown themselves quite willing to politicize the so-called War on Terror. This tendency does not seem likely to diminish in an election year.
So on the one hand, we have an intelligence community that is bumbling and somewhat less than trustworthy. On the other hand, there is a bona-fide terrorist organization that really is trying to kill us. What's a poor citizen to believe?
Inevitably in this kind of conflict there are going to be false positives. The cost of getting it wrong is so catastrophic that it means we have to put up with a fair number of false alarms. All the more so when you factor in the intense 'cover your ass' pressure at the intelligence agencies. That 13 million name terrorist watch list says it all.
But false alarms come at a price. The exercise at Roissy, for example, does not bear much repeating. It involved cancelling six international flights on short notice (the three outbound, plus three return flights), lodging eight hundred passengers at Air France expense, buying space for them on other outbound flights, and issuing an unspecified number of passenger refunds. These are, of course, minor inconveniences compared to having a Celine Dion audience destroyed by a plummeting 747, but the cost is there.
There's also a goodwill cost to consider. That the French authorities complied so completely with the American request demonstrates the considerable amount of goodwill remaining in France towards the United States, even after the acrimony over Iraq. Here I'm not only talking about shutting down international flights when the US asks for it - after all, the Americans could have kept the aircraft out by more unilateral means. I mean the the kind of low-level cooperation between intelligence agencies that maximizes both countries' ability to fight terrorism. When goodwill is high, there is trust, shared information, and a willingness to go the extra mile for the other party. When goodwill runs out, there is sniping, recrimination, and stonewalling.
People in this country sometimes forget (or are not often reminded) that France is second only to Israel in its extensive experience fighting against islamist terrorism. As Le Figaro rightly puts it,
French intelligence services offer their American counterparts information, but also their experience in the fight against Islamist terrorism, undertaken by Paris in the 1980's at a time when Washington was still flirting with jihadi networks in order to use them against communism.
The French know what it means to be the targets of islamist terrorism, and in the past twenty years have gained much valuable expertise in how to fight it. There are whole sections of the world (notably North Africa) where French intelligence is the best available.
Given this context, it has been particularly galling to watch the United States go out of its way to alienate France in punishment for its opposition to the Iraq war. Consider the remarks of Tom De Lay in March of this year:
"I don't think we have to retaliate against France [for their opposition to the Iraq war]," De Lay said. "They have isolated themselves. They have resigned from any responsibility for the war on terror."
Well, obviously they haven't. They're still searching planes for phantom terrorists for us.
And by alienating allies who don't agree with our policies, we end up shooting ourselves in the foot. The Le Monde article pointedly ends with one example of how the rift between Europe and the US is becoming harmful:
At present, the American secret services have complete access to the passenger files of European airlines. Names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card numbers, meal preferences, medical information, car rental data, persons accompanying passengers during previous trips, etc. are all known to the American authorities. On March 5, 2003, a provisional agreement, signed by the European Commission, but described as "an attack on privacy" by the National Commision on Freedom and Electronic Data [Commision nationale de l'informatique et des liberts] required airlines to provide their passenger data. Companies who do not comply risk being fined $6,000 per passenger and losing their landing rights. A new agreement - which is still awaiting approval by the European Parliament - was concluded in December. It sets a limit of 35 pieces of disclosable personal information per passenger, excluding (for example) a passenger's criminal record. But it will not be possible to put these electronic data filters in place until sometime in 2004.
European citizens see a vindictive foreign policy and draw their own conclusions about American good faith. Suddenly the tradeoff between privacy and the desire to help an ally starts to look less appealing. Over time, this means less information being shared between American and European intelligence agencies, and more opportunities for disaster.
Pretending that Europe has 'resigned from any responsibility in the fight against terrorism' is just reckless. Our government has decided to make the "War on Terror" a kind of giant tent, big enough to slide any policy under. And it has decided to ostracize France because that country won't pretend the Iraq adventure is relevant to bringing the organizers of September 11 to justice.
It's worth remembering that those same organizers are still alive, still active, and very much interested in repeating their earlier success. And as the Roissy incident demonstrates, we need all the help we can get to fight them.
4:19 PM12.17.03
100 Years Of Turbulence
A century ago today, the Wright brothers took turns steering one of the first powered heavier-than-air aircraft on a series of controlled flights, the longest of which lasted fifty-seven seconds.
I say "one of the first" because there is a bit of controversy about who was first to fly, depending on how Clintonian you want to get about the meaning of "flight".
If simply getting airborne is the criterion, honors have to go to the New Zealand eccentric Richard Pearse, who in 1902 built a giant flying table that enabled him to reach an altitude of several dozen feet and crash into gorse hedges.
If powered flight without a pilot on board qualifies, then credit is due to Charles Parson's powered glider (1883) and Alexander Mozhaiski's steam-powered [!] monoplane (1884).
If reaching an altitude of eight inches counts as flying, then put your hands together for Clement Ader, who made the first manned flight in 1890 - also using steam power - and then improved his aircraft so much that it could not get off the ground at all.
If you believe that a qualifying flight has to be sustained and controlled, but you have lenient standards of proof, then you should consider the claims of Gustave Whitehead, who built a plane that modern science shows to be stable and controllable, but neglected to bring a camera or logbook along on his maiden voyage.
If you are very demanding and insist that the plane not only stay in the air under its own power, but land at the same point it took off, to demonstrate full control, then you'll be wanting to congratulate the Wright brothers. In 1904, they rolled up their sleeves, built an improved version of their flyer, and on October 20 made a circular flight a little less than a mile long. Not even a year later, Orville was able to fly for more than 24 miles, staying airborne for 39 minutes.
That's true flight by anybody's criteria except the Brazilians, who insist on the tortured prerequisite of takeoff from a dead stop in still air, just so they can cheer the Brazilian scion and one-man freak show Alberto Santos-Dumont. Dumont made waves in Paris by flying a giant powered box kite for several hundred yards in October 1906, gradually perfecting his technology until it could 'easily cover 200 meters of ground'. From there, it was a direct line to the Embraer jet.
The bickering about who was first in the air obscures the real accomplishment of the Wright brothers, which was the careful and scientific approach they took to the problem of aircraft design. The Wrights were the first to do wind-tunnel tests, correcting longstanding errors in aeronautical theory, and they systematically applied their experimental results in designing each subsequent version of their gliders and aircraft. Unlike most of the other pioneers of aviation, they actually understood what they were doing. And they were superb craftsmen, who could turn abstract design principles into a handsomely assembled machine.
Unfortunately, like countless engineers before and after them, the Wright brothers were also dour, stubborn, and completely lacking in basic social skills. They wanted nothing more than to sell out and be free to pursue their aeronautical research, but alienated all potential buyers by refusing to demo the flyer until a contract had been signed. This stubbornness grew partly out of their obsession with having the invention stolen. After proving to themselves and the world that powered flight was possible, they basically locked the airplane away and said to each other 'let's litigate!'.
Having just invented the airplane, the Wrights stopped flying for two and a half years.
Of course, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Almost as soon as the news of the first flight got out, the brothers received a threatening letter from the nefarious glider pilot and charlatan Augustus Herring, who had rushed to patent parts of the Wright brothers' own design after a visit to Kitty Hawk, and wanted in on the action (the patent would be denied; Herring went on to a storied career as an aviation con artist).
The Wright brothers' first priority was to patent their airplane, and they duly received their patent in 1904. It didn't just cover their specific design, but the whole concept of three-axis control - being able to independently steer the aircraft in pitch, roll, and yaw - that was critical to powered flight. This patent became a mighty weapon that the Wright brothers used for the next thirteen years to sue the bejesus out of anyone else who tried to fly an airplane.
It may not have been a problem if the Wrights themselves had kept working on aircraft design, or if the original flyer had been good enough to license. But neither was the case - the Wrights became so consumed with their lawsuits that they had no time or energy left for further work, essentially becoming the SCO of the early aviation age. And their airplane design, while innovative, was mostly innovative in the wrong ways.
One major problem the flyer had was instability. If you take almost any modern airplane and deflect its nose or tip its wings in flight, it will gradually return to its equilibrium position - one reason why planes stay aloft even in severe turbulence. The plane is said to exhibit positive dynamic stability. The Wright flyer had negative stability - if you perturbed it, it would get further out of whack until the pilot corrected the motion, or until the plane returned to the ground "without further attention on the part of the aeronaut".
A second problem was the idiosyncratic technique the Wrights used to turn the plane. On modern planes, a pilot banks the wings by moving small control surfaces on the trailing edge of the wing called ailerons. The Wrights rejected ailerons in favor of wing warping, where the actual wing shape would be changed by the judicious pulling of wires. This technique was as elegant as it was ultimately ineffective.
Steering in general was a problem - there wasn't a lot keeping the flyer pointed in a steady direction. The forward 'rudder' (what we now call a canard wing) made things worse, because the plane naturally wanted to weather-vane around. The plane layout we're all used to (long fuselage with a tail and horizontal stabilizer behind the wing) actually predated the Wright's design by almost a century, but the Wrights had rejected it in favor of a canard wing, so that they could get the maximum amount of lift possible from their awful engine.
This engine was terribly underpowered, even by the standards of the day. The Wright brothers knew how to build airframes, not engines, and the only reason they were able to get their flyer airborne in the first place was because their brilliant propeller design and high-lift wing made up for the great crappiness of the power plant.
A fellow aviator, Glenn Curtiss, knew how to build quite wonderful lightweight engines, and in one of the great 'what-ifs' of aviation history offered to go into partnership with the Wrights in 1906. But the brothers turned him down, and subsequently worked hard to sue Curtiss out of the airplane business. In the years to come, the Curtiss-Wright rivalry would become the most bitter of the many legal disputes surrounding the brothers. Curtiss, backed by Alexander Graham Bell, scurried to build new airplanes faster than the Wrights could win court cases against him, going to great lengths to try to establish prior art or at least narrow the scope of the patent ruling. Despite the many innovations in the Curtiss design (ailerons, empennage, a new engine) the court took the broadest possible view of the Wright patent. Curtiss wasn't a thief - his designs were themselves revolutionary improvements, and he was motivated by a passion for aviation at least as great as the Wright brothers' - but the rivalry was so bitter that the brothers would not license to him.
For the Wright brothers, the patent struggle was a series of Pyrrhic victories. They wanted justice and credit, and ideally the freedom to pursue their research further. Instead they found themselves consumed by litigation, and forced to watch others catch up with and overtake their technical lead, particularly in Europe, where areonautical research had strong state support. The endless legal battle over the airplane patent may even have contributed to Wilbur Wright's early death - he came down with typhoid at an especially rough patch in the legal proceedings, and died at age 45. His brother Orville lived long enough to see the Wright company taken over by Curtiss in 1929, in the most bitter of ironies. Neither brother made any substantive contribution to aviation after 1908.
The United States government finally put an end to the patent strife in 1917. Mindful of the impending war, it insisted that the rival parties form a patent pool - in effect, removing patent barriers to creating new airplane designs. Together with the war, the patent pool inspired a golden age of American aviation. The pool stayed in effect until 1975; companies who wanted to preserve a competitive advantage did so using trade secrets (such as Boeing's secret recipe for hanging jet engines under an airliner wing).
I believe that the Wright patent story drives home the intellectual bankruptcy of our patent system. The whole point of patents is supposed to be to encourage innovation, reward entrepreneurship, and make sure useful inventions get widely disseminated. But in this case (and in countless others, in other fields), the practical effect of patents turned out to be to hinder innovation - a patent war erupts, and ends up hamstringing truly innovative technologies, all without doing much for the inventors, who weren't motivated by money in the first place.
It's illuminating to point out that all three transformative technologies of the twentieth century - aviation, the automobile, and the digital computer - started off in patent battles and required a voluntary suspension of hostilities (a collective decision to ignore patents) before the technology could truly take hold.
The Wright brothers won every patent case they fought, and it did them absolutely no good. The prospect of a fortune wasn't what motivated them to build an airplane, but ironically enough they could have made a fortune had they just passed on the litigation. In 1905, the Wrights were five years ahead of any potential competitor, and posessed a priceless body of practical knowledge. Their trade secrets and accumulated experience alone would have made them the leaders in the field, especially if they had teamed up with Curtiss. Instead, they got to watch heavily government-subsidized programs in Europe take the technical lead in airplane design as American aviation stagnated.
If you are someone who believes that the Internet and computer software are a transformative technology on a par with aviation, you may find it interesting to note that there is now a patent cease-fire in effect in the world of software, the occasional high-profile infringement case notwithstanding. The reason for the cease-fire is simple: if companies like IBM, Xerox, and Sun were to begin fully enforcing their patent portfolios, it would mean an apocalypse of litigation for all software developers. Everyone understands that the health and growth of the Internet are contingent on ignoring the patent system as much as possible.
At the same time, more patents are being granted than ever before, for broader claims, and with an almost complete disregard for prior art. Entire companies - and not just legal firms - are basing business models on extracting money from the patent system without actually creating any products. And the boundaries of patent law are expanding. For the first time in history, it's possible to patent pure mathematical ideas (in the form of software patents), or even biological entities. The SARS virus was patented shortly after being isolated for the first time.
But if the patent system doesn't even work for the archetypal example - two inventors, working alone, who singlehandedly invent a major new technology - why do we keep it at all? Who really benefits, and who pays?
If this topic interests you, read Bruce Perens' wonderful essay on software patents, which states the case more articulately and cogently than I ever could.
And please join me in drinking a toast to those prickly Wright brothers, who for all their foibles did something amazing on this day, and deserve all the credit and respect they so clearly craved.
Credits: The first part of this essay is cribbed from the timeline of aviation firsts at the first-to-fly website, which makes up in substance what it lacks in navigability. The second part is cribbed from a series of excellent articles about the Wright brothers in this month's issue of FLYING magazine, including a layperson-accessible technical analysis of the original flyer and a very readable history of the brothers' post-Kitty Hawk career.
6:49 PM12.15.03
Rotterdam
I was predisposed to like Rotterdam sight unseen, on historical grounds. Rotterdam had been utterly destroyed in the Second World War, just like my own hometown of Warsaw, and had to be rebuilt from the ground up after hostilities ended. Unlike Warsaw, however, the job hadn't been done by Stalinists, and this had to be a good thing.
Say what you will about the Germans, but when they set out to level an urban center, they don't cut corners. The city was flattened by an air raid at the very outset of the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. Despite being hugely outnumbered and having to defend a country that was topographically challenged, the Dutch had put up unexpectedly stiff resistance. The Germans decided to issue an ultimatum: if the Dutch didn't surrender immediately, the Luftwaffe would begin destroying cities, starting with Rotterdam and Utrecht.
The threat worked - Holland capitulated right before the deadline - but the Germans went ahead and bombed Rotterdam anyway because - hey! - they were Nazis. The raid killed 900 people and destroyed 25,000 buildings, essentially the entire city center. There is one lone block left of Old Rotterdam:
Rather than restore the old town after the war, the Dutch authorities signed the city over to a variety of young architects, who did their best to make the place look modern and interesting. As a result of their labors, a large part of the city looks like the senior thesis of a talented and precocious architecture major, albeit one who was heavy into drugs. There are bright colors and unusal shapes everywhere, and many of the buildings seem to be answering questions of the form "Wouldn't it be cool if...":
While some of the showplace architecture looks a little silly, the overall effect is surprisingly pleasant and harmonious. Rotterdam is still the busiest port in Europe, and has a substantial immigrant population. Both factors temper the preciousness of the design and give the city a lively street life to go with all the fancy buildings. The Maritime Museum has an impressive exhibit that shows all of the nautical activity at any given moment, projected onto a giant wall display that looks like a heavy travel day at New York area air traffic control. There are 200,000 ship movements every year in and out of Rotterdam harbor. From here you can travel by inland waterway to Lyon, or Budapest, or the Black Sea.
I spent my two days in Rotterdam in the Hotel Aram, a dingy little establishment on the western side of the city. Just closing the windows in the room was enough to give me a massive nicotine rush, but at least my inner miser was happy. In the evenings there was a cozy nearby cafe to escape to, where the cigarette smoke was fresher. Belgian beer makes up for a multitude of sins.
Rotterdam is spacious and nice to walk through - there's a sort of linear park down the middle of the city, leading from the train station, built to resemble a canal. And tucked in among the corners of the city are genuine canals, many of them residential (judging by the profusion of upscale houseboats). The city is built across both sides the river Maas, with a wide riverwalk that looks like it's the center of Rotterdam night life in the warmer months.
I paid a long visit to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which has a stunning collection of paintings even by Dutch standards. Like many of the other museums I visited in the Netherlands, it takes care to display its pictures in small rooms, so that you see them on a more intimate scale. This is a beautiful way to show old Dutch paintings, given the obsessive level of detail. It also means you often find yourself alone in a room with a celebrity painting, the kind shown to bored freshmen in every 'Introduction to Western Art' college course, without so much as a scowling guard to distract you.
The Boijmans Museum also has some memorable efforts by members of the Old Master farm team. I especially liked a painting by the most excellently named Jan Baptist Weenix, which has to be one of the few depictions in European art of a bird shitting in the eyes of a sleeping man. The picture is called "Tobit, sleeping under a vine, is blinded", and comes to us straight from Holy Scripture:
I did not know there were birds perched on the wall above me, till their warm droppings settled in my eyes, causing cataracts. I went to see some doctors for a cure, but the more they anointed my eyes with various salves, the worse the cataracts became, until I could see no more. For four years I was deprived of eyesight, and all my kinsmen were grieved at my condition. Ahiqar, however, took care of me for two years, until he left for Elymais. [Tobit 2:10]
Tobit 2:10 is the Idle Words inspirational Bible verse of the day.
Another Old Testament winner is a 1648 picture by Frans Post, which depicts a stock Biblical scene with various anacondas and armadillos lurking in the shrubbery - think Boaz meets the Crocodile Hunter. It's called "Brazilian Landscape with Manoah's Sacrifice", and I like the baldness of just moving the action to someplace the painter found more fun to paint than the dusty old Levant.
I also enjoyed "The Pancake Bakery", a food painting by Peter Aertsen from roughly the same period. It's comforting that a fondness for stacks and stacks of pancakes transcends the boundaries of time and culture. The pancakes are so numerous, so fluffy, and so modern-looking (compared to the staid baker and his family, certainly) that the picture looks like a postmodernist put-on. You keep expecting to see Mrs. Butterworth peeking out from behind a short stack. But it's the genuine article, and a survey of other pictures by Aertsen suggests that there is often a flapjack or waffle loitering in the background, like a Frans Post armadillo.
Tucked in among these all curiosities are two paintings by Pieter Breughel and Hieronymous Bosch that, if you were to get up from your computer right now and take the next first-class flight to Rotterdam, would justify the entire trip.
12:54 PM12.08.03
Haarlem
The great oil painters of the past generally fall into two categories - those it would be great to have a beer with (Rubens, Manet, Breughel, Bosch) and those best left to drink alone (Gauguin, Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Degas).
This has nothing to do with talent, and everything to do with a certain basic affability. For example, Vincent Van Gogh is a personal hero of mine, and probably the best colorist there has ever been. But it's hard to deny that he was a touch on the volatile side, somewhat creepy around the ladies (viz. stalker-like infatuation with first cousin), and prone to psychotic episodes. Not someone you want to see lifting a heavy tankard across from you in a confined space.
Similarly, just because Degas was a reactionary, Caravaggio was a thug, and Gauguin liked to knock up thirteen-year-old girls doesn't mean the boys were bad painters (Gauguin is a bad painter on the merits). But it does put a damper on fantasies of the "if you could invite any twelve people to dinner" stripe, at least for people like me.
By far the top choice for Old Master drinking buddies has to be Frans Hals, the 17th century Dutch portraitist. In an era of dour self-importance, Hals painted people who looked real and alive - happy, even - and managed to infuse the most formal group portraits with a vital spark. His style is almost casual, but there is no portraitist who can touch him.
It's fun to watch people walk through a museum room with a Frans Hals painting - they inevitably get hooked by it in passing, and stop in a little double take. Hals painted in a kind of shorthand - quick zigzags and precisely jotted lines that come together to create a sense of total realism. Three hundred years before Impressionism, he had the moves down cold.
Hals was born in Antwerp, but lived nearly all of his life in the city of Haarlem, a bustling economic center in his day. The railroad has made Haarlem practically a satellite of Amsterdam, just fifteen minutes' train ride away, but the city has managed to keep its own identity. Modern-day Haarlem has a population of just 150,000 (i.e., half of Iceland), but it was an extremely swinging place in the 1650's, and the fun hasn't died down yet.
The town center is stately and historic, just like you'd expect, but after nightfall the many small streets all come to life, with nice pubs and cafes, and the beautiful people all come out to dine in boutique restaurants, relaxing as they enjoy The Slowest Service In Holland. There is even the obligatory red-light district, squeezed in behind the old Fish Hall off the main market square.
For me, visiting Haarlem was like paying a visit to Disney World. Somehow this little corner of Europe had sparked up and, over a fifty-year stretch, brought forward a double handful of the best painters of all time. All I could do was drink plenty of the local water, and gape, and hope some of the magic might rub off on me.
I stayed at a warrenlike hotel called the Carillon (Carillon is Dutch for 'mildew'), whose Chinese owners were able to switch from English to Dutch to Mandarin with an intimidating fluency. For all the dankness, the hotel was hospitable and cozy, and it occurred to me that Haarlem might be a lovely place to bed down when visiting Amsterdam in a more touristy time of year.
Tourbooks will tell you that Frans Hals died broke in a Haarlem poorhouse, and it was a huge relief to find out that the tourbooks are wrong. Like with many of the great 17th century Dutch painters, not a lot is certain about Hals' life. We know that he hit hard times at some point in his later career, because his possessions were auctioned off to pay his debts. And he certainly did spend the last twenty years of his life in the Haarlem Almshouse, which is the same building that now serves as the Franshalsmuseum. But the almshouse was more of an upscale retirement home than a homeless shelter, and it's clear from Hals' paintings that he continued to hang out with and get commissions from some upscale locals. He even got a pension from the city towards the end of his long life - certainly a mark of recognition and appreciation.
The almshouse residents did collect alms once a week, walking around the town square, but the process was strictly pro-forma. The museum posts some of the other amusing house rules:
"In order to be considered for a place in the home, men had to be at least 60 years old, officially resident in Haarlem, single and have led an honest life. They also had to bring their own household articles with them, such as a good bed, a chair with a cushion, a tin chamber-pot, three blankets, six good shirts and six night-caps."
"They were not allowed to take more than one jug of beer to their rooms."
So think sophomore-year housing, with night-caps and old people.
Haarlem in the 1650's was a rich town, third in size after Amsterdam and Leiden. The Franshalsmuseum has a spectacular antechamber exhibit that details the economic and political context of the time without being boring about it. The curators have selected several period landscapes and cityscapes, and blown them up massively so a magnified painting completely covers each wall. This lets them place explanatory text next to points of interest, conveying a lot of information about the town, and as a side effect reminding viewers of the fantastic level of craftsmanship that went into oil paintings back then. You can see women bleaching linen in a stream, brewers brewing beer, ships entering harbor, local magnates and celebrities standing in front of their stately homes - an almost photographic panorama of life in the 1600's.
The old quarter of Haarlem is very well-preserved, so that you walk out of the Franshalsmuseum and find yourself in the same streetscapes you just saw on canvas, except with bicycles added in and fewer livestock.
According to the museum statistics, there were some 142 painters active in Holland between 1605-1635, and together they produced over a hundred thousand paintings. The fact that many of those paintings were masterpieces, even though the total urban population didn't exceed a half million, is one of those enduring mysteries of culture. Somehow the time was so right for art that this small corner of the world outdid all of England and Germany, before or since, before sinking back into obscurity.
![steam-powered [!] monoplane](http://www.first-to-fly.com/History%20Images/1884%20Mozhaiski%20airplane.jpg){kind=link}
