BIRTH | Oct. 18 – A. J. Liebling (Personal Comment)

A. J. Liebling. He died at 59, the
same year I met him briefly.

October 18, 2017 – This day was born in 1904 in New York City A(bbot) J(oseph) Liebling. As a boy, he loved reading the newspapers:

[M]any of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism... 

So he became a newspaper reporter and loved it. He would:

pound up tenement stairs and burst in on families disarranged by sudden misfortune. ... I learned almost immediately what every reporter knows, that most people are eager to talk about their troubles.

To get a job at the New York World, he hired a man to pace back and forth for three days outside the Pulitzer building with a sign: "Hire Joe Liebling." Although nobody at the World ever admitted to seeing the sign, he was hired. 

From The World in 1935 he moved up to a job with the The New Yorker that lasted till he died nearly 30 years later. He wrote about World War II, boxing and food. You might not figure out the first two topics, but you might guess the third by looking at his photo.

Comment

I met A. J. Liebling in the spring of 1963 when we were both at the Bircher-Benner Clinic on Keltenstrasse 9 in Zürich. Dr Bircher had an international clientèle, including my mother's Dutch relatives who claimed he cured several of them (including my grandmother) of cancer. His son Ralph Bircher carried on some of his work, and Dr Bircher's Estonian-born niece, Dr Dagmar Liechti-von Brasch, took over the Clinic in the 1940s after the death of Dr Bircher, who raised her as one of his own during and after World War I when the von Brasch family was at risk in Estonia. My mother made sure I was checked out several times at the Bircher-Benner-Privatklinik and I was given many earnest individual and group lectures on the value of exercise and minimally processed food. Modern medicine is catching up with Dr Bircher's régime. When I was there in 1963, I was told that a fellow American from New York I had met, Mr. Liebling, had left early because he didn't like the unprocessed food. Liebling was a gourmet and it showed (see photo above). It's too bad that he didn't learn to appreciate the gourmet qualities of Bircher Muesli. He died before the end of the year I met him, at a young 59 years of age.😕 

As Dr Bircher's son and daughter-in-law aged, the Bircher-Benner-Privatklinik lost some of its energy and it closed in 1994, becoming a government health facility. But as new research confirmed many of Dr Bircher's claims, and as the taste for Bircher Muesli spread throughout the world, the demand grew for the Clinic's return. It reopened in another location (Braunwald) in 2011.

EINSTEIN | Nov. 25–General Theory Finished

Albert Einstein
Made a timeline.
He had the nerve
To make it curve.
(Clerihew by JT Marlin.)

Nov. 25 – This date in 1915, 100 years ago, Einstein finished his general theory and submitted for publication his article, "The Field Equations of Gravitation."

It included ten equations that comprise his Theory of General Relativity. Through his equations, Einstein propounds the origins of his theory of gravity and how it interacts with "space-time."

Einstein had, ten years before, developed his theory of special relativity which said that the speed of light is a constant and a limit in our universe. [See Comment below, where this summary is contested by a man with a D.Phil. in Physics from Oxford.]

The New Yorker has a useful article that tells the "big idea" of the "space doctor"using only the "ten hundred" words in most common use in the English language ("thousand" is not one of them). Einstein's new general theory viewed space and time as interwoven – changing one produces an effect on the other. The basic idea came from his former professor, Hermann Minkowski, and he generalized it.

Speed depends on the observer's frame of reference:

• If you are on an airplane, you don't feel yourself moving.
• But an observer on the ground will report that the plane is moving. 

Einstein realized that if space and time are on a single continuum, then as the rate of speed goes up, the rate of time must go down and vice versa:

• For an object moving slowly through space, time passes quickly. 
• For an object moving quickly, time slows down. 
• The closer an object gets to attaining the speed of light, the bigger the effect.

Since then, scientists have proved his theory by sending atomic clocks up in high-speed rockets. When they return, the clocks on the rockets are slightly behind their earthly counterparts. 

According to Einstein's general theory, matter bends the "fabric" of spacetime. If space-time is a rubber sheet stretched above the ground, and you put a heavy object like a bowling ball in the middle of the sheet, the bowling ball will pull down the center of the sheet. Any other lighter-weight balls you place on the blanket will be pulled toward the bowling ball, because the bowling ball is keeping the blanket from being flat.

That's where gravity comes from. For us on earth, the sun is the bowling ball, and the planets are other, smaller balls rolling around the sun. The planets are moving so fast in their orbits that they just keep circling the sun; their speed keeps them from falling into the sun, and gravity keeps them from flying off into space.

Einstein theorized that light curves as a result of gravity's effects on the fabric of space-time.

Willem van Stockum,
Like William of Ockam,
Did what he must –
He invented his Dust.

He said that curve ought to be provable by carefully photographing an eclipse. In 1919, astronomers went to an island off the coast of Africa to get the best possible photo of a solar eclipse. Sure enough,  they showed a deflection of the sunlight matching Einstein's prediction.

Willem J. van Stockum is the first person to write in English about the implication of Einstein's general theory for the possibility of time travel.

His 1937 article showed that Einstein's equations generate closed time-like curves, following on his dissertation for his Edinburgh Ph.D. in physics.

His "van Stockum dust" invention is viewed as an ingenious interpretation of the most difficult parts of Einstein's general theory.

Comment

I sent the above to my nephew Chris Oakley (D.Phil. Physics Oxon.) to make sure I got it as right as can be and still be talking English, with or without the ten-hundred-word limit. He has responded only to the bit about the special theory of relativity, which he says is not correctly expressed above. Here is his proposed new language for that bit:

Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905): Motion can only be detected with reference to another object; when you say you are travelling at 50 mph it is 50 mph relative to the ground – relative to the surface of the Moon (for example) it would be a lot faster. The notion that the laws of physics do not depend on relative motion is called Galilean Invariance (neither word being in the 1,000-word list). Thus if you are conducting a physics experiment in a train travelling smoothly and levelly on a completely straight track at constant speed & it makes no reference to what is going on outside, you will get the same results whatever the speed of the train – if Galilean Invariance is true. Newton’s laws of motion are Galilean-invariant. The problem was that the new-fangled electromagnetism, discovered in the 19th century, which also governs the propagation of light, as embodied by Maxwell’s equations, is not Galilean-invariant. It looked as though there was a preferred reference frame where light would propagate in spherical waves much in the way that if you dip your finger in a lake from a stationary rowing boat, the ripples will radiate outwards in circles. That is the “preferred” reference frame; if the boat is moving the ripples will bunch in the direction of motion of the boat, and spread out downstream. Ripple propagation, at least as seen from the boat, is faster downstream (you add the speed of the boat), but slower upstream (you subtract the speed of the boat), and you can figure out the speed of the boat from this difference. That was the idea of the Michelson-Morley experiment c. 1900, only the boat was planet Earth, the lake they called the Lumeniferous Ether and the ripples were light waves. They found, and continue to find, nothing. All sorts of explanations for the null result were advanced, e.g., that the ether is dragged by heavy objects like the Earth, but Einstein came up with the simple but mind-warping notion that the Ether does not exist, rather space and time themselves conspire to ensure if you measure the speed of light you will always get the same result (about 186,000 miles per second) regardless of the motion of your measuring instruments. He was rightly dismissed as a lunatic… well, initially, at least. 

I am promised a subsequent bit about the general theory (1915).

The Whitney and the High Line

The new Whitney, from the High Line. Note the Whitney
visitors cantilevered out to admire their view. Alice
Tepper Marlin in the foreground. Photo by JT Marlin.

New York City is blessed with museums, and the Whitney Museum can be considered one of the "Big Four", the other three being the Met, MOMA and the Guggenheim.

The new Whitney that opened on May 1 is its fourth incarnation. According to a 2006 article by Calvin Tomkins, the Whitney originated from an offer in 1929 to the director of the Met of 500 contemporary paintings and sculptures by artists that had been showing in the makeshift Whitney Studio.

The Met's director, Edward Robinson, rejected the offer so brusquely that he appears not to have realized that a substantial endowment would accompany the art.

Instead of giving the art and endowment to the Met, the donor - Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney - created the first Whitney Museum of American Art in three converted brownstones in 1931. The Whitney sponsored Biennial Exhibitions and purchased art from them.

The latest incarnation of the Whitney by Renzo Piano has been widely praised, for example by Peter Schjeldahl. Alice and I walked down the High Line to look at it. We are located about one block from the High Line. The Whitney is at the southern end of the High Line on Gansevoort Street. It's a pleasant walk, and we enjoyed seeing the changing landscape of the High Line, changes both seasonal and permanent.

Comparing the Tomkins' and Schjeldahl articles it seems that the new Whitney may be five years late and way over budget, but the new building is a big success and will be an anchor for Chelsea, where we have lived for 44 years.

BIRTHDAY | Feb. 21–Happy 90th, New Yorker (Comment, Charlotte and "Maman")

Katharine and E. B. White feed their sheep on their
Brooklyn, Maine farm.

Bilbao, Spain–On this day in 1925, the first edition of The New Yorker magazine was published.

The founding editor was Harold Ross, who originated in Colorado via California and Georgia and finally as editor of the U.S. Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes.

Garrison Keillor today in The Writer's Almanac points to two other people who deserve credit for the magazine's success during the challenging years of the 1930s:

• Raoul Fleischmann, heir to the Fleischmann Yeast empire, who was the magazine's primary backer, loyal to his death despite disagreements with Ross and the magazine's slowness in starting to make  money.
• Katharine Sergeant (Kay) Angell White, who helped make the literary side of The New Yorker as successful as its art. She and Ross recruited James Thurber, John O'Hara, and Wolcott Gibbs; and E.B. White, who married Angell in 1929. White said of his wife after she died, in a 1980 interview with Nan Robertson in The New York Times: "I may be biased, but I don't think The New Yorker would have survived if Kay hadn't showed up there."

Comment on Charlotte and Maman:

This is a model of Maman in the
museum, for blind people who
want to feel the structure. Photos
by JT Marlin.

The heroine of Charlotte's Web is surely modeled on Kay Angell White – they were both beautiful, creative, word-savvy and a Really Good Friend.

With arachnophobia still epidemic, that thought is only for fans of E. B. White, but such fans are legion.

This shows the gentle side of Maman,
with slender legs and a preoccupation
with her babies.

With the New Yorker's birthday and E. B. White's Charlotte in mind, I therefore made sure this morning to get a close-up look at Maman, the 30-foot-high mother spider by Louise Bourgeois outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

This shows the menacing side of
Maman - the perspective from
below.

Bourgeois showed her interest in spiders in her drawings as early as the 1940s. She picked up the theme in a big way in the 1990s. Like E. B. White, she sees the mother spider as an intensely caring and protective creature.

In the case of Bourgeois, her tribute is to her own mother, who actually was a weaver. Whereas E. B. White, I think, shows only the gentle side of Charlotte, Bourgeois shows both the vulnerable and the menacing side of the spider.

GUGGENHEIM | Museum Bilbao Is Great Architecture, Planning

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao seen from across the Nervion River. Note the huge size of the museum.
The white tent frames a half-dozen people. Photo by JT Marlin, February 20, 2015.

BILBAO, Basque Country, Spain - I flew here today from Amsterdam today, on my way to see my sister Olga in Pamplona. Coming into Bilbao from the airport I had a great view of The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry.

The Museum was opened nearly 20 years ago by Spain's then-King Juan Carlos I, who abdicated last year in favor of his son Felipe VI.

Wide Praise for the Museum's Design

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has been widely praised by critics and is much-loved by the general public:

• Architect Philip Johnson described it as "the greatest building of our time".
• The New Yorker's senior critic Calvin Tomkins called it "a fantastic dream ship of undulating form in a cloak of titanium," its reflective panels conjuring up fish scales. 
• It is the most frequently named building as the most important work completed since 1980 in the 2010 World Architecture Survey of architecture experts.

The Museum has been imitated by other architects, and Gehry has used some of the themes of the Museum in other designs.

For example, Gehry did the building on the West Side of Manhattan on the edge of the Hudson at 19th-20th Street. We see it from our Chelsea apartment. On a smaller scale, it gives the effect of a ship's sails, much like the Bilbao Museum. It is a highlight of the High Line.

Incidentally, there's an ad featuring different cities in Amsterdam's Schiphol airport and it gives reasons for going to New York City. Under "free things" it lists just two attractions:

• The High Line
• The New York Public Library.

An Economic-Development Success

Not perhaps so much appreciated as the design of the Guggenheim Museum building is the success of the economic-development thinking of the Basque Government. After the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and the return of democratic government in 1979, the Basque Government came out of exile in 1980.

In 1981, this government suggested to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation that it would provide funds for a Guggenheim museum that would revitalize Bilbao's decaying port. The deal was far-reaching:

• The Basque Government agreed to pay $100 million to build the museum, $50 million for permanent acquisitions, $20 million to the Guggenheim for managing the process. It would then subsidize the annual budget to the tune of $12 million a year.
• The Guggenheim agreed to manage the institution and to rotate parts of its own collection through the Bilbao museum. The Foundation gets great credit for picking Frank Gehry as the architect, and for giving him free rein, even stimulus, to design something unique. 

The museum took 15 years to design and build. The wait was worth it. Not only has it been an architectural success - it has driven the Bilbao area's economy, and it gives great credibility to the intelligence of the democratic Basque Government. There are now nonstop flights between London and Bilbao, for example, on decent-sized planes, which is why I am stopping in Bilbao on my way to Pamplona. Hotels have sprung up and tours bring large crowds to the city.

Key Element of Success: A New Brand for Bilbao

Economist Beatriz Plaza of the University of the Basque Country had conducted several studies of the impact of cultural investments on the local economy of cities and regions. She concludes:

Culture-led branding has had real economic returns in Bilbao. Since the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s opening, press about the museum has effectively attracted visitors to its doors. A durable, valuable brand is a major goal of any city-branding strategy. [We provide] evidence that Bilbao has achieved such a goal.

Amen to that.

Postscript - "Maman" and Charlotte

The day I visited was the 90th birthday of The New Yorker, founded by Harold Ross. Katharine Angell found E. B. White for Ross... and she became Mrs. White after four years. EBW's Charlotte is surely based on his wife Kay. I compare the spider of Louise Bourgeois, "Maman", with that of EBW.

CONCERTGEBOUW | Orchestra in NYC Feb. 13-14

The Concertgebouw in their home habitat in Amsterdam.

NYC, Feb. 10, 2013–We will be going to hear Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on Feb. 13 at Carnegie Hall.

The Concertgebouw is performing Mahler's First and Bartok's Violin Concerto No. 2.

The Concertgebouw was judged the world's best orchestra by a panel of judges put together by Gramophone magazine in 2008. The New York Times asks: "Greatest orchestra in the world, or greatest orchestra ever?" The New Yorker says:

This world-renowned orchestra has the same qualities as a Rembrandt painting: commanding virtuosity and an unforgettably warm, rich palette.

My mother's grandfather, Charles Boissevain, when he was editor of the Algemeen Handelsblad, the leading Dutch paper of its era, led the campaign to build the Concertgebouw when there was nothing on the spot but a field of grass.

The Concertgebouw Orchestra was created in 1888. Charles Boissevain and his eldest son Charles E. H. Boissevain helped recruit as conductor William Mengelberg, who in turn became a huge fan of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Charles E. H. was on the Board for many years, excluding the years when his brother-in-law Han de Booy was a staff officer. 

The long, glorious and then sad story about Mengelberg–who has been described to me as the greatest conductor of the early 20th century–is told here:  Mahler and Mengelberg - www.boissevain.us/charlesboissevain/mahlerandmengelberg.html.

Mahler died in Vienna nearly 102 years ago, spending the last three years of his life in New York City, conducting the Metropolitan Opera - with its first opening night under his leadership on January 1, 1908 with Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde", followed by Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Beethoven's "Fidelio". While Mahler had many fans in New York City, he also faced backbiting from the New York establishment. Arturo Toscanini was inappropriately matched with him at the Met for the 1908-09 season. Toscanini knew how to woo the critical establishment and went on to a half-century of success. Mahler meanwhile was delighted to get away from the Met and accepted an offer to conduct the New York Philharmonic.  Dogged by a heart infection, however, he left New York in April 1911 and died the next month in Vienna. Years later, Leonard Bernstein said "I am Mahler"–meaning that he felt a spiritual kinship–and he is buried with the score of Mahler's Fifth Symphony over his heart.