Friday, 3 December 2004 Francis Crick & Christof Koch -- Fashion LA -- Techno-Terraforming La Jolla, Rosemead, Pasadena, The Infinite Francis Crick, 1916-2004 Last week's broadcast featured the long overdue presentation of my conversation with neurobiologists Francis Crick of the Salk Institute and Christof Koch from Caltech. Back in 2001, two years before the advent of Strange Angels, I was thinking about a new series of portrait paintings and with that in mind I photographed then Adobe Systems CEO John Warnock, educator Erin Gruwell, and neurobiologists Francis Crick and Christof Koch. For this new series I also recorded interviews... although I had no idea at the time, this series was in some sense the progenitor of Strange Angels. The night before I flew up to San Jose to meet with John Warnock, literally the night before, I trekked out to the Sony outlet store in Lake Elsinore and bought the first of much audio equipment. (Francis Crick & Christof Koch, La Jolla, California, Tuesday 13 March 2001) When I conducted these three early interviews I really didn't have the slightest idea that I'd ever host a radio show! And in one sense, rather than say that the portraits lead to the radio show, you might say - even though the portraits came first - that the radio show lead to the portraits. This is to say that in some sense even as I do all these Strange Angels interviews today, I sort of think of the project less as "journalism" and more as a form of "portrait art." And after all, my graphic portraits do carry a whoppingly heavy hand of the aritst on them, so you could say that the "sound portraits" are more honest or accurate or specific portraits of the subjects. These first interviews had various technical difficulties, the Crick and Koch interview was almost unlistenable because of periodic high frequency RF interference. So even though Strange Angles has been on the air for nearly two years now (I ran the Erin Gruwell interview on the show last year) the Crick and Koch interview has sat mostly in the can. Recently, audio engineer Rychard Cooper performed a fantastic piece of surgery on the recording and eliminated the bulk of the interference. It still has some jet noise, but I think Francis and Christof's ideas are easily worth that much. On Tuesday 13 March 2001 I made my way down to the LaJolla hilltop home of Francis and Odille Crick. Francis, Odille, Christof, and I had lunch at the side of their backyard pool - hence all the jet noise - and after lunch we recorded this conversation. As we spoke Odille brought out a fresh fruit dessert. Even now, three-and-a-half years later, I still remember - still recall the conscious percept - that this was the freshest fruit I'd ever tasted. Francis Crick died this summer, on 28 July, three years and four months after our conversation, four months before that conversation would finally air. Of course, Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for discovering the double helix structure of DNA. And maybe a little bit for the unassuming way Watson and Crick concluded their short paper on the discovery, "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." In some strange synchronicity, Maurice Wilkins, who shared the prize with Watson and Crick, was, like Francis, born in 1916, and, like Francis, passed away in 2004. According to Christof, two hours before Francis passed away, he was still dictating a paper. In Christof's words, "he was a scientist to the last." Bookending this 2001 conversation is Francis Crick's 1994 book The Astonishing Hypotheses: The Scientific Search for the Soul, and Cristof Koch's 2004 book, The Quest for Consciousness: a Neurobiological Approach. Francis' 1994 dedication reads, "for Christof Koch, without whose energy and enthusiasm this book would never have been written." Christof's 2004 dedication reads, "I dedicate this book to Francis Crick, friend, mentor and scientist." One of the interesting ideas in this conversation specifically and in the consciousness biz generally is that of "Qualia." In his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis defines qualia as, "the subjective quality of mental experience, such as the redness of red or the painfulness of pain." The philosopher David Chalmers says, "'to be conscious' is roughly synonymous with 'to have qualia,'" whereas the philosopher Daniel Dennett says, "there simply are no qualia at all." In his book The Quest for Consciousness, Christof defines qualia as "the elemental feelings and sensations making up conscious experience." He believes "that qualia symbolize, in a compact manner, the vast amounts of explicit and implicit information... sufficient for one particular conscious percept." Fashion LA! So qualia have various philosophical and neurobiological importance, but they're really also a lot about the "simple" notion: What is it like to be me? cf: What is it like to be a bat? (Gayle Day, Jose Angel, Uriel Saenz, Gayle Day, Rich Jacques) And what is more intimately engaged in being you than the topic of this week's Strange Angels broadcast: Fashion! The fibers we choose to drape on our bodies beam a visual sense of our aesthetics and moods outward, and impress a tactile, visceral sense inward on our bodies. This week's show features a romp through the fashion landscape here in Los Angles with designers Jose Angel and Uriel Saenz. In addition to design, Angel is also the producer/director/mastermind behind the recent P.KaBu series of runway shows. Filling in the hour is singer-songwriter Gayle Day who turns out to be something of an accessory designer herself. Singer-songwriter Rich Jacques enriches the sound with a second guitar. Also on tomorrow's program, the guests and I'll read entries from The Future Dictionary of America from McSweeney's Books, a dictionary set in some better, future American year. Techno-Terraforming It finally occurred to me the other day that I wasn't going to be shooting a whole lot of film in the future. Wake up and smell the CCD, so to speak. And so I wondered: do I really need to keep my four 35mm cameras, 2-1/4, 4x5 and 8x10 cameras and various assorted lenses? Actually, if you count his lifelong workhorse, the Leica M3, that my dad gave me a year or two ago, I suppose that'd be five 35mm cameras! So I took the classic Nikon F with motor drive and the elegant, black, Calumet monorail 4x5 camera up to a couple of Pasadena camera stores to see what I could get for them. I was already braced that it wouldn't be much... in fact I was just hoping to get a hundred bucks for the lot... and a little more storage space back in the studio. It turns out that a hundred bucks for two classic cameras was a bit presumptuous on my part. It turns out that neither store wanted the stuff at all. One of the guys who turned me down kept looking at the stuff... after opening up the Nikon F, he said, "wow, this is the cleanest Nikon F I've ever seen in my life... of course we still don't want it!" The other guy told me that 95 percent of their camera sales these days are digital. I guess I hadn't really been paying attention, but it was a little bit of a surprise that the penetration had gone so far. As I was driving home what finally sunk in was - far from being arrogant or dismissive when they told me they didn't want my useless old stuff - how sad both guys had been when they told me they couldn't take the equipment. Even though I didn't get to unload my used gear, I realized that this had all hit them far harder than it was hitting me. It made me think back to the time, maybe 15-ish years ago, when desktop typography decimated the typesetting industry. One day you were paying a dollar a letter to have display type set... the next day you just did it yourself on your Mac. Obviously that time had ushered in much sadness for many people - to say nothing of creating unscalable mountains of hideous typography - but it also put unprecedented power and independence on the desktop of every designer. It was really a wonderful thing, even as people were sadly throwing away their glorious letterpress machines and age-old collections of metal and wooden type and replacing them with crappy, plastic, obsolete-on-delivery computer boxes. And all of this, naturally, made me think of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Not just for Ricardo Montalban's fabu outfit or his babe entourage, but for the "Genesis Device," which was a terraforming torpedo that swept across a "matrix" (land) and reformed that place with it's new matrix in more or less an instant. And really, isn't that what digital typography and digital cameras and information age everything represent: the overnight techno-terraforming of tools, techniques and materials. So I suppose I'm keeping the Nikon and the Calumet for now. I stuck the Calumet on a tripod in the living room. It looks really cool with the bellows extended and the fabulous 300mm Komura lens (in a no.3 Copal shutter.) Anyway, it'll probably be a while before you'll have an instantly reconfigurable nanobot swarm that you can just ask to reconfigure itself as "a really clean Nikon F." Dress for success! -- Glenn Zucman, Rosemead, CA