Hasta La Gadget!

No, that headline isn’t glib observation. According to a new report, Samsung’s marketing department made the call to release the Note 4 ahead of schedule to capture a bit of the fever-pitch energy surrounding Apple’s Note 4 competitor, the iPhone 6 Plus.   Samsung announced the shipping dates a few days ago, noting (pun!) that the Note 4 would hit … Continue reading

There’s been an iOS 8.0.1 update this week, and along with it an update for HealthKit. At the launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus came word that HealthKit apps would need to take a breather. Now they’re back in action. The following message was sent by Apple in response to slightly less-than-optimal HealthKit action on iOS 8 … Continue reading

Image from Teach Yourself Visually Dog Training by Sarah Hodgson, Wiley and Sons 2006

I’m a big fan of Temple Grandin. I think she has done more to explain the human/dog bond than all the celebrity dog trainers combined.

I recently re-read her book Animals Make Us Human. While she frequently focuses on livestock, the sensitivity she shows to all animals, no matter their fate, is enriching. Her compassion inspires me and impacts how I relate to both my clients and my children.

Early on in the book, she sets the framework on which the rest of the book is laid. She talks about studies on the mammalian brain by the neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp. I bought his book, Affective Neuroscience, The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions and wish I had a college course to help me digest it, but the foundations are clear. Dr. Panksepp cites seven “Blue Ribbon” emotion systems that are at the root of all mammalian behavior: Seeking-Play-Fear Frustration- Panic-Lust-Caring. Following Ms. Grandins’ lead, I’m going to elaborate on how these concepts have influenced the way this dog trainer relates to and positively influences her clients-both people and dogs. There are seven emotion systems but I’m leaving out the emotions relating to reproduction. They’re important and interesting but – and I hope this goes without saying -they don’t really come into play when I’m training dogs.

Seeking
Panksepp and Grandin both refer to this one as the “Master Emotion”–the one that motivates life in general and I agree. From my less lofty podium, I
call it the “For me, for me!” center. It motivates all of us animals to want, desire
and explore. Wondering what present you’ll get this holiday season? Excited
to go to a party or fair? Does the smell of good food make you salivate? The seeking emotion is in play.

In my dog training practice, I often employ a “Stay Calm” paradigm. When a dog is doing something frustrating (e.g. jumping, chewing or pulling on leash) I encourage clients to think through the scenario ahead of time and stay calm in the moment. Together we recognize what may be prompting the reaction and offer alternative ways for the dog/puppy to express himself. Here’s a quick overview:

1. Figure out the motivation: is the puppy jumping to reach something or get attention? Is he chewing because he’s teething, he’s bored or trying to get your attention? Is he barking because he hears or sees something, is frustrated or trying to get your attention?
2. Next, shift your focus to change the dog/puppy’s orientation. Identify some favorite foods or activities, putting each on separate cue, like “treat” or “ball.” Hold each positive lure out separately and say the word as you offer it to your dog/puppy. Once your puppy makes the connection between the word and the reward, use one of these prompts to direct or redirect his routines. The word choice is endless and can be modified based on the action that’s aggravating you or you’re trying to encourage. “Go dig!” can alert a dog to a new area; “Kisses!” can be taught to redirect nippiness; “Belly Up!” can help shape calmer greeting responses.
3. Use Positive Reinforcement. There is no greater reward for the seeking emotion than getting what you desire. And that’s true no matter what your species!

Image from Teach Yourself Visually Dog Training by Sarah Hodgson, Wiley and Sons 2006

Play
Happy dogs love to play, and there are few greater rewards for a dog than the time you give them to engage in fun. Creative play — what I call play training — encourages routines that help a dog or puppy learn impulse control. For some dogs chasing is fun–and that’s good up to a point. If a dog gets too excited, she may start to jump and nip. One technique I use to encourage self-control is to play with treat cups. First I shake the cup and teach my student that she can have a treat when she grounded calmly on all fours and/or sits back on her haunches. Next I use the treat cup in play, shaking it for example, as I encourage chasing. When I stop, I say “Wait” and encourage her to stop and sit for a reward.

Lots of dogs love to tug. If you’ve got a tugger, teach her a release word before you get too involved in a game you can’t win. Fetch may seem like the Great American Dog Activity, some dogs just don’t go for it and sometimes a puppy is just too young to understand the concept of sharing (“drop”). If you’ve got a young pup or a non-retriever, try two-toy tosses. Toss the first toy–when your pup reaches that one and turns around, praise her, but immediately shake the other toy and play with that. Which toy do you think your puppy will want? Right- the one you’re holding!

Incorporating play into your normal daily routine is one of the most important elements of good dog training. When dogs have fun they’ll want to be around you and pay more attention to the routines you emphasize. Quoting from Animals in Translation: “Playful animals express happiness and when directed appropriately, display fewer behavior problems.” Look at the photo of the dogs playing- note what they use is place of hands! That’s right- their mouth!

Here’s a pattern I’ve noticed in my work with rescue/shelter dogs: When adult dogs are adopted out of a shelter, it routinely takes 2-6 weeks in a new home to express playful behavior. Why? Because dogs only play when fear and frustration are kept to a minimum. Being dropped off and living in a dog shelter is both scary and frustrating, especially if you’re the calm dog kenneled next to an assertive dog, or if your shelter limits your freedom to a kennel run.

When I’m called in to help a shelter dog or puppy transfer into a new home, I encourage routines that stimulate safe seeking activities (e.g. giving the dogs freedom to explore on a long line or in a fenced enclosure) and limit the pet’s exposure to fear and frustration. Fortunately there are creative ways to encourage behavior and discourage reactivity- techniques that offer guidance, conditioning and positive reinforcement instead of punishments. Playing is a sign of contentment and healthy bonding.

Can you guess what the other three emotions are? You’ll know soon enough. Tune in for my next post on “Your Dog’s 5 Key Emotional Centers, part two!”

Even though President Obama and Iranian President Rouhani are both scheduled to address the UN later this week, there are reportedly no exchanges planned between them. Not a handshake, a phone call or a meeting. But there should be! There is a unique opportunity for them to take a small but perhaps not insignificant bridge building step, one that centers on a place for which President Obama has enormous affection and which has a legacy of promoting peace through agriculture–Iowa.

While the nuclear discussions that are ongoing are no doubt filled with tension and extremely difficult issues, there is one thing that both the top American and Iranian political leaders share in common: An enormous respect for Iowa-born agricultural scientist Dr. Norman E. Borlaug, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate and “father of the green revolution.”

On March 25, when the state of Iowa unveiled Borlaug’s statue in the U.S. Capitol, the entire top bipartisan leadership of the Congress was in attendance, and all spoke glowingly of Dr. Borlaug’s accomplishments. Respect for Borlaug, who trained Iranian wheat scientists in the 1960s, is such that Iranian officials made inquiries with the artist in an attempt to purchase a copy of that same Iowa statue so that it might be erected on the campus of their agricultural research institutes in Karaj.

Just imagine the powerful symbolism that would be conveyed by Borlaug’s statue standing in both Washington and near Tehran. But there are more immediate and practical steps that could be taken.

Both the U.S. and Iran are facing the severe threat of wheat rust disease, against which Dr. Borlaug struggled his entire life. While there are many issues that divide us, this is one area where we could find steps to take together to defeat wheat rust and at the same time honor Dr. Borlaug.

Following the unprecedented invitation to me to speak at the August 26 Iranian celebration of the centennial observance of Dr. Borlaug’s birth [it was the first time a former U.S. ambassador ever addressed a conference organized by the Iranian government], the World Food Prize has invited an Iranian expert in wheat to take part in its Borlaug Dialogue Symposium October 15-18 in Des Moines. Approval of the visa for this scientist would be that small but not insignificant next step.

In 1959, at the height of the nuclear threat during the Cold War, Soviet Premier Khrushchev came to the Garst farm in western Iowa where he saw firsthand impressive American corn production. That visit lead to a three decades-long series of agricultural exchanges by a great Iowa Democrat, John Chrystal, that helped build openings and diffuse tensions between Moscow and Washington.

There is the chance for another Iowa opening now. All it takes is a phone call about the one person, maybe the only person, they both admire.

William Eggleston, Untitled (Memphis), 1970. © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

The argument could be made.

American photographer William Eggleston (1939-) is widely considered “the father of color photography”; the 1976 exhibition of his work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is considered the most important solo exhibition of color photography to date; and this image, entitled at times Tricycle, Memphis and Untitled, served as the cover image of MoMA’s exhibition catalogue.

So what is going on in this picture?

Let’s begin with the use of color, which was (and in many ways, still is) the most commonly-discussed attribute of Eggleston’s images. There’s good reason for this. At the time of Eggleston’s exhibition, color was shunned in serious photography circles. Until then photographers used color only for advertising and journalism, and most influential voices in the field would echo Walker Evans’ opinion, voiced in 1969, that color photography was “vulgar.” Furthermore, even though we retrospectively understand Eggleston’s MoMA exhibition to be hugely influential, it was widely despised by the mainstream art world of the time, primarily because of its powerful assertion that color photography should be considered an art form.

Color wasn’t just an important attribute for Eggleston but arguably the most important. He famously said that what he chose to take pictures of were just pretexts for the making of color photographs. Eggleston’s 1974 adoption of dye-transfer printing (which was the only manual process that allowed photographers to manipulate color before digital photography) was a major turning point for him, and one can understand how liberating and exciting this new technology must have been for him to work with. Certain works by Eggleston seem wholly obsessed with color, such as his 1973 photograph, Greenwood, Mississippi (which is almost entirely concerned with the blood-red color of a ceiling). Tricycle is less intensely-focused on color. Yet at the same time, there are subtle gradations of tans and browns, a sharp contrast created between the blues and whites of the bike, and then there is the sharp red of the handlebar grips.

Let’s move on to discuss what is photographed here: banal, everyday, common objects and imagery. This has been a common trait of Eggleston’s work throughout his career. On one hand this focus shares many similarities to the work of Eggleston’s influences, such as Walker Evans, and Robert Frank or others grouped into what is referred to as New Documentary Photography or New American Color Photography, i.e. Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach and William Christenberry. Outside of photography, this also connects Eggleston to Pop Art. At the same time, unique to Eggleston is his de-emphasis of the people involved and the fact that upon closer inspection, his images reveal something slightly off, in a way which was much more subtle than in, for example, Diane Arbus’s work. For this reason, photographer Lewis Baltz once called Eggleston’s work, “images of the American home place, inviting on their surface and ice cold at their heart.” In Eggleston’s world, objects often fray at the edges, erode or allude to the underside of society. Take Tricycle, in which a familiar American scene of a tricycle on a sidewalk upon closer examination yields up the rusty handlebars, worn tires, rims and spokes of the tricycle, as well as dead grass, empty yards, leafless trees and a cold white-gray sky.

The particulars of Tricycle’s composition and framing were also important ways Eggleston used to defamiliarize common imagery. The tricycle is monumental–Eggleston laid down on the ground to take this image and we look up at it looming over the houses and everything else in the picture. Eggleston suggested his interest in this point-of-view was inspired by his desire to create a child’s point-of-view or even an insect’s. He has also talked about making pictures that looked as if they weren’t taken by a human being. Then there is the framing of the shot. A car peeks in at the right side, both houses are not shown completely but are either blocked or cut off. Also the lines of the sidewalk, the house and the road are slightly off-parallel creating a consistent sense that the image is not in line, and off-kilter.

What’s the story of this picture?

On one hand, it’s impossible to know exactly, since Eggleston rarely discusses the details behind any of his pictures. On the other hand, like so many of his images, the ambiguity and subtle allusions created by his choice of subject matter, lack of figures and composition allow for many possible readings. Critics often see these as dark narratives, comparable to the movies of Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch. For example, the empty tricycle, or the front of a car just peeking into the right side of the frame might be–according to familiar Hollywood narratives–the visit of a long-lost father, the scene of the death of a child (whose parents refuse to move his toys) or the front yard of a dysfunctional family that does not tend its yard (as opposed to the order of the rest of the suburban landscape). A more light-hearted reading could allude to the various ways kids play. Children might have no interest in riding a tricycle, and would find it more fun to lie down and look up at it, imagining it as a motorcycle. Or they might just want to lie on the ground and look up at the sky and space out. There is also something subtly phallic about the adjustment pole of the seat. Maybe Tricycle is a rumination on the masculine trajectory of mid-century America? Young boys start out riding tricycles (which are highly suggestive of hot rod motorcycles) and are thus fed the dream early on about the power of the road and owning a car; for this reason the sedan in the background may have been framed by the bike. Another reading that has been proposed is biographical: A recent documentary about the artist shows a family snapshot with Eggleston as a child with a tricycle in the background. Maybe this is the artist reflecting on his own childhood.

As always, please feel free to send me your feedback, either here or on Twitter. This is the eighth in a series of posts on individual artworks. Previous posts have concerned one of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Pegasus, 1987, Keith Haring’s “Crack is Wack” mural, Banksy, and Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.