My Dad, Dempsey, Willard and Firpo

Funny how you run into things, how you discover things. It was Friday night and we were laying in bed trying to find something to watch. For all the thousands of channels and video-on-demand, there was nothing but garbage and junk. I took the control and flipped over to PBS, where there was a show about the American painter George Bellows, narrated by Ethan Hawke, who we both like from the Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight movies. As we were watching the film about Bellow's life and his interest in boxing, I suddenly found myself staring at a painting depicting a Jack Dempsey falling out of the ring and just about to land among the reporters. Standing in the ring is the challenger, Luis Ángel Firpo.

The thing is that my dad told me about the match when Dempsey got knocked out of the ring in an interview I did with him in 1983, 60 years after the match in New York 1923. I used it in my book about dad --  I’m Adding Sunshine to My Paint -- Harald Sandberg’s Path to the Arts.

George Bellow's 1924 painting of the Dempsey-Firpo Match.

Jack Dempsey temporarily out of the ring.

Boxing was big when my dad was a little kid in Söderhamn, a coastal town in Northern Sweden, and his hero was Jack Dempsey. He wrote a school essay about Dempsey that was much talked about, and he retold the essay when I interviewed him, but at one point he switched the story around. He had been talking about how Dempsey was fighting Jess Willard, and had hit him so that he landed among the journalists, but then my dad corrected himself and said that it was Dempsey who had been knocked out of the ring. I googled the Dempsey-Willard match and found a video on Youtube, but nobody fell out of the ring. I assumed that dad's memory had failed him, or that his imagination had played a trick on him.

Dad was right about the event, but had mixed up Willard and Firpo. Three minutes into the Youtube video of the Dempsey-Firpo match -- which took place on September 14 at the Polo Grounds in New York in front of 80,000 spectators -- Dempsey really does go through the ropes. And one of the spectators was Bellows, who soon after painted Dempsey and Firpo, which hangs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

If I hadn't flipped channels that Friday night, I may never have found out that dad was right about Dempsey's fall, but wrong about the challenger. So it is with much of our knowledge. It just comes to us as an epiphenomenon.

Firpo's mausoleum at the Recoleta, in Buenos Aires.
Copyright: Hans Sandberg, 2018

Read more:
'Dempsey and Firpo': The Greatest American Sports Painting
Allen Barra in The Atlantic Montly, April 24, 2012.

Jack Dempsey vs. Luis Ángel Firpo (Wikipedia)

Below is an excerpt from my book about my dad, the part where he tells the story Jack Dempsey. Click on the images to read them full size!

What Do We Do Once the Autonomous Lethal Robots Have Arrived?

A brilliant speech about horrible prospects right around the corner. It's so scary, but fortunately, there might be a solution if we chose to use it. 

 

Veteran Cyborg in Scuffle at Champs Elysees McDonalds

Cyborg pioneer Steve Mann claims to have been attacked in Paris. Blogger John Biggs writes:

"Upon ordering, McDonald’s employees at 140, Avenue Champs Elysees, Paris accosted Mann and tried to tear the glasses out of his head."  

"In short, these McDonald’s employees harassed, intimidated, and damaged Mann nearly irrevocably. Ray Kurzweil, a well known futurist, calls this the first attack on a cyborg in history and Mann’s importances to the field of human-computer interaction can’t be measured. That a pioneer like Mann would be accosted – in Paris, of all places – is a travesty," Biggs continues. (Augmented Reality Explorer Steve Mann Assaulted At Parisian McDonald’s)

To me the whole things seems rather silly, and it is not the first time Steve Mann has been in similar situations.  He is a prophet, and prophets need attention.

Here is a link to a story I wrote about him back in 2001.

Half Mann, Half Computer

For those of you who read Swedish, please read this blog post about Steve Mann's scuffle at an airport back in 2002. You can find an English news report about the event here! The event is in many ways so similar to the one at McDonalds that you wonder if it has been scripted.

"On that day, Feb. 16, he said, he followed the routine he has used on previous flights. He told the security guards in Toronto that he had already notified the airline about his equipment. He showed them documentation, some of it signed by his doctor, that described the wires and glasses, which he wears every waking minute as part of his internationally renowned research on wearable computers.
On his return flight, he did however run into trouble as Airport security wanted to run his wearable computer through the X-ray machine. He refused and spent two days arguing his Cyborg rights.

“When he was finally allowed to go home, some pieces of equipment were not returned to him, he said, and his glasses were put in the plane's baggage compartment although he warned that cold temperatures there could ruin them.

Without a fully functional system, he said, he found it difficult to navigate normally. He said he fell at least twice in the airport, once passing out after hitting his head on what he described as a pile of fire extinguishers in his way. He boarded the plane in a wheelchair.

‘I felt dizzy and disoriented and went downhill from there,’ he said.” 

(....) 

“Since losing the use of his vision system and computer memory several weeks ago, he said, he cannot concentrate and is behaving differently. He is now undergoing tests to determine whether his brain has been affected by the sudden detachment from the technology.” At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged, Lisa Guersney, New York Times, March 14, 2002.)

Robert Kuttner on A. O. Hirschman

Robert Kuttner reviews Worldly Philosopher, Jeremy Adelman’s biography of A. O. Hirschman, in Rediscovering Albert Hirschman.

What Austerity Does To the Sum of Our Minds

The origin of totalitarianism is right here and now. Fear and loathing is always easier than brave and caring.

Robert Reich: Global Capital and the Nation State

 

How Dad Cheated Death and Became An Artist

Here is the English version of my book about my father's struggle to become an artist.

Markets Fill Vacuum Left by Hollow Power in North Korea

Like in China after Mao, economic and political reforms will come to North Korea not because of external pressure or political insights among the elites, but because once the political legitimacy of the regime has evaporated, there are only two alternatives to reintegrate the society: War or markets. The former solutions is still possible, but looks rather suicidal. The other solution offers a way forward, but the risk to the elite is immense.

Deng Xiaoping realized that only by decentralizing economic power could the party preserve enough centralized political power to control the country's political future. Young Kim Jong-un probably knows that, but he lacks real stature in the political elite, which is why he is fighting so desperately and erratically to raise his military profile. If he fails, I would expect a military intervention led by a general that can muster enough charisma to control the situation while beginning to adapt the political and economic system to the reality on the ground, which seems to be a more or less market driven society.

Jang Jin-sung, a former North Korean state official and poet laureate, gives a very interesting analysis of the current state of the North Korean society in today's New York Times.

The Market Shall Set North Korea Free

"All North Koreans depended for their very survival on a state rationing system until it collapsed in the mid-1990s. Its demise was due in part to the regime’s concentrated investment of funds in a “party economy” that maintained the cult of the Kims and lavished luxuries on an elite instead of developing a normal economy based on domestic production and trade. Desperate people began to barter household goods for rice on the streets — and the underground economy was born. With thousands of people starving to death, the authorities had no option but to turn a blind eye to all the illegal markets that began to pop up.

Around this time, the nation’s workplaces were made responsible for feeding their employees. The only way they could do so was by setting up “trading companies,” which sold raw materials to China in exchange for rice. These businesses became part of the foundation of the underground economy, acting as import-export hubs that in time began to import from China consumer goods like refrigerators and radios."

Facebook Is Playing Peek-A-Boo With Me

It's there and then it's gone, and then it's there again, and then it's gone again.... this new virtual game is brought to you courtesy of Facebook.

I was relieved on Friday when my News Feed suddenly reappeared in its normal state, but on Saturday it stopped displaying more than 4 posts, and ending the page with the sentence I have now come to hate:
"There are no more posts to show right now."

What's going on here?

I can post from other applications, and these posts show up, like the one I did from Dagens Nyheter this morning, but trying to enter something directly through Facebook doesn't result in anything, at least not on my News Feed/TimeLine.

And the Afternoon When It Came Back

I had almost resigned myself to a life without Facebook, which was not such a terrible thing after all, when I met our resident techie and told him about my vanishing News Feed. I turned around and followed me back to my office explaining potential solutions on the way. I logged in to my system and started Facebook to show what had happened, but quickly realized that something had changed. There was a new post at the top of my feed, and when I scrolled down, there was no annoying message at the bottom telling me that there  were no more posts to show. The problem had solved it self.

Don't worry! Procrastinate! Sometimes that all you need to do....