Charlie Haden, RIP

A giant. He was an essential force in the jazz avant-garde. But forever an Iowa country boy too.

Cerveza

In Seville when you ask for a cerveza with your tapas you are most likely to get a glass of Cruzcampo, which is brewed here and is Spain's biggest-selling brand. It is now owned by Heineken. In fact, Heineken's Seville brewery is its largest in Europe, and produces both Cruzcampo (80% of its output) and Heineken. We toured the facility on our sustainability trip. Spain had just been eliminated from the World Cup after being shut out by Chile, and some noted the irony that the mighty Dutch, who had trounced Spain 5-1 in an earlier match, also owned Spain's most popular brand of beer. Still, our Spanish guide took some pains to insist that Cruzcampo is not just Heineken with a different label, pointing out the different orientation of the giant cylindrical fermentation tanks (vertical for C, horizontal for H), noting that the yeast is a different breed, etc. I can vouch for the fact that Cruzcampo is its own beer. Not Lagunitas IPA by any stretch, but better than Heineken to my palate.

The enormous brewery, only a few years old, is a marvel of modern industrial technology. Beer brewing is a bulk process and is subject to significant economies of scale, at least for mass-market rather than craft-style production. So I was already expecting big vats and a lot of automation. The reality exceeded my expectations on both counts. Basically, most of the operation is controlled by a handful of workers. The students picked up on this, noting that such facilities are unlikely to contribute much to "sustainable employment" in this regional economy that is suffering 35% unemployment. But it's been a long time since breweries were a significant source of jobs, except maybe upstream for barley farmers, and downstream for bartenders and bouncers...

Here is the outside, done up in the official Cruzcampo and Heineken color schemes...

Mixing, cooking, and filtration are done in these enormous vats...

Do you like pipes? I do...

Here's where the bugs get to work and do the fermentation...

The bottling plant extends as far as the eye can see and has only three workers...

Still more impressive, the shipping warehouse, which is the size of three soccer fields and employs various robotic forklifts and other vehicles but only two human workers... what happens when these obedient fellows get sick of schlepping cases and kegs and decide to team up with their drone friends in the military?...

Activated sludge

This would be a great name for a metal band, but it happens to be the key process used in treating urban wastewater... i.e., sewage. An affection for sewage treatment runs deep in my veins (bowels?), as my father, a retired professor of chemical engineering, specialized in researching wastewater treatment for many years (in fact, he wrote the book on it). Among his favorite aphorisms were, "Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink" and "It may be shit to you, but it's bread and butter to me." Anyway, effective and efficient treatment of wastewater probably deserves a place among the most important advances of human civilization.

On our sustainability tour in Spain we visited one of Seville's EMASESA treatment plants. Our friendly and knowledgeable guide Enrique Toro did his best to explain what was happening, given the language barrier. One interesting thing they do at EMASESA is to use an anaerobic process to obtain methane gas from the sludge. This provides a large percentage of the energy for the plant.

The real action takes place in the activated sludge reactors, where the bugs, as they are known in the business, eat the crap out of the crap, quite literally. Maintaining a healthy culture of bugs is a major task of the plant's employees. Here's where it all goes down:

After the sludge does its work, it settles to the bottom and the clear water flows from the top, in this case in large very humid geodesic domes:

The resulting treated water is not of drinkable quality but is more than clean enough to release into the Guadalquivir River. Old dead sludge that is not consumed by the next generation of bugs, known as "bug bones", is composted for fertilizer. Neat!

Most people don't appreciate how much of modern life depends on the deployment of bacteria and other microorganisms. It's not just the human biome, which is essential to health (90% of your cells are non-human), but the role of biological decomposition, fermentation and related processes. Up next: fermentation on a grand scale...

Sevilla

A few impressions from my trip to Spain and Italy... starting with Seville. We were there for four days, jet-lagged and kept busy with site visits as part of the sustainability program. Still, I got out to see some sights. The Alcazar is on every tourist's list, and I have no superlatives to add. The buildings are spectacular, and the gardens are worthy of a thorough exploration. Here is a sample of the architecture...

One piece of advice I have to any visitor is that the place rewards patience. In the early evening, as the crowds were thinning out, I took a detour into the Sala de Justicia, near the main entrance. This is a fairly modest room featuring little of the elaborate "Moorish" decoration that is so entrancing here. For that reason, perhaps, I was able to sit in a corner and have the room all to myself for 20 minutes. The little fountain at the center of the room burbled, the water silently drained into the adjacent courtyard pool, and the pigeons ignored me after a while and came in for a sip, softly cooing and chortling as they do. This kind of solitary, meditative moment is a luxury today, but the original builders of the palace clearly had it in mind as a regular feature. It's worth seeking out.

The Seville cathedral is a must-see, if only for the awesome scale of the thing. The pictures I took with my phone don't provide any sense of the enormity, so I'll skip those. On a much more modest scale is the baroque chapel at the Hospital de los Venerables. The chapel is not really my cup of tea, but the price of admission also gets you into the one-room Diego Velázquez Research Centre, sponsored by the Focus-Abengoa Foundation. This little room will bring you up close and personal with some fine paintings of the immaculate conception by Velázquez and Zurbarán, among others, but also in particular with one undeniable masterpiece by Velázquez, of Santa Rufina, who legend has it lived in Triana, the gypsy quarter of town. No photos permitted, so I copy the picture from their web site. Velázquez may have used his own daughter as a model, and if so, I bet she was a handful. Apparently Rufina was one tough cookie, and Velázquez perfectly captures both her youthful charm and her steely determination in this powerful work of art.

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Daytona Beach, Florida. Bethune-Cookman College. College student whose home is in Lakeland, Florida. Gordon Parks, 1943.

Homer and Langley

In E.L Doctorow's beautiful and touching novel, the disordered lives of the notorious Collyer brothers are reimagined as a story of resistance against the main course of establishment U.S. history over the twentieth century. Just as their increasingly pathological hoarding gradually fills up their Manhattan brownstone with hazardous piles of junk from the outside world, so their lives and home accumulate a sequence of archetypal American outsiders, from an African-American cook and her jazz-playing son, to a Japanese-American couple who are dragged away during World War II, to a veritable commune's worth of hippies, to a mobster on the run, to an orphaned piano student who lives with the brothers for a time and eventually leaves for school, later to become a nun, and who still later is murdered (we are led to believe) for her work with the poor in an unnamed Central American country.

The metaphor of hoarding engages some of Doctorow's modernist impulses as a writer—especially his frequent employment of lists—but with intentional irony, he has with this novel crafted one of his most orderly and structured works. As the world literally and figuratively closes in on him, as he loses his hearing and his contact with anyone but his own consciousness and his brother Langley, our narrator, the blind brother Homer, is left with that most Doctorovian of pursuits: he writes. Homer, channeling Doctorow, insists that while the brothers may be eccentric, they are perfectly sane—quite possibly saner than the rest of humanity. But for Homer, sanity is ultimately a curse. "If I could go crazy, if I could will that on myself, I might not know how badly off I am, how awful is this awareness that is irremediably aware of itself. With only the touch of my brother's hand to know that I am not alone."

And that fraternal bond is the other great theme of this unlikely love story.

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

[Untitled photo, possibly related to: Abandoned land and poor pasture at Florida Withlacoochee River Agricultural Demonstration Project near Brooksville, Florida]. Carl Mydans, 1936.

Hobby Lobby

This strikes close to home, as many of my colleagues struggle to reverse the recent decision of our employer, Santa Clara University, to drop abortion coverage from our health insurance plans. The impact of Hobby Lobby on our situation, however, is probably at most indirect, because our own legal context involves state regulators rather than the provisions of Obamacare.

One of the arguments we have used in favor of retaining the coverage is that in the labor market, employees actually pay for most of their nonpecuniary benefits (such as health insurance) in the form of lower cash salaries than they would otherwise earn, so benefits should be treated as spending from compensation over which the employees should have choices. The fact that the employer acts as our agent in the health insurance market is an oddity of U.S. labor markets and a historical "accident." Uwe Reinhardt elaborates on the economics a little here. And this excellent post by Brad DeLong places the matter in the historical perspective of welfare capitalism, a topic I studied many long years ago in my Ph.D. dissertation.