My head has been on the edge of exploding for a few days now. It just exploded. My brains are all over the floor in our cubicle area here at D Magazine HQ. Zac is calling maintenance to come clean it up. Let me explain what happened.
Jim Schutze, the bearded, laconic gadfly over at the Observer, has ignited an interesting debate about whether paid consultants should be allowed to sock puppet in the comments sections of the Morning News. He compares Mike Snyder to Thomas Paine. Like I said, interesting debate. I agree with him on one point: the Morning News should have revealed in its story (paywall) how its reporters, Steve Thompson and Gary Jacobson, learned that Snyder was sock puppeting in the paper’s comments. The story led one to believe that the reporters did their sleuthing in documents obtained via an open-records request. That wasn’t the case. They used data from the News’ servers. Fuller, clearer disclosure was warranted.
But pretty much everything else Schutze has written lately about this topic has increased the pressure inside my head. The worst of it shows up in a passage from this Friday post:
The Nasher dispute demonstrates an old truth about Dallas. When you get the rich people and the culture mob lined up with the usual media sycophants, this big city turns into one little East Texas all-cousin one-horse town. For good reason, hardly anybody has the backbone to go up against those pitchforks. But Snyder did, and as far as I’m concerned, it was the right thing to do.
In Schutze’s mind — if we are to take him seriously, if he’s not just trolling us — the Nasher is for rich people, and Museum Tower is for the common man. Everyone who comes out in support of the Nasher, everyone who points out the underhanded behavior of Museum Tower’s operatives, all those people are just small-town nincompoops who are eager to please the people with money and power. Think about that. Consider how he describes people who care about art: “the culture mob.”
Listen to me. An individual membership to the Nasher is $50. Can’t afford that? Fine. On the third Friday of every month, you can get in free, look at some of the most important art ever created, then enjoy an outdoor concert and a movie from 6 p.m. to midnight. This week, Calhoun will play. The movie is Three Amigos. Three fucking amigos! What sort of culture mob turns out to watch Three Amigos?
I apologize for swearing. I’m sorry. Really. [deep breath]
Condos at Museum Tower start at about $1.2 million or so and go up to $8 million and change. That doesn’t include finish-out. Membership is a bit pricier than at the Nasher. Museum Tower does not have a free movie night for the public.
Like I said, the pressure in my head reached a critical point after reading about the “culture mob.” Then, yesterday, Schutze put up another post. This one came at the controversy from another angle. Schutze assailed my math. He calls it science. Like this:
A whole lot of absolutely bat-shit crazy off-the-wall stuff has been put out there concerning the science. In May 2012, for example, D Magazine Editor Demeritus Tim Rogers signed off at the end of a very long article attacking the condo tower with a line stating as fact that the glare coming off Museum Tower is tantamount to “the glaring light and searing heat generated by the power of two and a half suns.”
Think about it. Wow. If Museum Tower can multiply the power of the sun itself by a factor of 2.5, maybe we should build a bunch of them and use them to replace all our nuclear reactors. But, wait. Museum Tower is composed of flat to convex surfaces. The way you got leaves to smoke as a back-yard Cub Scout was by focusing the sun’s rays with a magnifying glass whose surface was concave, not convex. The trick was to focus the sun’s rays, not disperse them. And I say all of this not without a pang of sympathy for the young Rogers boy who must have spent long afternoons in the back yard trying to set leaves on fire with a Coca Cola bottle. Perhaps there were tears.
I like “editor demeritus,” by the way. But that clever turn of phrase couldn’t prevent my head explosion. Here is the “bat-shit crazy off-the-wall” stuff that I wrote in our May 2012 story:
The Nasher’s computer modeling found that the reflectivity of the glass creates patches of radiation that are 150 percent more intense than normal direct sunlight. Imagine the Sun growing to two and a half times its size. Direct measurements taken on a cloudless, 78-degree March day showed that the reflected light raised the lawn’s temperature to 103 degrees. For most plants, 115 degrees is lethal. Even at much lower temperatures, they can sustain damage if temperatures fluctuate too quickly for them to adjust.
This is just math. Even Jim Schutze ought to be able to follow it. If you increase something by 150 percent, that is 2.5 times. The radiation measurements were taken by a firm called ARUP. The findings were presented at one of the first big meetings between the Nasher and Museum Tower. At that meeting, Museum Tower presented its own findings, from its own consultant, a firm called RWDI. RWDI said the increase in radiation would only be one-sixth of the Nasher’s predicted gain. Why the discrepancy? Because RWDI used the wrong data in its model. Museum Tower’s glass is 300 percent more reflective than the glass RWDI plugged into its model. Museum Tower officials do not dispute this.
Schutze wraps up his most recent post by asking his readers to watch a video prepared by Museum Tower. It shows what the Nasher’s galleries would look like if Renzo Piano’s patented oculi roof were replaced with Museum Tower’s proposed redesigned roof. Schutze:
Here’s a thing I can say about this eight-minute video that I don’t believe is debatable. It’s intriguing. They claim their solution is 100 percent effective and completely invisible. If you do look, watch for the moment when they pull this amazing Houdini magic trick on you: they make Museum Tower completely disappear.
I mean, c’mon. How do they do that? That’s really why I want you to watch. I want you to tell me how they can make a 42-story condo tower vanish into thin air.
Okay, I’ll tell you how they can do it: WITH COMPUTERS! It’s a computer-generated video! Does the computer-generated video show what would actually happen if the roof were replaced? It very well might. Or it might not. Neither Schutze nor I know for certain. What we do know is that the Museum Tower’s consultants have made mistakes in the past. They have used the wrong data. And they have willfully misled us by launching sock-puppet campaigns. So why would you believe your eyes when they show you a “magic trick”?
I’d like to hear Jim Schutze’s answer to that question. I think I know how Mike Snyder would answer it.
Anyway, my apologies again for swearing. And for this overly long post. I’ll go stuff my brains back into my skull now.
