Obviously Arthur C. Clarke was a huge influence on anyone who paid real attention to science fiction over the last few decades. I read Clarke for years, but (like many) I was more influenced by Stanley Kubrick's more poetic interpretation of Clarke's 2001. I read about the film as it was in production and made a commitment to see the full-blown Cinerama version when it was released. My friend Pinky Arnold and I hit the road that summer, thinking we would drive to San Francisco for the summer of love, but were waylaid by beer-guzzling pals in Flagstaff, where we had many adventures before returning to Texas, our California dream unfulfilled. One thing we did accomplish, though, was a Sunday drive to Scottsdale, Arizona with our late friend Bill Morton. We saw 2001 at the Cinerama theatre there. In the year 2001, I wrote a remembrance of that trip for ReWired, called "2001 Blues." I just re-read it and made a few corrections. It's not well written - until recently, my approach to writing was casual and undisciplined. It's slightly interesting, at least, as a consideration of 2001's plot and characters. I don't believe an intelligent machine like the Hal 9000 was ever possible, though Clarke was famous for the accuracy of some of his speculations about the future. Not much that Clarke predicted in 2001 came to pass... we still haven't found evidence of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, and we haven't build machines that truly think and are aware, and we haven't flown to Jupiter, mined the moon, or launched commercial space ventures, though we're close to the latter.
Clarke has a final book in press, co-authored with Frederik Pohl, called The Last Theorem. There's also a film in development of his novel Rendezvous with Rama.
Plutopia!
If you're in Austin Monday night for SXSW or otherwise, check out the Plutopia bash at Scholz Garten, 1607 San Jacinto. This most interesting of SXSW evening events is a collaborative gathering of two camps that normally don't pitch tents on the same terrain - green/sustainability advocates and techies.
Plutopia is the name of a collective including futurist, artists, technologists, and green activists that are aligned in their understanding that a sustainability economy is emerging and inevitable, and sustainability will be mediated by technology. If we're to opt out of business-as-usual and rething community organization, building, food production, etc., we'll be experimenting and finding alternatives. The Plutopia event at SXSW (where "Plutopia" was a mashup of "pluralist utopias") is an explosion of art and entertainment that has, as subtext, a creative consideration of possibilities. Bill McKibben will talk about economy, ecology, and community - the subjects of his book, Deep Economy - and The Heather Gold Show is a conversation about "opting out." The live premiere of producer Maggie Duval's Lance Van de Kamp Show is happeniing, too, featuring His Excellency Nikita Chrusov of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. There'll be installations by Austin Green Art and The Robot Group. We'll also have performances by pioneer electronic composer Carl Stone, David Demaris, London's Intimate Stranger. And there's more (check out the site). Not sure how we filled the vessel quite so full...
Maggie Duval coordinated the production of this cool little commercial for our big Plutopia event at SXSW Interactive. Plutopia is a tech/futurist/art/green collective that Derek Woodgate and I instigated. It's turned into a smart mob with crew attached.
Marc English
The latest issue of the Austin Chronicle has a great Marc Savlov profile of my friend Marc English, designer extraordinaire. The quote below has one thought, though I just messaged Marc I think he's really the Joe Strummer of design. (I'm not sure what that means, but I don't know what "Stanley Kubrick of design" means, either. Maybe he's the Marc English of design?) Whatever the case, every time I visit Marc's studio, I feel very down the rabbit hole.
His identity both as a human being and an artist is XXL life. AustinThomas Pynchon Wiki
filmmaker/writer Cary Roberts has rightly called him "the Stanley
Kubrick of design." He fairly burns with passion for his life and work,
and he wants you to burn, too. No sparks or embers here. English is a
conflagration of design theory, overwhelming talent, and
experimentalism, and his work with Criterion meets at the dirty
crossroads of the artistic truth of what has been entrusted to him and
the bottom line, the movement of "product," the allure of the dream
made cardboard, laser-encoded plastic discs, at midnight, beneath a
full moon, with pistols and blood well spent. His aim is truest.
When it was first released, I bought and started reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, then stopped reading for almost a year (okay, I get distracted). I recently jumped in again, and at the rate I'm going, I expect to be through sometime before I move to a nursing home (in case you haven't looked, it's over a thousand pages long, and brilliant - you want to savor it along the way).
Meanwhile I've just discovered the terrific Thomas Pynchon Wiki, which has a section dedicated to Against the Day. This is a huge relief. I've assumed I would have to read the novel at least twice, the second time researching as I go. Not as time consuming as the work you have to do around Joyce's Finnegans Wake, but still pretty challenging. Now I figure I can just refer to the wiki as I go.
Five sci-fi scenarios
MSN Tech & Gadgests has a slide show presentation of sci-fi scenarios "that will come true" : biometrics (already true), space tourism (already barely true), the holodeck (unlikely as shown on Star Trek, but VR environments using holography are likely), and domestic robots (already true, care to Roomba?) There's one more: "self-aware computers." That's what the headline says, but the text below says "...machines driven by artificial intelligence will, within 15 years or so, be handling many routine tasks." Hello? "Artificial intelligence" is not the same as "self-aware computers." Computers already simulate intelligence without being "self-aware." The whole self-awareness thing, Hal 9000 style, is extremely unlikely, though predicted by very smart people. Nobody's smart about everything, and my real difficulty with this is that we don't know enough about "awareness" to know how to create it in a computer, which is essentially a bunch of switches. How we get from switches that simulate logic via sophisticated human-generated programming to a state of "self-awareness" I don't get. If we make enough maps, and we make them increasingly sophisticated, do they become "the territory"?
Tesla Rock!
Very cool idea: using a Tesla coil as a guitar amp. (Thanks to Adam Rice, who posted the link on Twitter).
Better than freeIn a world where digital convergence is accelerating and all media, all data are increasingly digital, copies are super abundant, therefore worthless/free. In that context, what has value? Kevin Kelly's been thinking about this. He explains that what's "scarce and valuable" is stuff that can't be copied. He talks about "eight generatives better than free" - e.g. immediacy, personlization, authenticity, findability...
These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.Color Photos from the 1930s-40s
In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.
A compelling Library of Congress set of color photos from the 1930s-40s has been posted at Flickr. [Link]
These vivid color photos from the Great Depression and World War II capture an era generally seen only in black-and-white. Photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) created the images between 1939 and 1944.
Crazy Ads
Oddee has posted a dozen crazy ads – you have to see 'em to believe 'em.
[Link]
If you'd met me in the late 60s, I would've convinced you by my passionate dedication to the proposition that I had only one calling, and that was to write fiction. At some point thereafter I concluded that I wasn't much of a storyteller, and started writing nonfiction instead. The real truth behind my decision was that I was undisciplined and couldn't grasp the importance of revision, then revision of revision. My curse as a writer for years, whether with fiction or nonfiction, has been that I wouldn't take time to revise (a problem I'm correcting, finally getting back to writing and taking it seriously again).
The three writers of fiction that most influenced me were James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, and Malcolm Lowry. (Philip Dick's in there somewhere, as well). Of the three I spent less time with Lowry, who'd only written one book, Under the Volcano
“Under the Volcano”—his “ultima thule of the spirit,” as he called it—contains a remarkable death scene, and some of the language evokes Lowry’s own. The Mexican paramilitaries close in on the consul. One pulls out a pistol and shoots him, then shoots him twice more, and the world becomes a giant symbol of despair: “Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echo returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying.” This is pure Baudelaire. But, at the moment when the consul sees the gun firing, Lowry sees things more plainly: “At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realized he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. ‘Christ,’ he remarked, puzzled, ‘this is a dingy way to die.’ ”
Underachieving
Ryan Norbauer at 43 Folders considers whether life is all about achievement, or whether we can be more human, and in a sense more effective, by living our lives as underachievers. He's influenced by a book called The Underachiever's Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great, which espouses these principles:
- Life’s too short.
- Control is an illustion.
- Expectations lead to misery.
- Great expectations lead to great misery.
- Achievement creates expectations.
- The law of diminishing returns applies everywhere.
- Perfect is the enemy of good.
- The tallest blade of grass is the surest to be cut.
- Accomplishment is in the eye of the beholder.
Albert Camus was but one of many philosophers and poets seriously to tackle the question of how we are to fill up the time that we have while we are here on earth, but I like many of his answers best. He saw the futilely struggling Sisyphus as a strangely sympathetic figure. Camus—who was in fact one of the more accomplished and ethically upright individuals with which the caprices of the genetic blender have gifted our species—embraced the absurd futility and overwhelming insignificance of our individual lives as a counterintuitive source of hope and empowerment. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd [than that of Sisyphus]. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”
Camus believes that it is not the activity of work that leads us to despair, but the hope for some sort of grand success that will never come. Insofar as we can resist the temptation to view our lives as goal-driven in this way, we have at least the prospect of happiness. As The Underachiever’s Manifesto has it: “striving is suffering.” It is only by accepting the illusory nature of achievement that we can hope to transcend it. Would it be mawkish of me to invoke Steve Jobs?: “our time is limited, so don’t waste time living someone else’s life.”
I find that by trying to achieve much, I spread myself too thin and begin to lose focus. In that sense, I suspect that one can do more by doing less, or do more effectively, at least. Living and working in a more limited and focused way is more sustainable, as well. I was already giving this a lot of thought.
This reminds me of Suzuki-Roshi's talk about life as one continuous mistake.
My energy undermined by respiratory virus, I've been a little listless and depressed this Christmas weekend. Last night I watched "White Christmas" for the first time in many years, and this morning I've been listening to Caroline Kennedy's recent Christmas discussion with Tim Russert, prompted by publication of her book A Family Christmas. She says she learned a lot while writing it; one story she offers is that of the World War I Christmas Truce, which began on Christmas Eve, 1914. German and British troops sung Christmas carols from their respective sides, and this led to shouted greetings, then to actual visits across the line. Firstworldwar.com refers to the ad hoc temporary truce as "a shining episode of sanity from among the bloody chapters of World War One — a spontaneous effort by the lower ranks to create a peace that could have blossomed were it not for the interference of generals and politicians."
"White Christmas," though it begins during World War II, is a musical comedy set in postwar USA — but it's still a movie about war, or at least about the bonds that form during war. Protagonists Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) and Phil Davis (Danny Kaye) met during war, and much of the film is about their efforts to help their former commander in the Army's 151st Division, Major General Thomas Waverly (Dean Jagger) — in the end bringing veterans of the 151st together for a musical salute to the General. It was common for post WWII films to celebrate and acknowledge the military, and the lush, unreal technicolor hues you find in "White Christmas" and other films of the era were in part a manifestation of a desire to escape the darker realities that were such a presence through both world wars. Baby boomers were born into this world; it's no wonder so many of us were such fervent idealists, and so ultimately disillusioned.
Earlier this week I heard another story — on NPR — about the impact of a Iraq war veteran's post-traumatic stress disorder on his marriage. At some point in the story, the veteran, Peter Mohan, mentions how his wife didn't understand the bonds he had formed with his buddies while in the military. He was evidently unable to refocus on his own life and marriage when he returned to civilian life. This made me think about Audie Murphy, a high-visibility case of PTSD.
I wonder this Christmas about all the soldiers stationed in Iraq and elsewhere, away from family and home — and former soldiers with PTSD, some of whom, like Peter Mohan, have been transformed by war. It's a sad moment. I suspect we'll see more wars, worst wars, and various devastations even worse than wars. I resist the thought of my grandchildren at war, and their children.
But I'm Technicolor-blind at this point.
Excellent profile of Jacques Barzun at the New Yorker's web site. Interesting that Barzun, almost 100 years old, chooses to live in the sprawling multicultural Texas city, San Antonio.
Barzun wanted to do on the page what he did in the classroom: help the reader “carry in his head something more than the unexamined history of his own life,” not because knowledge is inherently good or makes one a better person but because it fosters an independence of mind. The more one learns about the course of civilization, he believed, the more one can appreciate its achievements. After a while, if you learn enough, you can argue that, say, Shaw’s mind more closely resembles Rousseau’s than Voltaire’s—and you may actually enjoy doing it. Consequently, there’s nothing Hegelian, Heideggerian, or hermeneutic about his work; no nihilistic or existential angst livens things up. Nor does he proffer any grand theory or unifying design that would explain the past in the categorical manner of Spengler’s organic cycle of regional growth and decay, or Braudel’s emphasis on broad socioeconomic “structures.” For Barzun, these systematic models of cause and effect run counter to the temper of history, which is intuitive, concrete, beholden to time and evidence:History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction.
Marc Andreesen's sci fi favorites
Former Netscape and current Ning entrepreneur Andreesen has pubished his "top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s -- so far." This caught my eye - I used to be a science fiction fan and attempted to write some of my own. I was cofounder twenty years ago of a sci fi writer's workshop in Austin, called Slugtribe. In recent weeks I've been thinking about diving in again, partly because there's a whole new slate of great sci fi writers I've been hearing about, such as Charlie Stross. David Armistead just gave me a copy of Charlie's new novel Glass House; I'm eager to get into it... and look into other writers on Andreesen's list.
I'm digging The New Yorker's new web design – they finally figured out how to bring it online. Also digging the Halloween cover for this week's issue (abovee).
I'm discovering online info about old, out of print "golden age" comic books, including whole issues scanned from rare copies and posted as jpgs. While looking for old favorites, I found Cover Browser, which has a bazillion covers, including quite a few for the comics I was looking for, the American Comics Group's Adventures Into the Unknown and Forbidden Worlds. Magazine covers including Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mad Magazine, Fate, and The New Yorker.
At Facebook, Bill Braasch has posted a great set of photos from the Summer of Love Reunion at New Speedway Meadows. I have my own interesting memories of a couple of failed attempts, in '67 and '68, to drive from Texas to SF and join the fun. In '67 I set out with $20, a gasoline credit card, and an old Mercury Comet and drove to Denver, then across the Rockies, deciding in Utah that twenty bucks wasn't going to do it (though I'd only spent $3 at that point). I drove back to Texas, and tried again the next year with my friend and literal fellow-traveler, Pinky Arnold. We made it to Flagstaff where we joined some old friends who were (barely) attending classes at Northern Arizona State, and had a great couple of weeks drinking beer and exploring Oak Creek Canyon before my brother talked me back to Texas for his wedding in Austin. I didn't make it all the way to SF until '72, and by then, the summer of love was more or less over. I recall standing in line for a big show at the Fillmore (the late Sylvester, Dan Hicks, and one of my favorites at the time, Stoneground) and being accosted by a few drug-addled street crawlers. Alas.
Schwa visionMy former FringeWare partner Paco remembers our work with Bill Barker of Schwa for the cover of FringeWare Review #5, the "Stay Awake!" issue. The inspiration of the piece: an Engadget article about a "xenon-based paralysis inducer." Sez Paco,
Bill's first pitch to me about Schwa was that it was a government conspiracy for alien UFOs to use Xenon-based technology for non-lethal crowd control. In other words mass media brainwashing. Holy shit! Apparently somebody at DARPA was actually listening to us back in the 1990s. Either that, or Bill knew more back then than he could ever say in words. I'd bank on the latter.Say Bye to Bat Boy
Weekly World News has lost its place on the rack (though the web site's still around). One of its writers, Stan Sinberg, has written a fond farewell.
As both a writer and a reader, what I loved most about the WWN was that its stories existed in a parallel universe in which literally anything could happen. Spain's most popular matador battled bunny rabbits, not bulls; after 27 futile years a scientist found a "watched pot that boils" when his wife told him he had to put water in the pots; and a judge was scolded for having a "tip jar" on his bench. Who wouldn't want to live in a world where a traffic cop is so honest he gives himself a ticket for DUI, or a minister starts a Church of the Hokey-Pokey because "for every season, there's a left foot in, and a left foot out"?Save "John from Cincinnati"
Funny how a show that feels like a bomb to most people will develop a rabid following. I'm often one of the rabid, dedicated to shows that last eight episodes, the disappar – like my current favorite, the surreal "John from Cincinnati." If you like it, too, sign this petition!
I ran across this very good review by Thad Ziolkowski of my current-fave television show, John from Cincinnati. Zilokowski, a surfer himself, writes that the show is unusually accurate about surfing. Acknowledging its surreal forays into magical realism, he says that, "But if JFC wants to deepen its surf reality, it's not the supernatural that needs emphasis but the mundane."
The daily reality of surfing is one of checking the waves (at the beach or, these days, on a Web cam), surfing if there are any waves (and often there aren't and if there are, they aren't particularly good), looking at magazine spreads of exceptional surf photographed elsewhere in the world, watching surf videos, and daydreaming.
I never was a surfer but I was always interested in that world, in the way surfer's establish and intimate relationship with nature with the wave as an interface. That's powerful, and one thing I get from the "John" series is an ironic sense of the intersection of the absolute and zen-sense perfect with the more degraded aspects of human nature - the sense of the divine mixing with the fallen. The theme song is "Johnny Appleseed," by the late great Joe Strummer:
Lord, there goes a Buick forty-nineBloggers vs Journalists redux
Black sheep of the angels riding, riding down the line
We think there is a soul, we don't know
That soul is hard to find
A few days ago, David Swedlow and I had a meeting with a PR pro from Business Wire, and we had the blog vs journalism discussion, which is back in the air, nudged along by Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur. Keen argues that the great unwashed shouldn't be allowed to publish, but his arguments are extreme and I'm not really interested. However it's great to talk to someone like our PR friend, who's coming from a reasoned perspective and raises very real issues about the place of the professional journalist in a chaotically evolving media environment, where traditional business models aren't working and traditonal media outlets are struggling for mindshare against an explosion of user-generated content, some of it very good. A journalist is taught standards and practices, the intent of which is to create something like objectivity. No one, of course, is completely objective – but journalists make a professional commitment to objective and accurate reporting, and without the practice of journalism we would lose signal in the noise, and we would lose whatever trusted, authoritative sources still exist.
I don't think that'll happen, but I understand the concern. And I know that it's tough to be a journalist in this environment. Our friend didn't like the term "citizen journalism." If you lack the training, commitment, and infrastructure of the professional, she figures you're not a journalist and shouldn't be so labeled. I get her point, though I don't agree. There are professionals who've embraced citizen journalism – who want to partner with bloggers to extend research and depend on the blogosphere to provide coverage that market-driven publications can't or won't.
From that conversation I felt challenged, productively, to be more than a filter when I'm blogging. My friend said that a journalist's job is to publish new and valuable information, and I realize that it's not enough to simply point to this or that story, originating elsewhere, just because I think it's cool or interesting. It's really only worthwhile to write and publish here what you won't find anywhere else... my original thinking, and views of the world from my own unique perspective. So I'm setting that standard for myself.
One other note: I mentioned the blog vs journalism discussion to David Armistead, and he said we already had a good name for the stuff many bloggers are doing: gonzo.
The Internet's for commiesAndrew Keen (author of Cult of the Amateur) thinks "Web 2.0" is a "grand utopian movement," and that it's like Marx's vision of "communist society." His beef: any one of the great unwashed can publish. This trashes the cultural authority of the elite.
Clay Shirky < title="Andrew Keen: Rescuing 'Luddite' from the Luddites. Many-to-Many:" href="http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/07/09/andrew_keen_rescuing_luddite_from_the_luddites.php">writes that Keen is making a Luddite argument, "one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfit the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys."
An argument is especially Luddite if the discomfort of the newly challenged professionals is presented as a general social crisis, rather than as trouble for a special interest. (“How will we know what to listen to without record store clerks!”) When the music industry suggests that the prices of music should continue to be inflated, to preserve the industry as we have known it, that is a Luddite argument, as is the suggestion that Google pay reparations to newspapers or the phone company’s opposition to VoIP undermining their ability to profit from older ways of making phone calls.
This is what makes Keen’s argument a Luddite one — he doesn’t oppose all uses of technology, just ones that destroy older ways of doing things. In his view, the internet does not need to undermine the primacy of the copy as the anchor for both filtering and profitability.
But Keen is wrong. What the internet does is move data from point A to B, but what it is for is empowerment. Using the internet without putting new capabilities into the hands of its users (who are, by definition, amateurs in most things they can now do) would be like using a mechanical loom and not lowering the cost of buying a coat — possible, but utterly beside the point.
The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.
Sagmeister in Belgrade
Jasmina Tešanović encounters Stefan Sagmeister in Belgrade, via boingboing.net. Among other things, Sagmeister designed the Worldchanging book.
Money does not make me happy; Being not truthful works against me; Having guts always works out for me; Trying to look good limits my life; Everything I do comes back to me... And some other thirty aphoristic wisdoms of this kind, which the artist threw into his lecture in the National Library. They also appear in his exhibition in the SUPERSPACE gallery on the Danube river.
While I listened to Stefan Sagmeister I had a deja vu, as if somebody threw a net on the top of our dirty loud and aggressive Belgrade which I once loved so much... And I even know why, because Belgrade is not much like Barcelona or Rome or Vienna, or New York or Los Angeles, although Belgrade had all the advantages of wild big dirty cities...
Photo by Bruce Sterling
Automatic UpdateAutomatic Update is a MOMA exhibition featuring late dotcom-era media art.
By the year 2000, this quasi-revolutionary aura had dissipated and media art had settled into the mainstream. Automatic Update features several installations from this later period. They are mature works that ease the somber mood of the times with entertaining presentations. Nevertheless, their humor does not soften their biting commentary on our social milieu. What at one time was Pop art has now become pop life.
Via Geert Lovink through the nettime-l email list. From Geert's report:
As with any vibrant art form, new media finds itself historicized in multiple and evolving ways. Significant attention has been paid to whether the field is alive, dead (date negotiable), or risen from the grave, and to defining its constituent elements. Automatic Update, an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art organized by Barbara London, argues that new forms of media art rose with the swell of the dot-com era and became mainstream in its wake. The five installations included, all drawn from the moment after the bubble burst, speak less to the internet or interactivity and more to a culture saturated with media of all kindsGoogle search dispute resolution
Lauren Weinstein posts about a Google page called "An explanation of our search results." Says Weinstein, "In the normal course of searching on Google you'd only find it if you followed an unusual "sponsored link" -- sponsored by Google itself -- above the regular search results for a single, very ancient word." The term is "Jew," and the Google page acknowedges that its search algorithms produce "results that [are] very disturbing" when it's entered as a search term, as opposed to "Judaism," "Jewish" or "Jewish people," which produce "informative and relevant" results. The Google team says
The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.
We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.
Weinstein makes a good point about the value of this page:
...it might be wise to muse more on that Google page noted above. For it tells us very plainly that among major search engines, Google understands that Search Results Matter. They matter now to everyone who uses the Web, and even to people who don't have Internet access at all -- but whose lives are impacted by the Web nonetheless. And that's the entire population of the planet.
The Web, after all, isn't really computers and routers, fiber and spinning disk arrays, databases and blogs. The Web is people. Our job now is to find the path toward helping make sure that the power of Web search enhances people's lives while not incidentally creating asymmetric opportunities for seriously damaging innocent lives in the process.
The Silver Surfer
I want to see the new Fantastic Four film (Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer), if only because the Silver Surfer was my favorite Marvel character, the tragic, detached herald of worldy doom... so I'm reading reviews this morning. Manohla Dargis in the NY Times refers to the film as an "amalgam of recycled ideas, dead air, dumb quips, casual sexism and pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo." She says it like it's a bad thing – but that's an apt description of any Marvel comic. The One Who Matters, fanman Harry Knowles, loved the film against his own expectation, and writes "...what we have are scenes of the Fantastic Four being… well the Fantastic Four. Entertaining crowds, Reed and Sue are trying to get married, but something is always complicating that process. (I know the feeling) - Johnny wants to throw Reed a bachelor party. It’s appropriately goofy, but dammit… it’s the exact sort of hammy thing that Stan Lee would have done." Now there is a review I can trust!
David Weinberger: Everything is MiscellaneousDavid Weinberger has written a book about metadata, called Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, and if you're thinking metadata's a dull subject, guess again. In fact, this is the most important book I've read in years, and one of the best at getting at what's really as we move online and digitize everything we know. David's written about the changing architecture of knowledge as a third order of organization emerges. The first order is physical (how you stack books on a shelf or arrange silverware in a drawer); the second is physical or analog metadata, like the cards in a card catalog or the entries in a ledger. The third order is electronic metadata, and what's significant about it is ... sufficiently complex that he's written a book about it. The third order is characterized by folksonomy or tagging, where you can create multiple categories for any one item, creating many classification schemes and many ways to order the same reality. From the book...
For example, the digital order ignores the paper order’s requirement that labels be smaller than the things they’re labeling. An online “catalog card” listing a book for sale can contain–or link to–as much information as the seller wants, including user ratings, the author’s biography, and the full text of reviews. You can even let users search for a book by typing in any phrase they remember from it–“What’s the title of that detective novel where someone was described as having a face like a fist?”–which is like using the entire contents of the book as a label. That makes no sense when all that information has to be stored as atoms in the physical world but perfect sense when it’s available as bits and bytes in the digital realm.
I'm leading a conversation with David at the Inkwell conference on the WELL, and we're about halfway through the two-week discussion. If you want to comment or ask a question but you're not a member of the WELL, you can email inkwell at well com and one of the forum hosts will post your words. Meanwhile I suggest that you buy the book if you're interested in the changing architecture of knowledge.
Metadata is, of course, information about information. Back in the day, it was easier to know which was the data and which was the meta. The book on the shelf was data (purists may disagree with me) and the catalog card was metadata. In fact, this corresponds to the first two "orders of order" my book postulates. In the first order, you organize the things themselves: The books on the shelves, the bolts in the bins, the cans in the larder. In the second order, you physically separate the metadata from the things, you generally reduce the metadata to what fits on a card or label, and you organize them: The library's card
catalog, the map of the items in the warehouse. In the second order, you frequently can manage multiple sorts (subject, author, title), whereas the first order requires you to put each thing in one and only one spot, because that's atoms are mean that way.
In the third order, the content and the metadata are all digital. We can now organize free of the constraints of the physical. The old principles of organization are ill-suited to this new environment, so we have to invent new ones...which is what my book is about.
Now, metadata gets mushy in the third order because when both the content of (say) a book is on line, we can use that content as
metadata. So, we can ask "What was that tragedy Shakespeare wrote in 1599?" using the author, genre and year as metadata, or we can ask, "When did Shakespeare write the play that has the line about someone having 'smote the sledded Polacks'?" The content becomes metadata. So the difference becomes operational: Metadata is what we know and data is what we're looking for.
This makes metadata squishier as a concept, but it makes our species smarter. Everything that is linked to anything else becomes a lever by which we can pry up new knowledge.
Patenting yoga
Evidently the U.S. has been granting patents or trademarks on various yoga practices or postures. [Link] Via Souljerky, which has a bunch more links.
Back in January I was reading a Malcolm Gladwell piece in the New Yorker, ostensibly about Enron, but actually about the difference between mysteries and puzzles. Here's how he made the distinction:
The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large. The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.
David Pescovitz has blogged another Treverton piece on the distinction in The Smithsonian. Pesco has a longer quote from the Smithsonian piece, concluding with this thought: Solving puzzles is useful for detection. But framing mysteries is necessary for prevention.
Picked up on this Guardian piece via Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond blog. Gwyneth Jones should drop by the nearest Dorkbot, I think. [Link]
A long time ago, back in the 1980s, a new kind of science fiction burst on to the scene. For progressive fans of the genre it was like a supernova, blasting the old finned space ships, streamlined Metropolis robots and tentacled aliens right out of the sky. It was called "cyberpunk", and if you want to know what it looked like, you can see the cyberpunk future in Ridley Scott's dark, elegaic Bladerunner. The manifesto went like this: in the forseeable future there will be no aliens, and no trips to distant planets. Digital technology, however, will get better and better at an incredible rate, throwing up fantastic new gadgets that will not remain in the hands of the wealthy. They will immediately be adopted by "the street". Every punk will have a supercomputer in his pocket (and this was before desktop PCs, mind you, when video-camera, Wi-Fi internet access phones weren't even a twinkle in a Finnish eye). And everything else in the world will get much, much, worse.
Much of the science-fiction establishment hated the cyberpunks. Science fiction was supposed to be about progress, and how advances in technology will inevitably create a better world. But they were right, and the truth they told is highly relevant to this new century of sci-fi come true. If a child is told at the age of five that he has the cognitive scan of a delinquent, there's a very strong chance that he'll fulfil that prediction, especially if he continues to be singled out. Our gadgets are just like our children. They have the potential to be marvellous, to surpass all expectations. But children (and robots) don't grow up intelligent, affectionate, helpful and good-willed all by themselves. They need to be nurtured. The technology, however fantastic, is neutral. It's up to us to decide whether that dazzling new robot brain powers a caring hand, or a speedy fist highly accurate at throwing grenades.
Photo: A friendly robot hanging out at an Austin Dorkbot.
Doug Rushkoff in AustinDoug Rushkoff will be speaking at the Paramount Theatre Wednesday night. Doug's an old friend of mine; I interviewed him a few years ago for the Austin Chronicle, and thought, in all modesty, that it was one of his better interviews. Here's one of my favorite bits from that talk:
JonL: Well, you throw a party, and you invite everybody to come, and you really have a good heart, you really want it to work. But the thing is, how do you accommodate the diversity, and how do you accommodate the fact that some people have bad intentions?
DR: There's so many models, even biological models. You figure we're all one body, right? And every person's a little cell. So okay, I want to have a gathering of cells, the good ones. Not the pimple cells and cancer cells, I just want nice ones coming in. And you know that after a certain point, you can invite maybe one or two negative people, and then hope the energy of the good group heals those people, or brings them around somehow.
But you invite five or six or seven, and you crash the whole thing, and it makes you feel really shitty. I always used to tell myself that I never want to live a life where, if I was tripping, I'd look at stuff and bum out. And one thing that does bum me feels like a lingering elitism ...
JonL: Within yourself?
DR: Yeah! I want to hang out with certain people, I don't want to hang out with others. But on another level, well ... shit, I'm a human being, I'm only on this earth for so much time. It's easier to look at images of starving people than images of fucked-up people. With starving people, at least you can say how do we get them food? What can we do? But what can you do about fucked-up people? And unfortunately, maybe half the people in our culture are fucked-up people. I mean, I'm fucked-up in my own little ways. But there's legions of unconscious people, people who are what I would call coerced by corporate America, coerced by television, coerced by the very systems of logic they've succumbed to.
Link to a press release about the Wednesday gig. Link to the event page, where you can buy a ticket.
Castaneda's cultLike so many late sixties/early seventies college students, I had a passing interest in author Carlos Castaneda's books about his experiences learning to be a shaman from the wise Yaqui Don Juan. After reading the first book, I was fascinated but skeptical; Marsha and I read the second book and maybe the third, and we decided that some of the "teachings of Don Juan" were interesting and compelling even if they were actually fictions. I was always curious about Castaneda; who he was, and the real bases for his stories &ndash even if they were fictions, they seemed to draw on real cultural, philosophical, and spiritual traditions of native Americans and others. (I just asked Marsha what she remembered of Castaneda's writing; she says "that you have to look to decide to see." We found this and other bits of wisdom useful and meaningful.) Currently Salon is running a very good, comprehensive article about Castaneda, the eventual compelling evidence that his books were fictions, and the strange life he led until his death in 1998 from liver cancer. After his dealth, five women who lived with him had their phones disconnected and vanished. Most assume they committed suicide.
Jennings believes Castaneda knew they were planning to kill themselves. "He used to talk about suicide all the time, even for minor things," Jennings told me. He added that Partin was once sent to identify abandoned mines in the desert, which could be used as potential suicide sites. (There's an abandoned mine not far from where her remains were found.) "He regularly told us he was our only hope," Jennings said. "We were all supposed to go together, 'make the leap,' whatever that meant." What did Jennings think it meant? "I didn't know fully," he said. "He'd describe it in different ways. So would the witches. It seemed to be what they were living for, something we were being promised."
The promise may have been based on the final scene in "Tales of Power," in which Carlos leaps from a cliff into the nagual. The scene is later retold in varying versions. In his 1984 book, "The Fire From Within," Castaneda wrote: "I didn't die at the bottom of that gorge -- and neither did the other apprentices who had jumped at an earlier time -- because we never reached it; all of us, under the impact of such a tremendous and incomprehensible act as jumping to our deaths, moved our assemblage points and assembled other worlds."
Did Castaneda really believe this? Wallace thinks so. "He became more and more hypnotized by his own reveries," she told me. "I firmly believe Carlos brainwashed himself." Did the witches? Geuter put it this way: "Florinda, Taisha and the Blue Scout knew it was a fantasy structure. But when you have thousands of eyes looking back at you, you begin to believe in the fantasy. These women never had to answer to the real world. Carlos had snatched them when they were very young."
Wallace isn't sure what the women believed. Because open discussion of Castaneda's teachings was forbidden, it was impossible to know what anyone really thought. However, she told me, after living so long with Castaneda, the women may have felt they had no choice. "You've cut off all your ties," she said. "Now you're going to go back after all these decades? Who are you going to go be with? And you feel that you're not one of the common herd anymore. That's why they killed themselves."
After the Wedding
The New York Times reviews one of the best films we saw at the SXSW Film Festival this year, the Danish film "After the Wedding," directed by Susanne Bier. It's a film of substantial emotional complexity and great humanity.
The dark sideI don't know that I have anything to add to the ongoing conversation about the death threats against Kathy Sierra. It's like something from prime time television, which is really sick, when you think about it. We've evolved from Mayberry RFD to a steady diet forensics heroes tracking serial killers through mounds of gore, so we shouldn't be too surprised to find casual threats of violence in cyberspace and elsewhere. Some anonymous jerk has practiced a random (or not) act of terrorism without considering the real effect on a real person. On the other hand, it appears that a few good people (Jeneane Sessum, Frank Paynter, and Chris Locke) have also been affected because Kathy S., understandably rattled, associated them with anonymous comments posted on a prank site they'd set up. I don't know the whole story here, but I know Frank and Jeneane, and I sort of know Locke, and they're not scary people or misogynists. Locke has posted a response, so has Frank.
SXSW has posted a snippet of the Jon L./Bruce discussion at Studio SX. It's short, but the url suggests it's a trailer, so maybe the whole thing will pop up. Two observations: Bruce is in high rant mode as the conversation progresses, and I really need to lay off the nachos. [Link]
BaudrillardSince reality was deprecated anyway, Baudrillard quit the scene. His death doesn't mean anything. His life meant too much. [Link]
FringeWare ChronologyScot Casey, who joined the crew at FringeWare, Inc. after I was already out the door, has put together a FringeWare chronology. It's very weird for me to look at the chronology, and especially to see quotes from Brad King's Postcards from the Fringe, a somewhat inaccurate account of FringeWare history (or it would logically seem that way to me, since it pretty much skips my own role and involvement).
Scot's overview is very cool to see, and it definitely brings back memories of those thrilling days of yesteryear...
Twelve writing tips from George Orwell, author of 1984 among others. I was't exactly bowled over by Orwell's writing, but these are good enough that I figure I should read his stuff again (as if I would ever find the time). The best tip: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." [Link]
Followup to my post about Samba Drums: here's a video clip from Carnaval Brasileiro, this one with sound (and dancers!) Also note - the drummers and the Inside Out Steel Band will be performing at Ruta Maya on February 17 (World Carnival). Also worth noting: the Acadêmicos da Ópera has a Myspace page.
Prelude to a Change of MindI recently met Robert Stikmanz in a nonliterary context, and he mentioned the imminent release of his novel Prelude to a Change of Mind: The First Book in the Lands of Nod, which he said is one part of a larger body of work. A week or two ago, I got an email announcing yesterday's reading and signing at Book People, which drew a huge crowd and piqued my interest... this seems like a book that everybody should read though one read is probably going to create some kind of habit, sucked into the world of the Dvarsh... (Stikmanz, aka Rob Lewis, has been evolving a mythopoetic universe in his head for a couple of decades.)
Samba DrumsYesterday Marsha and I went to a steel drum concert by members of the Inside Out Steel Pan project led by C.J. Menge, playing with steel bands from various Austin schools. Menge is artist in residence working with the steel bands for Bowie and McCallum High Schools as well as Covington Middle School. They perform occasionally, one venue being Austin Lyric Opera's Armstrong Community Music School, which is where they were playing yesterday, which was also Carnaval in Austin. At the end of the steel drum concert, Acadêmicos da Ópera showed up for an impromptu performance. I think they were warming up for their performance at Carnaval last night. We were blown away by the great high-energy romp and the kinetic energy of Acadêmicos leader Robert Patterson, which I captured in a bit of video posted below. Unfortunately there's no sound, but several sound snippets are
downloadable from the Acadêmicos site.
Molly Ivins
She was really really sick, and we all knew this was coming, but it still hits like a ton of bricks fired out of a monster cannon... Molly Ivins has died, and I'm pissed off because it's just not fair. When we were in despair about the incredibly nasty state of things she made us laugh and made us hope. I guess we owe it to her to keep hoping and keep laughing, but it'll be tougher knowing she's gone. (If you want to do something in her memory, subscribe to the Texas Observer, where she was once editor, and make sure the the progressive spirit in Texas lives on despite the odds.) [Link]
One of the many great Davids in the universe saw my Harryhausen post, and sent me a Youtube link to a video catalog of Harryhausen's creatures, embedded below:
Ray HarryhausenAt Boing Boing, Mark posts a link to a Ray Harryhausen tribute site listing all of his films and creatures, with links to some snippets of animation. Harryhausen was a stop-motion animation wizard who carefully built miniature models and animated them by shooting their movements one frame at a time. I was a big Harryhausen fan; it's been great over the last few years to see him getting the recognition he deserves. I first remember seeing his work in a preview of "It Came from Beneath the Sea," which featured a giant octopus menacing San Francisco, giving tentacle to the Golden Gate Bridge. The first of his films I actually saw is still one of my favorites – "20 Million Miles to Earth," which featured a creature brought back from Venus (by Hedda Hopper's son, William, who was also a regular on the Perry Mason series) as an egglet that hatched and grew bigger than a building. There's a great fight scene between the creature, called an ymir, and an elephant. His next film was the great "7th Voyage of Sinbad," that featured a cyclops that looked like the ymir's cousin, and a swordfight with a skeleton that was precursor to a more complex scene in "Jason and the Argonauts," a fight with an army of skeletons. These animations were real magic – perhaps not as realistic as the computer animations that are so much a part of today's films, but they had their own aesthetic of amazement.
Alice ColtraneAlice Coltrane died Friday; Xeni Jardin wrote a good obituary with several links. She was still performing 'til the end. Though she came to prominence through her marriage to John Coltrane, she was herself an accomplished performer and profoundly spiritual. From an interview by Susan L. Taylor for Essence:
John knew that music fundamentally is a spiritual language that speaks to the heart and soul. Unfortunately, everyone cannot go to the mountain, or to isolation. But through music, people can go within their own heart and let their spirit soar, and maybe say, “Lord, at least through spiritual sound, I could possibly reach that open door that leads to your sacred domain.” I felt that through John’s compositions, and the sound of his instrument, this could pave the way to the righteous path, giving us a time for spiritual reflection, concentration, upliftment and revitalization. In India, there is a Name of God known as Nadabrahma. It means God as sound. God is sound.
John was deeply affected by the need for peace in the world; and he wanted to utilize his music as his elders had done in the church. Not necessarily from the pulpit, but from a platform that could serve as an outreach to many more souls that those who followed his music. He respected the faiths of others, and I don’t believe people knew how deep his thoughts were on the subject of salvation, liberation and God realization, and that he believed in love toward all mankind with and the effort to relieve pain and suffering.
RAW quits the scene
From his blog: "Robert Anton Wilson Defies Medical Experts and leaves his body @4:50 AM on binary date 01/11." [Link]
Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.
John Shirley, main instigator of the cyberpunk literary genre, says Cuaron's Children of Men "is truly masterful film making." [Link]
One of the great things about this cyberpunkesque dystopian film about a near-future where people can no longer reproduce and society has imploded, is that it’s an action movie without action movie cliches–the hero, Clive Owens (he’s very good), never kills anyone (well he bashes a guy in the head with a car battery once), never shoots anyone, never hangs from the runners of helicopters or runs from a fireball. But it’s paced like an action movie and there’s achingly realistic jeopardy in it. Cuaron has a climactic scene, with a lot of police-versus-terrorist mayhem going on, that is all one long shot and he does it magnificently, it’s incredibly well choreographed. Clive Owens’ barefoot, animal-loving Theo seems to be a St Francis of Assisi figure, rather than an action hero. The girl who plays the world’s only pregnant woman is wonderful but especially fine is Michael Caine as an aging hipster, a stony idealist…
There’s a concentration camp for immigrants in the film and don’t imagine for a moment it’s far fetched, they’re building them right now…and some already exist. The film’s use of Homeland Security and other Bush-flavored protofascist references bring it right on home…
Doctorow: "The American lifestyle frankly sucks."
In response to Worldchanging's question, "What's Next," I wrote
What I'd like to see is a clear plan that explains how 6 billion people coexist on earth with a very high-quality standard of living. I want that plan to explain how to overcome the resource issues, and how to work through the political and distribution issues, to make that world possible. I want this to be more than a hopeful idea that fuels a lot of blog posts or a book like ours, which does include fragments of this kind of thinking. I think the biggest challenge here is coming up with, and describing effectively, a global political model that will support this kind of evolution.
I was riffing off a question about the earth's lack of resources to support the American version of "a high standard of living" for everybody. Bruce Sterling points to resonant comments from Cory Doctorow:
SFRevu: I've heard varying numbers on how many planet Earth's it would take to provide everyone with an "American" standard of living, ranging from 10 to 20 or so. That's always seemed bogus to me since a) Americans suffer from over-abundance and b) information doesn't consume resources to be replicated. Mostly. What's your take?
Cory: Well, America has lots of weird consumption inefficiencies, especially away from the coastal cities where we're encouraged to own a lot more house, car and material goods than we need. I'd be more interested in how much it would take to provide every person in the world the kind of life they enjoy in one of the moderate-priced European "B" cities like Florence. Walkable places with incredible food, design, manufacturing, schools, racial diversity, etc. Places with great public transit AND a high level of private vehicle ownership, as well as universal health-care, cheap or free universities, and refreshing absence of paranoid security theater aimed at eliminating abstract nouns like "terror."
The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks. We spend too much time in traffic and too much time taking care of a badly built McHouse that has the ergonomics of a coach seat on a discount airline. Add to that the lack of health care (just listened to a Stanford lecture about the American Couple that cited a study that determined that the single biggest predictor of long-term marital happiness is whether both partners have health care), the enormous wealth-gap between the rich and poor, blisteringly expensive tertiary education, an infant mortality rate that's straight out of Victorian England, and a national security apparat that shoves its fist up my asshole every time I get on an airplane, and I don't think that this country is much of a paragon of quality living.
America has lots going for it -- innovation, the Bill of Rights, a willingness to let its language mutate in exciting and interesting ways, but the standard of living is not America's signal virtue.
More First Night: Giant Eyeball
Luke Savisky's "'I" of Texas'"...
First NightWe made it to Austin's second annual First Night on New Year's Eve. I didn't attend the first, ran into friends who had been there and who said this one was far better because it was less spread out; most of the activity was focused around Cesar Chavez from Congress Ave. to City Hall. The event started with a terrific parade, probably the best parade I've seen. I think it's because the politicians and corporate marketing folks turned it over to artists and independents. I shot a photo set and took time to clean up the photos, which were already pretty good. Looking over the list, I see that there's a lot we missed... next year we'll do better!
Here's my silent video of the Blue Lapis dancers:
Mr. BrownThe online version of The New Yorker reposts a fascinating 2002 piece about James Brown, by Philip Gourevitch. [Link]
A thousand people had gathered in the midday sun to see him, most of them white, and around the periphery marched several hundred protesters, chanting, "James Brown sold out." Suddenly, a very loud, thumping beat blared from the sound system, and Mr. Brown appeared onstage, rapping out a karaoke version of his new song, "Killing Is Out, School Is In," with a vocal accompanist, who barked back, "I don't think they heard you, brother. Say it again." Despite the volume, their voices were barely audible over the chants of the protesters. From here and there in the crowd, people began hurling pennies at the stage. Two young black men looked on, discussing James Brown's presence in tones of disgust: "He's done. . . . He's finished. . . . Out the window with all them records—like Frisbees."
All at once, with the song still playing, Mr. Brown spun around and walked offstage. He did not wait for applause, or return for it. One second he was there, and the next he was gone. Protesters surged toward him as he climbed into his limo. Mounted policemen moved to hold them back. An old man screamed, "Bring Elvis back—they both dead now." James Brown got back out of the car to hug a well-wisher. A few protesters rushed forward, and he ducked back inside. With the police cavalry as an escort, the car finally began to move off. A new chant began: "Say it loud, we got him out now."
Flying Saucers Farewell
Someone's actually written a serious book about the "wonderfully absurd" UFO whacko George Adamski, reviewed at a ufologist's blog, The Orange Orb. The book, Looking for Orthon
The typical pseudoscience book has the characteristic that each chapter deals with a different topic and is completely unconnected to previous and subsequent chapters, and to the book's supposed title or theme. Colin Bennett has found a new paradigm! Each of the 17 chapters in this book, supposedly about 1950s "contactee" George Adamski, is THE SAME! Each chapter starts with a bit of completely unreliable "information" about Adamski, and then veers into precisely the same diatribe, reworded only slightly from chapter to chapter. The word "pandimensional," as a result, occurs on just about every page in the book. Invariably, we hear about the irredeemable and total evil of science, scientists and indeed scholarship or scholarly integrity of any kind in any context. Then we hear about Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Then we hear about Uri Geller, the long forgotten Ted Serios the bellhop and "thoughtographer," Pacific Cargo Cults, and the same few Adamski followers. And then we get an incoherently presented Fortean account of a saucer sighting or a haunting or whatever pops into the author's mind at that particular moment.
When I was a teen or preteen, I forget which, I read an Adamski book, the name of which I forget, but I always wanted to steal the title of one of his other books, Flying Saucers Farewell, for a film script I never wrote. (I was fascinated with flying saucers after seeing the scifi classics, This Island Earth and Earth vs the Flying Saucers). I still occasionally run across Adamski references because pursuing Forteana is one of my guilty pleasures. My favorite Charle Fort quote: "If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?"
James BrownOddly, I was thinking about James Brown a day or two before he died, wondering how he was holding up and whether he was still touring. I was a James Brown fan starting 'round 1966. I'd heard his music before then, but it was "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" that got under my skin. I bought the album, a King record with a wild cover, and played it 'til it wore out. I've been listening to him ever since, Check out his discography at Allmusic – this was one hard workin' man.
Come here sister.....Papa's in the swing
He ain't too hip...about that new breed babe
He ain't no drag
Papa's got a brand new bag
Come here mama....and dig this crazy scene
He's not too fancy....but his line is pretty clean
He ain't no drag.
Papa's got a brand new bag
He's doing the Jerk....
He's doing the Fly
Don't play him cheap 'cause you know he ain't shy
He's doing the Monkey, the Mashed Potatoes, Jump back Jack, See you later
alligator.
Come here sister
Papa's in the swing
He ain't too hip now
but I can dig that new breed babe;
He ain't no drag
He's got a brand new bag
Oh papa! He's doing the Jerk
Papa...he's doing the Jerk
He's doing the twist ... just like this,
He's doing the Fly ev'ry day and ev'ry night
The thing's....like the Boomerang.
Hey....come on
Hey! Hey.....come on
Hey! Hey....he's pu tight...out of sight...
Come on. Hey! Hey!
(Papa's Got a Brand New Bag)
The ResentmentsYesterday even residual, almost poetic pain from removal of ingrown toenails couldn't stop me from catching The Resentments' low-cost, high quality (two hour) gig at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. This is, after all, the best rock and roll band in the world, and it wasn't hard to snag a chair on the front row, right in front of Jon Dee Graham, who nearly blasted me out of my chair with his lap steel guitar runs. The best news, though, is that I shot a bunch of photos, and you can check 'me out on Flickr. The band would also like you to buy their great new album, On My Way to See You
John Shirley discusses his new book, The Other End
At least, his last laugh with Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, in an article about his "rebel spirit":
The last laugh I shared with Altman onstage came when he was discussing A Prairie Home Companion. He said he had upset Garrison Keeler, who thought of the film based on his radio show as a light romp. Altman shook his head and said, "No it's not, it's a film about death. Virginia Madsen plays an angel who keeps picking people off. By the end of the picture she's practically taken the whole cast with her." In retrospect, Prairie feels even more like an elegy for a time past that won't come back. But Altman wouldn't go in for eulogies. "It's just death," he said, "nothing to be afraid of."Reading is a skill
Pesco blogs a great Zadie Smith quote he found via Orange Crate Art:
But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.Jon Dee Graham
Friday I took a much-needed break to catch Jon Dee Graham at the Saxon Pub, and he blew my socks off. Just back from a tour with Peter Case, he slammed two sets out of the park, his sound falling somewhere between Tom Waits and X, and I found myself thinking about the Velvet Underground in there, too. But he sounded most like Jon Dee Graham, and that's even better. I was inspired to buy a copy of his latest cd, Full, right there at the Saxon. (It looks like he's back at the Saxon tonight with The Resentments...)
Honoria's SoFi art experience
At the SoFi Arts Fair in Austin today, Marsha and I visited Honoria and had a conversation (1.46MB MP3). We also bought a watercolor (poppies!).
Steve Reich @ 70Thanks to Web Zen for noting Steve Reich's 70th birthday. Celebrate by grabbing a copy of Music for 18 Musicians, you won't regret it....
You don't wanna be normal
Mark blogged a SubGenius rant byt Nenslo called "Act Normal," originally publsihed in '94. Here's the quote I like &ndash it's zenful:
I don't wish it to be thought that "Normal" thinking is essentially a bad thing. Very few people actually require an open mind or the ability to reason in the course of their everyday lives. A donut-shop cashier does not need to consider the ethics of selling blobs of greasy dough, and a philosophical and ethical outlook would be an outright detriment to a nuclear warhead assembly plant worker or oil-company lawyer. It is vital for most people to continue to act "Normal." Without such behavior the wheels of commerce and progress would grind to a halt. The excesses which make life in this modern world so simple for those who are free from the confining systems of dissatisfaction and complaint would suddenly cease to be. Without the ridiculously expensive and painfully loud car stereos, the mindless repetition of pop-song lustmongery, elaborate hairdos, huge jewelry and ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches dangling before the sleepwalking hordes there would be no cheap crummy apartments, discarded art supplies, inexpensive healthfood, or good secondhand clothing.Signs of Witness
For the most part, the existence of "Normal" behavior is a good thing for those who require nothing more. But for people who care about things or think about things, who examine their lives and their place in the world, acting "Normal" is insanity, a trap which leads to constant dissatisfaction and eventual destruction. Acting "Normal" for such people is hating, complaining, finding fault, holding grudges, being afraid, and limiting themselves to the small world of everyday existence, the world even "Normal" people pay most of their money to escape from by buying distractions, or getting loaded and laid as much as they can before they die.
John Shirley, who with Bruce Sterling was an architect of the cyberpunk literary subgenre in the 1980s, is writing a new kind of apocalyptic novel. As right-wing "end of days" novels proliferate, John's writing "unapologetically" from the other end of the partisan scale, hence his novel's name, The Other End.
It strikes me that if the landlord of this property we call Earth returns and discovers how we've treated it, and how many of the better tenants have been treated, then he--or she or something beyond gender--may indeed wish to do some evicting and rebuilding. But a mythology cooked up in a narrow backwater of the world is unlikely to provide the blueprint for that Day of Judgment. Hence, alternative End Times tales are called for, for the sake of balanced viewpoint, at least, and--not least--in the hope of the beginning of a paradigm shift. This novel offers that alternative judgment day.
While writing the novel, John's developed another project, a web site called Signs of Witness, which "offers an equal opportunity for wry comment, entertainment, skepticism, and passionate belief in the forthcoming transfiguration of the world." A kind of apocalyptic Fortean Times, the Signs site is similarly addictive, filled with accounts of asteroid threats, elephant rebellions, prophecy, environmental degradation, and global destruction. You know... .fun.
Speaking of "51 Birch Street"...Don't miss the New York Times' review of Doug's film. [Link]
“I didn’t make a film just because all this weird stuff was happening and I found the diaries and all that,” he said. “No. It was because my father was talking about himself. The movers were coming, Dad’s in the basement. The light looked really great. And I threw him a question or two. The next thing you know, it’s an hour later and I’m changing the tape.”The Departed
Mike Block was not, his son said, the kind of man to express his inner suburbanite. “And it was the first time I ever heard him talk about my mother,” Doug said. “Ever. Or the marriage. It was weird, you know? Kind of uncomfortable. But he seemed to want it, and I picked up on that. I saw a really unique opportunity to get to know my father better.
“But it wasn’t until later, when we were in the car, and I asked him ‘Do you miss Mom?’ and he said no” that Doug Block knew he was onto a movie.
The buzz about The Departed is all about Jack Nicholson &ndhash; "Jack's Back!" – but the actor who holds the film together isn't Nicholson or DiCaprio or Damon. It's Mark Wahlberg, whose character Dignan, who has the soul and instincts of a ninja, is the moral center. But the rest of the ensemble is pretty great, and the film is a magnficent, tragic American rock opera. Critics who say the film is "light" for Scorses puzzle me. Based on the "Infernal Affairs," its plot may be a little improbabe here and there, but hey, that's opera. One critic complains that Nicholson's performance is over the top, but I would say "larger than life." It works in context.
Subscribe to the life of Robert Anton Wilson
It's a helluva note that remarkable people too often die broke, often because they've devoted their lives and their energies to missions that enrich the lives of many without too much regard for their own financial stability. The great Robert Anton Wilson, whose ideas and cosmic jokes influenced a whole generation of eyeball-rolling cultural dissidents, in fact reality dissidents, is suffering from post-polio syndrome, has little money and little means to make money. He could use our help. And for more on Wilson today, read this.
In fact, one day this past spring, after Santa Cruz moviegoers had lined up to see What the Bleep Do We Know!? in sufficient numbers to justify its three-month run, Robert Anton Wilson was lying alone, conscious but unable to move, on the floor of this one-bedroom Capitola apartment for 30 hours."The idea is more important than the object."
"It really didn't seem that long," says Wilson of his collapse, which ended when his daughter arrived and broke down the door. "And I remember thinking, as I'm lying there trying to move and unable to move: Hey, I may be dying now. And it didn't frighten me or bother me at all."
Wilson's subsequent trip to the hospital, the first of his adult life, was a different story altogether.
"The worst thing about hospitals," says Wilson, who was rescued when his daughter managed to break into the apartment, "is that all the rights guaranteed in the first 10 amendments are immediately canceled. You have no civil rights whatsoever. And the second thing is, all the ordinary rules no longer apply--you are no longer a person deserving of kindness, you're a disobedient child who has to be reprimanded and herded around. My God, I don't know why people put up with such treatment." Wilson, we can presume, doesn't particularly like being told what to do.
"Not by people who treat me like an idiot. Not when I'm 73 years old, I have 35 books in print, I supported a wife and four kids for most of my life. I do not appreciate being treated like a disobedient 4-year-old, the way they treat everybody in the hospital."
Of course, you don't have to go to a hospital to be treated like that, but Wilson's on a roll ...
"I was an editor of Playboy, for chrissake," he cries, as though that, if nothing else, should carry some weight in this culture. "I've had plays performed in England, Germany and the United States; my books are in print in a dozen countries. Why the hell do they treat me like a child? I refuse to tolerate it. If they won't treat me with dignity, I won't go anywhere near them, especially with all the goddamned germs they got floating around there. CNN did a report on it -- the number of people who are killed by diseases picked up in hospitals is much greater than the number who are killed by cars.
"I'm never going to a hospital again. Never, never, never, never! I will lie on the floor and die before I go back to a hospital...."
The title of this post is one of two quotes that Bazooka posted yesterday, but he says the second (posted below) is more important... [Link]
After abstract expressionism, a lot of artists haven't been trained to manipulate material. Instead, they've been taught that what they're supposed to manipulate is concepts or ideas. To me, this is absolutely responsible for a lot of weaknesses in artists' production at this point. I'm an advocate of a return to very fundamental, very basic studio practices, which means that you first spend a lot of your time trying to figure out what materials will do, and in the process of figuring that out, you figure out what to do with them. [...]
Do writers get away with poor construction if their ideas are compelling? They shouldn't. I've been guilty of this though — my first draftism, dismissing craft and publishing poor constructions, focusing on getting the word out without enough attention to the power and clarity of the piece. Easy to screw up when you don't have an editor... as I was reminded via a recent experience with an editor whose feedback significantly improved the final deliverable (a brief article about danah boyd, which will be included in the first issue of the new SXSW magazine).
This is intense!A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness. - Miller in "Repo Man"
Thought about this quote after seeing a couple of very similar articles about 9/11 conspiracy theories this week - from Michael Ventura and RU Sirius. Seems they were both having the same thought, dipping into a pervasive cosmic unconsciousness...
Ventura is skeptical of blogs because "they often fail to cite their sources, and there's no way to know if they've confirmed their facts." He's even more skeptical of the 9/11 consipiracy theories, especially the one that says it was an "inside job," that the U.S. government brought down the World Trade Center. I won't say the thought hasn't crossed my own mind – an analysis that asks who benefited most from the attack could point to the Bush Administration, who clearly took full advantage of the post 9/11 senes of national unity and fear of terrorism to further it's own agenda (as Keith Olbermann said earlier this week). However as one who's played (ironically, not seriously) with many conspiracy theories in the past, I've always had a skepticism similar to Ventura's:
The conspiracy usually outlined would require dozens of people to do lots of manual labor for a considerable time with no leak then and no leak since. Perfect secrecy accomplished by, say, a hundred people. As a journalist and student of history, to me that would be strangest of all.
In this week's article he goes on to make a good point:
Even if these conspiracy theorists are right, does it matter? Does it matter which cabal of murderous madmen was responsible? What matters more is that cabals of murderous madmen now set the world's agenda. It's easy to say that, one way or another, it's always been like that, and I would agree that there have always been cabals, and some have been powerful, but what has been more powerful by far is the counterpoint of momentum and inertia of the masses of us, throughout the ages, who want to live our own lives by our own lights and do the best we can. What's changed is that technology has given cabals vastly disproportionate power.....
RUSirius is skeptical of conspiracy theories anti-conspiracy theories... pretty much everybody. He reviews a book from Popular Mechanics called Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts
It happens sometimes. People just explode . . . natural causes. - Agent Rogersz in "Repo Man."Getting all emotional
Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design talks about his pioneering work in "emotional design." [Link] Here's the quote that's sticking in my brain:
... design in the 90’s actually got consumed by the internet-IPO mania, and it turned out to be “the decade of greed and cheat” - and an entire generation of designers were lost. Frog survived and ultimately succeeded but we will never forget the dark times. For this decade, I hope that “Design” will advance, but so far it is “the decade of outsourcing”, and with a very fractured processes driven by naked economics, innovation and human-cultural design is very hard to achieve.What a Rush!
Richard Rush is phenomenal.
Last night Marsha and I caught a screening of Richard Rush's "The Stunt Man" and "Psych-Out" at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, organized by Lars Nilsen, who programs the Alamo's Weird Wednesday series. Though I'd seen some of his earlier exploitation films ("Hell's Angels on Wheels," "The Savage Seven," I became a Richard Rush fan when I saw "Getting Straight" in 1970 - probably the only film to get a handle on the upheaval at the end of the 60s (which seems quaint compared to nastier contemporary upheaval, but I digress). Oddly, there wasn't a single reference to "Getting Straight" in last nights discussions before and after both films - wish they'd included it as a third feature.
We saw Rush's own print of "Stunt Man" - the studio hasn't reprinted it, though it's available on DVD along with his full-lenth documentary, "The Sinister Saga of Making the Stunt Man" – which is about the ten years it took to cut through the politics of the film industry and to get the film made. Rush mentioned how he had to keep revising the script as the Vietnam era faded into the past. The protagonist of the film is a Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback) who stumbles into a brilliant director's location shoot and becomes a stunt man for the film - and more: he becomes the soul of the film, and the key to its purpose. The director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), says at one point that his film is not about fighting wars, it's about fighting windmills. Ultimately both films, Rush's and Cross's, are about paranoia fed by assumption and illusion.
Appearing with Rush: Charles Bail, a stunt man himself, who played stunt coordinator Chuck Barton in the film, and Austin's Gary Kent, who worked with Rush on several films, including "Psych-Out" (where he created the special effects).
I ran into my friend Juliette Kernion, who's behind the terrific Slackerwood blog; looking forward to her post about the screening.
Joe Coleman
The New York Times on Joe Coleman: "Obsessively depicting a grim moral universe of transgression and retribution, Mr. Coleman paints grotesque images of murderers and victims, freaks and monsters, disease, depravity and perversities of every kind." Art-as-sideshow. Mr. Coleman also markets effectively via his web site (the server for which mysteriously vanished as I was writing this). [Link to Wikipedia article]
The latest Web Zen: travelling zen, for the armchair traveller, and for those of us who're too busy to take a real vacation:
http://www.quietamerican.org/vacation.html
http://www.turnhere.com/
http://www.driveproject.com
http://www.yutakaloveslondon.com/
http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/29/
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~richardb/page4.htm
http://www.lostamerica.com
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/
I was especially interested in the Lost America site, where Troy Paiva notes that he's been posting his latest at Flickr. It's great stuff. He says he's "been doing night photography/light painting in abandoned places since 1989 and have been running the 'Lost America' Website since 1998."
Apocalyptic fun"Signs of Witness" is John Shirley's new web site, "devoted to compiling apocalyptic and 'apocalyptic' events, observations, eccentricities, etc, all with an end-times flavor." (Thanks, John!)
allmusic: tribute to Arthur LeeIf my homage to the late Arthur Lee piqued your interest and you want to learn more about him, check out allmusic.com's tribute.
Twenty years later, it's hard to believe that any list of the greatest albums of all time would not include Forever Changes, which is a testament not only to the strength of the album but to how Love's reputation has only grown over time. And frankly, although they are a band that captured the sunny, hazy vibe of the Summer of Love, they seem to be a band that was almost designed to be appreciated at a later date. Their music seems to float out of time -- there are strands of folk-rock, garage rock, and of course psychedelia, yet they don't comfortably fit into any of those styles. They were too mystic for folk-rock and never were as earnest as the folkies, either. They could rock hard, as the rampaging "Seven & Seven Is" proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, but they were also too beautiful and precious to be categorized as just a garage band. And while they certainly were a mind trip to hear -- they dove head first into side-long explorations, like "Revelations" on Da Capo -- the lush orchestrations of Forever Changes are far removed from roiling acid rock, as was the irrepressible cheerful vibe of "¡Que Vida!" for that matter. Love was simply like no other band and that's why it's easier to marvel at their achievements from a distance; separated from the time and judged on the music alone, it's easier to hear how they were special, and even if you can wonder why any of their first three albums weren't huge hits (and there were good reasons why, chief among them their lack of touring), you kind of know that music this unique is better heard at a later date.We're driving Japan crazy
Western (as in American) values are literally driving the Japanese crazy, and one result is that the population is shrinking because the birth rate is falling and the suicide rate is rising. [Link]
A spokesman for the Mental Health Institute said that the emphasis on individual performance was driving Japanese workers — particularly those in their thirties — to mental turmoil. “People tend to be individualised under the new working patterns,” he said. “When people worked in teams they were happier.”RU Sirius interviews Chris Nakashima-Brown
RU Sirius' latest NeoFiles podcast includes an interview with Austin's Chris Nakashima-Brown, who "has been compared to J.G. Ballard, Mark Leyner, William Gibson, and Jorge Luis Borges… on 'The Love Boat.'" [Link]
Arthur Lee, 1945 - 2006
Arthur Lee was the creative force behind the band Love. Love's first three albums were a significant part of my life's soundtrack, especially the remarkable "Forever Changes," one of the greatest rock albums, if rock is the correct classification. (It was really unclassifiable.) Lee was difficult, made some wrong turns, spent time in prison... then made a triumphant return to the stage in 2002, touring and performing the complete Forever Changes, though his backing band split with him in August 2005, evidently frustrated at his mental and physical issues and a resulting decline in the quality of his performances. He was treated for acute myeloid leukemia.
Arthur Lee died yesterday, August 3, 2006.
This is the time and life that I am living
And I'll face each day with a smile
For the time that I've been given's such a little while
And the things that I must do consist of more than style
This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that's all that lives is gonna die
And there'll always be some people here to wonder why
And for every happy hello, there will be good-bye
There'll be time for you to put yourself on
— Arthur Lee, "You Set the Scene"
Love performs My Little Red Book:
Cory at boingboing notes that emusic, where I do most of my shopping these days, is the second largest online music store in the world. Cory links to a USA Today article that says eMusic has 11% market share, second after ITunes at 67%. The site, which provides mp3 files without copy protection, focuses on independent music, cool cutting-edge stuff that you might never find on the other sites. The truly great if obscure stuff is visible on eMusic because they find ways to tell you about it - reviews and a site 'magazine,' as well as reviews ported over from allmusic.com. Best news: it's cheap... 25 cents per track!
Spam is good for something after all
Alex Dragulescu has created "spam architecture" images based on patterns and rhythms found in junk email text. [Link]
Media Matters metacovers CNN's recent rapturous moments, dancing the apocalypso with a couple of of Christian authors, Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg, who says
I've been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill. Members of Congress, Israelis, Arab leaders all want to understand the Middle East through the lens of biblical prophecies. I'm writing these novels that keep seeming to come true. But we're seeing Bible prophecy, bit by bit, unfold in the Middle East right now....I would say that Bible prophecy is an intercept from the mind of God. It's actually fairly remarkable intelligence, and that's why my novels keep coming true, because mine are on this side of the Rapture, leading up to Jerry and Tim's books, but they suggest events that the Bible does lay out that will get us closer to those events....They're New York Times best-sellers, because they're based on Bible prophecy, and they are coming true bit by bit, day by day.
Maybe the rapture's already happened, but only a couple of guys qualified, and they were both living in caves, so nobody noticed they'd gone?
FringeWare used to carry a Macintosh-based game called Rupture the Rapture by Robert Carr. As I recall, the idea was to blast souls out of the sky as they ascended. Searching a reference, I found a blog by that name, and found an interesting name Rapture-bound fundamentalists – "Raptiles."
The Raptiles are giddy with glee. They are jumping up and down with joy in there belief that the present hostilities between Israel and Lebanon are the first salvos of the coming final battle at Armageddon between the armies of jesus and the anti-christ and his minions. The odds-on favorite for the anti-christ is, of course, Osama, or perhaps a mullah yet to be named (along with a 2nd round draft choice in 2009 should 2009 actually happen.) Some are sticking with Bill Clinton. My money's on Rob Schneider.Against the Day
The sailor's back in town.
Against the Day might be the title of Thomas Pynchon's new novel. We'll find out soon enough. [Link]
Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all."The YouTube War"
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.
--Thomas Pynchon
Ana Marie Cox notes that, while the architects of the Iraq War and their boosters argue that media portrays the war as a downer whereas soldiers on the ground could tell you all the good things that are happening, you can see that's not the case by surfing through the videos they're sharing on sites like YouTube. [Link]
By that logic, putting cameras in the hands of those soldiers on the ground should provide enough celebration for an "Up with Iraq" musical.Jasmina in the Deep South
There's music in a lot of the soldiers' videos, but precious little uplift. In "The War Tapes," one soldier/auteur complains frequently about the risks he and his comrades take to protect the property of the Halliburton subsidiary subcontracted to feed the troops: "Why the f--- am I sitting out here guarding a truck full of cheesecake?" he laments. After another guardsman supplies a Bush Administration-approved justification for their presence (freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people, stability in the Middle East), the cameraman asks, "tell me how you really feel." Deadpan, he continues: "After that happens, maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy."
Jasmina blogs a visit to Holly Beach, Louisiana. "We enter the tourist center at the border of Louisiana. We want to go to Holly Beach, we say. Holly Beach isn't there any more, says the clerk, politely smiling." Indeed, Holly Beach quit the scene, wiped bare by Hurricane Rita. [Link]
The graveyards have no fences left, the churches have no windows. These people here are all Catholics, and the state of Louisiana is divided into parishes, not civil counties.The madcap laughs no more
I have seen dead towns before, destroyed by war, not nature. My friend argues. The oil of Louisiana is pumped and produced all over these desolate marshlands as if nothing else matters; fossil fuel is like heroin, selling like crazy since the price is soaring worldwide, and bringing the damage of climate change back to the marshland. The refineries smell of pollution, putrid fish, putrid capitalism.
I am interested in people, not things. But there are not many people around here any more.
Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett's taken the ultimate trip, dead at 60. [Link]
The madcap laughed at the man on the border
hey ho, huff the Talbot
the winds they blew and the leaves did wag
they'll never put me in their bag
the seas will reach and always seep
so high you go, so low you creep
the wind it blows in tropical heat
the drones they throng on mossy seats
the squeaking door will always squeak
two up, two down we'll never-[lee] limit
so merrily trip forgo my side
Please leave us here
close our eyes to the octopus ride!
- –Syd Barrett, Octopus
Brian Aldiss, ostensibly inspired by an exhibition (The Starry Messenger: Visions of the Universe) about visions of the future, has a few visions of his own. Noting his profession as author of science fiction novels, he notes that they are "hardly a judicious study of discernable reality, but rather the realities discernable through a capricious temperament." Ah so. [Link]
Science over the past century in the west has brought many comforts and blessings including longer lifespans. Yet here that ominous phrase, "Research shows ..." beloved of journalists, enters; there are surveys that indicate how frequently men and women suffer as greatly as Wagner without having an ounce of his genius. There is reason to believe that the human brain has developed rather on an ad hoc basis - chance again - and is not without its imperfections. How else could warfare be so endemic? It is generally considered impolite to speak of self-styled homo sapiens in derogatory terms, but the question remains. Why are we not by now living in a utopia?Bridging the Gap
Archaeologists and palaeontologists provide us with a possible answer to the riddle. It is a cause for amazement that skulls of men are dug from the ground where they have lain intact for centuries, long after the softer materials associated with the skull have disintegrated. How much reckless evolutionary energy nature has expended on bone and the durability of bone. If only more of that energy had gone into building bigger and better-integrated brains.
My pal Hank Jones ( an Austin attorney and culturista who does a lot of public speaking himself) just sent me the link to Social Innovation Conversations at the Center for Social Innovation. The site has a mp3s of presentations at "Bridging the Gap: Leading Social Innovation Across Sectors," the Stanford 2005 Net Impact Conference. (The site also has a several podcast feeds.) Thanks, Hank!
FlickringMark's posting funny cellphone pix on Flickr: Set One | Set Two
While you're at it, check out Mark's boingboing pointer to Todd's 15 Minutes of Madness,
"My Beating Blog"Last we heard from Yuri Gitman, he was riding wireless "magic" bikes through NYC. I just stumbled onto one of his current projects,
"Beating Heart":
My Beating Blog is an attempt to take the journaling aspect of blogging into a surrealistic future, in which the blog author literally and metaphorically bares his heart. The artist-blogger wears a GPS-enabled Heart-rate monitor throughout parts of the day, then blogs the data along with matching personal experiences, events, and musings.Jumping the art shark
For three weeks, the site will blog a series of posts contextualizing heart-rate visualizations, GPS-maps, and personal journal entries. Online users are given a rare entrance into personal medical-grade statistics, stalker-level location tracking, and the private thoughts of the blogger. Inevitably, issues regarding privacy, exhibitionism, and voyeurism playfully emerge as the blogosphere is infused with biofeedback and location technology. Rather then play into a dystopian or Orwellian future, blogs and biofeedback are given a poetic license, reframing our awareness of our own and each others' beating hearts.
The shark in Damien Hirst's concept art piece The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living is beginning to rot, evidently because it was preserved with formaldehyde rather than alcohol.
All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey. ~ John Dryden
Technology artMike Kuniavsky talks about the relationship of technology art to design (and has some good info about technology art in the Bay Area, as well). [Link]
Technology art is a key incubator for ideas in interaction and industrial design. For me the chain of influence is clear: if design is the practice of making technology more human-centered, then art is the most pure expression of that idea. This doesn't mean that art is user-centered (it's not), and design shouldn't be treated as an art medium (as I've criticized critical design for doing), but art is made for people without the typical constraints that normally define the technology design process*. This makes it much more free to explore people's relationship to technology in ways that commercial products rarely can. I believe that it's critical that industrial and interaction designers look to art and artists for the results of their interpretations of the possibilities of technology and how they use art to identify important social and cultural phenomena.The future's back there
Fascinating cultural variation: the Aymara people of South America use a spatial metaphor for time that's opposite other world cultures - the future is behind them, and the past is in front. [Link]
There are also in English ambiguous expressions like "Wednesday's meeting was moved forward two days." Does that mean the new meeting time falls on Friday or Monday? Roughly half of polled English speakers will pick the former and the other half the latter. And that depends, it turns out, on whether they're picturing themselves as being in motion relative to time or time itself as moving. Both of these ideas are perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical too, as illustrated by "We're coming to the end of the year" vs. "The end of the year is approaching."666
Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn't command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.
"These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon," Nunez said. "That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn't have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.
"But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly different," he said.
Some Christian hexakosioihexekontahexaphobics refer to today (6/6/2006) as "Devil's Day" and believe that Satan (or his minions) will be particularly busy today dancing the apocalypso. Leveraging the vibe, 20th Century Fox is releasing the remake of The Omen today. If you're undisturbed by facts, check out Wikipedia's article on 666.
Tintin in Tibet
The Dalai Lama presented the Light of Truth award yesterday to the Hergé Foundation. The Light of Truth Award is presented for contributions to the public understanding of Tibet. Hergé (Georges Remi), author of the Tintin books, wrote Tintin in Tibet as a sequel to Tintin: Blue Lotus, wherein Tintin visits China and meets a Chinese boy, Chang Chong-chen (based on a Chinese student the author had actually met). In the very personal book on Tibet, considered one of the best in the series, Tintin searches the Himalayas for Chang after a plane crash, and encounters Tibetan Buddhist culture. From the Hergé site:
Tintin abandons his daily routine and bourgeois life which he will describe in Castafiore Emerald. He penetrates a cosmic world, where only the chosen few may communicate, without words. He gets lonelier, as if he were trying to reach this nether world, as he was so doing in the desert or on the sea. Guides and porters abandon him. Part of the equipment has to be left behind. “All this is not strictly indispensable” (2) The tent flies off, the stove explodes, Tharkey gives up, Haddock refuses to move ahead. Snowy betrays. They will come back however and accompany Tintin in his quest.Ouch
Monks will consecrate his initiative by giving the heroes a new and poetic identity: pure heart, morning snow, rumbling thunder, thus revealing its religious dimension. The greatest friendship or the deepest love must be recognized in order to be confirmed, thus receiving the seal of authenticity.
Funny excerpt from Ed Ward's latest BerlinBites post:
The Sauerkrautmeister, taking time off from the delightful little bundle of cabbage he and Ms. Arpa brought into the world recently, noted my mention of the 30-foot (I checked yesterday) aspirin in back of the Reichstag, erected there as part of the Germany: Land of Ideas campaign that's got a truly hideous pile of books at Bebelplatz and a rather generic car somewhere else. "I love that," he writes. "Guess where they got lots of human pain data to refine the formula?" Why, volunteers from the S&M clubs which flourished here during the Weimar Republic, right? No?Resistance is futile
I guess what George Clinton said is true: "When you have a big headache, you need a big pill."
Thomas Holmes of the University of Minnesota has charted WalMart's growth. You can also see an animated version of the progression as a .wmv video.
Clifford Antone: intimate with the blues
Austin's mourning the death of Clifford Antone, who put Austin on the blues map by creating what for years was considered the world's best blues venue. Yesterday there was a long wake at Antone's ("just stick around, music will happen" was the intro). [Video]. I waited 'til today to blog about Antone so that I could include links to the memorials at the Austin Chronicle's web site:
- Okie Dokie Stomp by Joe Nick Patoski
- This Be an Empty World Without the Blues by Bill Bentley
- Buried Alive in the Blues by Ed Ward
- I Saw the Light by Margaret Moser
Clifford Antone might not have set out to be a wise man of music, but he did just fine. Then the light went out. Just like that. But the sound – the pounding, strumming 12-bar march to the lowdown, the dance that so many of us in Texas have known for 100 years – its life extended in no small part by a kid from Port Arthur, is still coming across loud and clear.There's also a link to Margaret's 2001 interview with Antone, about the origin and history of the club:
"It was a hard time for blues," he continues. "The hardest time was right around '75. That's why we became so close with Jimmy [Reed], Clifton [Chenier], Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Walter Shakey Horton, and Sunnyland Slim. Some of them had never been to Texas. Some of them no one wanted anywhere, and here's this club of kids devoted to the blues. It just blew them away...."I didn't know Antone though I followed his career, heard great stories, loved the club. One of my favorite stories was about Boz Scaggs trying to ego his way in the back door of the first Antone's on Sixth Street - word was that Antone kicked him out, evidently offended by Scaggs' lack of humility. The Antone's show I most remember was the first time we saw Stevie Ray Vaughn play solo; his dramatic opening, head bowed with wide-brim black hat concealing the tornado that was about to emerge and tear up the house; his incredible percussive touch. SRV was gonna be huge no matter what, but he was so much more because the Antone's scene nurtured him like a loving Mom and Pop.
I didn't know Antone, but ever time I saw him he was nod and smile, greeting me like I was an old friend. And I suppose the great thing about his career was that, by the time he died, he had so many old friends, and was completely intimate with the blues he loved.
It's a plot!DIY Planner tells how to use a subset of the site's productivity forms to plot fiction, drawing on best practices of fiction writers. [Link]
The plot concept --for which you can use the Story Idea card-- is often the best place to start. The "summary" area is where you should distill your plot into a few succinct sentences. Just a few sentences? But I have lots of great ideas! I need more than a few sentences! Sure, it's wonderful to have lots of ideas (you did bring your journal or notebook, didn't you?), but the idea here is to bring focus to the task. Too many stories wander off in a dozen different directions with no coherent plot or theme, and the writer often becomes so frustrated with attempting to say so many things that he or she will often drop the whole endeavour. So, right now, your primary duty at this early stage is to tie all your little vague threads together into a unified whole.The business of Second Life
Business Week this week features a set of articles on Second Life, the avatar-based virtual community operated by Linden Lab. I started to say created by, but online communities are co-created by their members, the folks who make the platform are like any city's infrastructure – they serve the community, but it's inherently beyond their control. What's great about Linden Labs is that they totally understand that, and they're all about creativity in building an infrastructure that brings out the best in the community – perhaps I should say the various communities – that they serve. Business week notes that "it's not all fun and games," there are business applications for Second Life (and potentially for other graphically-realized virtual worlds that might follow).
Bruce Sterling discovers a new literary form... "the idea of using search engines for Burroughsian cut-up material is hairy." Amen, brother. [Link]
'The initial aesthetics of Flarf went largely unarticulated, but they can probably be approximated by the following recipe: deliberate shapelessness of content, form, spelling, and thought in general, with liberal borrowing from internet chat-room drivel and spam scripts, often with the intention of achieving a studied blend of the offensive, the sentimental, and the infantile.'User's Guide for the 21st Century
Over the last busy month or so, in addition to conferences and meetings and Polycot work, I made final touches on my contributions to the WorldChanging book, A User's Guide for the 21st Century. My piece of the book is about network politics and online tools for amplifying your voice. The book will be released January 1, 2007. [Link]
Seven Makes ItPolycot pal Seven makes things, so it make sense for O'Reilly's Make Blog to feature video of Seven doing his thing – in this case, showing his latest warezL a musical instrument hybrid and a Jacob's Ladder. The latter's pretty shocking...!
"Fear Factor": Lemann on O'ReillyEverything you wanted to know about Bill O'Reilly, but were afraid to ask - via Nicholas Lemann at The New Yorker. Actually an appreciation – who knew that Lemann was an O'Reilly fan, despite their obvious ideological differences? [Link]
The connection between the scourge of child sex abuse and liberals whom O'Reilly doesn't like – a long list that includes George Clooney, Hillary Clinton, Paul Krugman, and Alec Baldwin – may not be obvious, but, to O'Reilly's way of thinking, both are part of a national climate of permissiveness and relativism. This is manifested in the unprovable, but no doubt painful, loss of the norms that O'Reilly and his audience remember growing up with. The implied connection, anyway, gives O'Reilly a good pretext for the odd but compelling mixture of subjects on "The O'Reilly Factor," with foreign policy one minute, a lurid (one might even say titillating) sex crime the next, and the Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof's latest unfair attack on O'Reilly the next. (O'Reilly is feuding with Kristof, who has assembled from readers' pledges a notional fund to send O'Reilly on a reporting trip to Darfur. O'Reilly recently parried by saying that the Times "continues to ignore the child predator situation here in the U.S.A.") It would be useless to accuse O'Reilly of trafficking in cultural symbols and not substance, because to him cultural symbols are substance. Like every artist, he has created a territory that is distinctively his, and under anyone else's supervision would not cohere."A Handful of Dust"
J. G. Ballard's streamed a few paragraphs of consciousness about modernism. Makes me want to go out and watch the buildings for a while. [Link]
I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser's brilliant Heathrow Hilton. But I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry. Architecture supplies us with camouflage, and I regret that no one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast, people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National Gallery.SXSW Interactive 2006
All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and cartouches, corinthian columns and acanthus leaves. Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature and never prepared us for our eventual end.
Jon Lebkowsky, Jon Barlow, and Richard MacKinnon at EFF/Creative Commons party during SXSW 2006
I took time yesterday to put up SXSW Interactive 2006 photos. Interactive was big this year – I'd estimate twice the number of registrants as last year, far more diverse than the "usual suspects" we see every year. When we set up some business sessions for the Digital Convergence Initiative's track, we weren't sure there'd be interest given the blogging/design focus of SXSW Interactive's usual crowds, however those sessions – in fact all of the DCI's sessions – were packed. (I'm pleased to say they were all very good, too - and that's not just my assessment. People were stopping Alex Cavalli and I in the halls to tell us how much they were digging the track!)
I think many attendees were in business, and of those, many were entrepreneurs or operators of small to medium enterprises with an interest in convergence and/or "Web 2.0." My general sense of the crowd was that they were smart, creative early adopters, and that their sense of something happening was not about exploiting trends to build individual wealth. Even those who were interested in making money were thinking about more sustainable practices than the usual MBA-driven build-and-sell approach.
That might be a reflection, in the biz realm, of Bruce Sterling's vision in his closing comments, summarized by Alex at Worldchanging.com:
The challenge, Bruce says, is that the worst people in the world -- genocidal ethnic mafiosos, fundamentalist fanatics, Washington lobbyists -- are running the show, American government has become the new Soviet Union (ossified, corrupt and widely perceived as illigitimate by the rest of the planet) and things are not good in much of the world. That said, if you look honestly at the world, you see a new story emerging, with millions of smart, dedicated people locked in a struggle to steer us towards a better future using every tool in their power, and that "that's a big story!"The party just kept getting bigger!
Next Tuesday, March 14, the Digital Convergence Initiative of the Texas Technology Corridor (DCI) will host an event that's been in development now for almost six months. Originally the plan was to create a Digital Convergence track of programming for the SXSW Interactive Festival as well as a convergence showcase on the floor of the trade show, but we had ambitions for the showcase that would have been hard to realize without more time and funds, so we decided instead to hold a terrific party instead.
As we talked about it, the party turned out to be almost as ambitious as the showcase. We hired an events coordinator (the great Red Velvet Events) and pulled together a group of motivated, excited, and very creative volunteers. We also realized that we could leverage the first DCI workshop and testbed, on Adaptive Web Services, to create a prototype high definition feed between Austin and San Antonio. A terrific idea, but this also meant that we would have to host not one, but two parties, one in each city.
The great thing about the DCI crew, mostly volunteers, is that they didn't flinch when we suggested two parties and a network link of the highest quality (which is definitely a convergence item, and something that hasn't been done quite this way before). The project was conceived by Andrew Donoho of IBM, and we're getting help from AVW Telav, among others. We'll have performers in Austin and San Antonio, and they'll all be performing for both cities. We'll also have other multimedia jazz, the results of the Mobile Content Festival, and Brian Park's Flogiston chair experience.
If you want to join us and you won't have a SXSW Interactive badge, go to http://dcitexas.org/rsvp to sign up. You can also note your intention to attend at upcoming.org.
51 Birch Street
"51 Birch Street" is a powerful documentary about a post-WWII American family that, on the surface, appears much like any other. Dad has a corporate job, Mom stays at home with the kids, and the kids grow up seeing only the surfaces of their parents' lives. Many families leave it there, but in the case of Doug Block's family, his mother's sudden death led to a process of discovery revealing a surprising emotional complexity behind the American middle class facade.
It happens that Doug Block is a documentary filmmaker whose last film, "Home Page", explored online journals and relationships before anybody had ever heard the word "blog." He also shoots weddings, where he catches the first moments and mysteries of nuclear family relationships, experience that he leverages for this latest film.
Doug and I met when he was screening "Home Page" in San Francisco, at a Web '98 screening, and later in Austin at SXSW Interactive '99. He's a bright, curious, garrulous guy, a devoted husband and father, the kind of guy who comes from a solid loving home. After watching "51 Birch Street", I can see that he came from a loving home, but a home that appeared more solid than was the case. Doug approaches his parents' story as the mystery it was, for him. The question was, after his mother died, why his father rather quickly announced his intention to marry his secretary of 35 years past and move to Florida. This leads to other questions, and Doug skillfully documents the pursuit of the answers so that the revelation opens doors for all of us. (In fact, I was tearful at the end, and that never happens.)
Doug is screening "51 Birch Street" at SXSW Interactive. I strongly recommend the film, especially for boomers, since I think it's most relevant to those of us whose parents lived through the depression and WWII and raised their kids - my generation - through the 50s and 60s. I think many or most of them concealed their inner lives, sometimes even from themselves, while the kids (that would be us) made assumptions about reality that owed more to our safe consumption of media, especially television, than to our perception of the less palatable real world.
This film's power owes much to the fact that Doug had been filming his family for years, and partly to his mother's extensive documentation of her thoughts in a huge pile of notebooks (there are scenes where Doug and his siblings wonder whether, by reading her private notebooks, they're somehow intruding.)
There will be three screenings of "51 Birch Street" during SXSW Interactive:
- Sunday, March 12 at Alamo South - 5:30 pm
- Tuesday, March 14 at Alamo South - 2:45 pm
- Friday, March 17 at Alamo Downtown - 11:00 am
Doug's father and his wife Kitty will be in Austin for Q&A's after the first two screenings. Says Doug, "People were floored when they spoke after our showings in Toronto and Amsterdam. Especially me!"
Doug will also be on the "Blogging About Film" panel on Monday the 13th at 3pm.
Jesse Taylor
Years ago, before every scene in Austin was a crowd, we went to a park - I'm pretty sure it was Deep Eddy - to see the Butch Hancock Band, and Jesse Taylor was there shredding the air with his guitar riffs. I'd seen him before, but this was the night I realized how great and unique he was. I think it was his playing on "Fools Fall in Love" that put me over, and the fact that I can still remember that night after 25-30 years says something. Back then we spent a lot of time around live music, and most of it is a blur to me now. And I wasn't responsive to the country/folk/songwriter strain of Austin music, but I looked for opportunities to hear Jesse play again. Sometimes those opportunities found me by accident. One year during SXSW, as I was walking from the convention center to find my parked car, I heard an amazing acoustic blues coming from a building across the street, and when I rounded the corner, I saw that it was Jesse, just playing for the hell of it.
Jesse Taylor died March 7. [Link to memorial page .]
Heffalumps in Loch Ness
Neil Clark, curator of palaeontology at Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum, might be called a "decryptozoologist" if he's right about the real origin of Loch Ness Monster sightings. Clark learned that circuses used to frequent the Loch Ness area, and they let their elephants swim in the Loch as a bit of R&R. Elephant's hump + trunk = Nessie. [Link]
Already intense SXSW Interactive prep is gathering more steam as we hit the last week before a four day explosion of activity that culminates in a couple of parties we've been working on, the EFF + Creative Commons Party on March 13 and the DCI C3 Party on March 14. Both great parties, and the DCI party will be a little more, an event that actually demonstrates convergent technologies - it's actually two parties in Austin and San Antonio with a high definition link so they can share content. That party also has a digital triptych, the world-famous Flogiston chair, and live music by Aaron Hamre and Darin Murphy. A bit of an AV challenge.
I've been so focused on party prep and coordination of a convergence track that I hadn't paid attention to the rest of the Interactive program, but the Austin Chronicle has several backgrounders in this week's issue.
Hope to make time to track non-DCI panels and presentations that relate to my more usual areas of focus - online community and social networking, strategic web, emerging technologies, etc. Suggestions welcome!
Curated shopping
Yesterday Maida mentioned "curated shopping," and today I saw where Bruce Sterling had blogged a link to a Metropolis Magazine article on the subject. Metropolis defines curated shopping as "the concept of offering a selection of products as carefully edited as a museum collection." They go on to say that "in addition to giving up-and-coming designers a venue, these refreshing boutiques offer shoppers unique items in an age of mass production. And as an appealing alternative to big-box stores, they promise to be retail tastemakers." Metropolis has a list of curated shops. (I might go to Minnesota just to hang out at Robot Love.)
Net NeutralityThe incumbent telcos, corporate giants spawned from a trust-busted monopoly, have never quite got away from monopolistic thinking. They go for dominance, and to get there they ignore the paths of innovation and competition in favor of brute-force legislation. Not long ago they were looking for ways to prevent municipalities from building communication networks for their citizens, nonprofits, and small businesses. Now they want to create new fees for Internet services, tiered pricing that would result in different billing levels for different kinds of services. Mitch Ratcliffe takes a thorough look at the implications of this approach, which would do away with net neutrality, an important aspect of the Internet's success as a platform for innovation. Says Mitch:
Tiered services would make data services pricing a complex Chinese menu and would isolate many homes and businesses in narrowband backwaters. This is the carriers' new holy grail, the ability to milk more from their already crappy services.
Instead of embracing the need to upgrade carriage generally in order to justify higher fees, the telcos are seeking to turn IP-based services such as VoIP and video downloads that compete with their voice and video services into subsidies that offset the weakness of their current business models, which tie connectivity to voice and other services. In David Isenberg's words, we don't need a telecommunications law that helps these companies survive despite their inefficiency, the U.S. must let them fail faster.
David Isenberg, organizer of the second annual Freedom To Connect conference in DC, wrote a poem (in Dr. Seuss mode) that suggests this is a free speech issue, since those who pay will will benefit from a higher quality of service, which suggests that they guy with the money is more likely to be heard. This could marginalize potentially innovative new content sources.
Imagine a world where all the highways are owned by a few companies, and they charge significantly more for the roads that are well-maintained, and you get the idea...but this isn't just about transport. Doc has something to say about all this:
...clearly the Net is not a form of carriage, even though it might appear that way to the carriers and the copyright extremists. The Net has an existence that encompasses carriage and content but is not reducible to either just as human beings have an existence that encompasses the circulatory system and its constituents but is not reducible to either.Biscuit Retrospective
There are higher principles involved. Life is larger than the systems that sustain it. The principle we call net neutrality is as essential to Internet life as consciousness is to human life. When we subordinate Net neutrality to the systems that sustain it, we reduce it to those systems. The Net becomes a cable system, a phone system, a content delivery system. And nothing more. In human terms, this is called brain death.
By framing the Net as a neutral place, we assure that it will continue to serve as what it has already been for more than ten years : a public marketplace where private enterprise of all forms can not only grow and thrive, but can do both better than it ever has anywhere, ever, before.
Gallery Lombardin in Austin will have a restrospective of Randy "Biscuit" Turner's work. (Thanks for the pointer to Keith Wyborni, who commented on my earlier Biscuit memorial post.) [Link to Gallery Lombardi's page for the exhibit.]
Daily AnarchySiva Vaidhyanathan, "the anarchist in the library," made a brief appearance on the Daily Show this week. He blogged that the "Trendspotting" segment he was on took four hours and many takes to shoot, confirming my suspicion that those news items are carefully constructed to look "candid." [Link]
Jeff Jarvis: Interaction vs. ReactionJeff Jarvis has a good post about the real value of interactivity. "Interactivity is about more than reaction. It is about creation. It is not about controlled authority. It is about sharing authority." Indeed. (This resonates with a conversation I had recently with a reporter from the Austin Chronicle.)
A "better Internet" is a complicated propositionWhat I like about this piece by Scott Canon at KansasCity.Com is that he addresses the the real complexity of "fixing" the Internet.
Theres no silver bullet, said Tom Leighton, the chief scientist and co-founder of Akamai Technologies, which makes sure its clients Web pages remain available online even when they come under organized attack. He is also a member of the Presidents Information Technology Advisory Committee. We have to change as we go. The problems arent going to go away overnight.
Neither, say some, will the system crash in an instant. Look at the history of the planet. The sky falls very rarely, said Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and the founder of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. We adapt. Its not fun. Its expensive. Its pretty bad out there now. But its not critically bad out there.
Nobody, he said, is going back to pen and paper.
In a comewhat related story, the Washington Post published a good overview of the net neutrality question and the attempt by carriers to take some of the profits that companies like Google and Yahoo are making by making them pay more to push high-bandwidth content over their networks. See my earlier post on "the broadband dance."
Weinstein Company options John Shirley novelGood news for John Shirley fans:
The Weinstein Company, the new company built around the producers of The Lord of the Rings, has optioned John Shirley's Del Rey books novel DEMONS for a "high five figure sum". Jim Sonzero has committed to direct. Shirley's novel IN DARKNESS WAITING is in development at Gold Circle productions ("My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "White Noise"), and the script by Matt Venne ("White Noise 2") has just been completed. A third production company, part of a major studio, has inquired about the rights for his novel CRAWLERS but details are under wraps as of now. John Shirley's new novel THE OTHER END will be out in its first edition from Cemetary Dance in 2006. His novel John Constantine, Hellblazer: War Lord will be out from Pocket Books in February 2006.(Thanks, John!)
Amazon link to the book Demons
ChinaChina's popped up in several conversations I've had recently; the nodding assumption being that China is ascendant and will become the dominant world economy, especially where technology is concerned. China has a couple of advantages over the current USA – relatively strong leaders and an emphasis on education, especially in the field of science and technology. Chinese leaders tend to be engineers. They're also Communists, and some believe that their market experimentation will fail because markets won't thrive without democracy. This may be so, but on the other hand, it takes more than a democratic intention and the wave of the executive wand to create thriving markets, and it'll be interesting to see how China evolves and whether the U.S. is devolving. More about China at technologyreview.com
State of the World 2006
Once again, I'm leading a State of the World discussion with Bruce Sterling on the WELL. Bruce has just finished a year-long gig as Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design, and is in Austin for the holidays before setting out for Belgrade and other parts of the world.
India and China are tremendous stories. Even big pieces of Eastern Europe are getting onto the EU carousel. America's being run by corrupt Lysenkoist morons, but, debilitating as that may be for us Yankees, it also means that the remaining 94 percent of the planet has some chance at the limelight. Hey, South Korea could have been full of cloning superstars -- if they could just get over their endemic Asian urge to cook the books.
The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States of America. You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's the secret textbook of the Bush Administration. The South lost that war for a reason. The South didn't have it in them to be a major power, because they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined anxieties.
The thing is, though: when a culture is "gone with the wind," it's never utterly and entirely gone. You can't make things go away by distributing them into the wind. It's just... up in the atmosphere. The emissions of the past form a smog. A breathable compost. You can't throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero. There is no "away." Tomorrow is this place, at a different time.Darknet excerptsJD Lasica has created a torrent file that combines all the excerpts from his fine book Darknet: Hollywood's War on the Digital Generation that he's published online. [Link]
Barlow returnsJohn Perry Barlow has reappeared, sending a new rant his email list and promising more. It's not posted at his site yet, and no excerpt out of context seemed adequate, so I'm reposting the whole thing here, because it's especially eloquent and resonates so well with my own sense of the times.
THE FLOATING WORLD
Ok.
In my New Year's BarlowSpam a few days ago, I indicated that I might be about to break my long silence. Now I guess I will. But, before I go back to spamming you again, I will offer a word (or several) about how this came to pass.
Throughout the Uh-oh's - and I'm more convinced than ever that I called this decade right from the get-go - I've watched with growing stupefaction as successive tsunamis of surreality swept through the world, macro to micro, from the icy works of Darth Cheney to disruptions in my own little life that were as nonsensical as they were either menacing or exhilarating. I began to feel like Kafka, or maybe Nietzche, had become my invisible friend - but if Nietzche, then one whose God is not dead, but crazy.
Now it seems my life - indeed, the world itself - has become manic depressive.
But I am not. Not yet. Disoriented, perhaps, and certainly susceptible to occasional bouts of chemical self-immolation, but not crazy. Why bother to go crazy when reality has already done it for you?
I know. This is not the first time you've heard this sort of thing from me. After four years of raving at you about how outlandish things seemed to be getting, I've come to feel like the boy who cried, "Weird!"
But then we entered the strange dream that has been 2005. By the end of January, I had run out of psychotic superlatives and, not being Hunter S. Thompson (thank Satan), I chose to dummy up. I quit writing BarlowSpams, aside from the occasional announcement or invitation. I threw in one bland blog post from the utterly surreal Madrid conference on Terrorism in March and thence ran on radio silence. As any BarlowFriendz who've been on the list since before March would know, I made no further public pronouncements. For 9 months, Tar Baby, he say nothing.
Weinberg on WikipediaI've posted several items about Wikipedia as a work in progress that draws unfair criticism (and incidentally responds well to constructive criticism). David Weinberger has a longer piece, Why the Media Can't Get Wikipedia Right, (via Cory Doctorow.)
With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process. The solution to a failure of knowledge (as the Seigenthaler entry clearly was) is to fix the social process, while acknowledging that it will never work perfectly. There are still individuals involved, of course, but Wikipedia reputations are made and advanced by being consistent and persistent contributors to the social process. Yes, persistent violators of the social trust can be banished from Wikipedia, but the threat of banishment is not what keeps good contributors contributing well.Dick Clark says it all...We watched a stroke-damaged Dick Clark, still struggling with aphasia, bring in the New Year last night, and I realized how his appearance was symbolic – after one of the worst years ever, a year of war, disaster, plague, political corruption, economic volatility and spiritual confusion, I think we're all feeling damaged ... but, like Dick Clark, still hopeful that we can overcome overwhelming adversity. I've never said this with more sincerity or more concern: have a Happy New Year.
Year-end #2: MusicHere's a year-end list, since I've been listing to a lot of music and seldom blog about it... an elderly grandfather's best music of the year, in no particular order, and this doesn't count all the older stuff I was listening to... a ton of Miles Davis, for instance. I also want to honorably mention Austin's own Eliza Gilkyson and her Paradise Hotel, which has a particularly great track, "Man of God."
Beck - Guero: Hoppin' that's hip.
Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine: Passionate, clever, hard to classify.
Bruce Springsteen - Devils and Dust: Americana, a kind of 21st century Woody Guthrie piece.
Dave Douglas - Keystone: Oddly enough, a tribute to Fatty Arbuckle. Dave Douglas is the best embodiment of the spirit of Miles.
Kanye West - Late Registration: Great album; what sold me was his gig on Saturday Night Live, with strings.
Rodney Crowell - The Outsider: This was a surprise - Dylan-influenced rock from a singer/songwriter usually considered country. Thanks to the guys at KUT for playing this til it sunk in.
The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema: Great pop, tinged with psychedelia. One of my very favorites.
Sleater-Kinney - The Woods: Their earlier stuff never quite grabbed me, but this just rocks.
Nortec Collective - Tijuana Sessions #3: Unique south of the border techno jams.
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Howl: Retro acoustic folk that just works. I don't know their earlier stuff, but those who do say this was quite a departure.
My Morning Jacket - Z: Melodic hoppin' pop with rich arrangements.
Gorillaz - Demon Days: A weird kind of funk-pop-hiphop collection. My grandson turned me onto this... now it's a favorite.
White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan: Pretty wild, all that sound coming from two people. Wild, all over the map, great rock and roll.
Vincent SchiavelliNot your grandfather's encyclopedia...
Vincent Schiavelli died of lung cancer in Sicily, where he'd been living ... and cooking! (He was evidently a terrific chef.) I first recall seeing him in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as Frederickson – he looked so strange I thought he'd been, er, altered in some way. As the Master Thespian sez, "ACTING!" My favorite Schiavelli role: John O'Conner, a Red Lectroid in "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai." (Thanks to Mark for the pointer.)
I've been talking a lot about Wikipedia lately. I don't consider myself an expert on Wikipedia, but I think I get some of the issues that are cropping up after the Curry and Seigenthaler flaps. In case you missed those, Adam Curry changed a Wikipedia item on podcasting and John Seigenthaler complained bitterly about a Wikipedia article that referred to his possible involvement in the Kennedy Assassination (which is absurd; this was evidently an ill-conceived prank). These flaps turned up the volume on discussions of Wikipedia's accountability for its contents. If bad facts appear in Wikipedia, who do you blame? In traditional publishing, you blame the publisher, and that's justified because the publisher has a system for collecting, vetting, and editing content before it's published. However Wikipedia has volunteer editors who review articles and updates after they're posted, not before. The actual contributors can be anybody, and until recently they could be anonymous (though generally traceable through their IP numbers). It's a decentralized system where no single person or entity is clearly accountable for what's posted, yet it works – you've probably heard about Nature's investigation showing that Wikipedia, overall, is about as accurate as Brittanica.
Wikipedia is now requiring authentication for new posts, though you can make still anonymous updates to existing content. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's fearless leader, has said he doesn't want to pursue strong verification of identity, and that Wikipedia should be assessed on the quality of the content, and not identity or reputation.
Is Wikipedia an authoritative source? The Nature study suggests accuracy comparable to Brittanica's – and what source of information will ever be wholly authoritative? Wikipedia actually has advantages: bringing collective intelligence to bear means more minds and more perspectives are represented, and this would tend to mitigate bias. Wikipedia is also more current, and has articles on subjects you would never find in Brittanica. However there's always going to be lag between publication and editorial review, and in some cases (like Seigenthaler's) bad information will find its way into an article and linger. I wouldn't consider Wikipedia a single authoritative source (though I often use it as a reference, and link to its articles).
(BTW, fans of Wikipedia should note there's a fund drive under way.)
Santarchy in Auckland
Looks like Santarchy is getting ugly, with drunken Santarchists rampaging in Auckland. While researching this imiportant story, I discovered there'd been a Santa Rampage in Austin just a few days ago at the Driskill Hotel... less whacky, though, than the New Zealand rampage, where "the men, wearing ill-fitting Santa costumes, threw beer bottles and urinated on cars from an overpass."
the men then rushed through a central city park, overturning garbage containers, throwing bottles at passing cars and spraying graffiti on office buildings.Lightnets
One man climbed the mooring line of a cruise ship before being ordered down by the captain. Other Santas, objecting when the man was arrested, attacked security staff, who were later treated by paramedics....Via J.D.: Jason Boog at Ziff-Davis' Publish writes about Darknets vs. Lightnets, following on J.D.'s book Darknet : Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation book:
A Darknet is a hidden Web nook where a small group shares digital files. Lightnet refers to a theoretical push towards an Internet where sharing and remixing files is encouraged.Boog quotes web developer Lucas Gonze, who says "in a Lightnet world, New York Times audio and video will be about as accessible as text. Anybody will be able to e-mail the link to a friend, incorporate the item in a playlist, comment on the item on their own home page, and perhaps make a derived work in the form of a remix, Podcast, or videoblog....Publishers will give away some content in order to be able to sell other content, and they will find new revenue sources when they become remixers themselves." I.e. smart media companies will be thinking outside the pre-digital "intellectual property" box of concepts. The Digital Convergence track we're putting together for SXSW Interactive this year will address this in a couple of panels.
Monsters from the Id!John Shirley on King Kong
Back in the 90s, when I was associate editor of the 'zine version of boing boing, I wrote an appreciation of 50s science fiction/horror films called "Monsters from the Id," basically a top ten list with a bit of context. It was too long for the zine, so the version that appeared was only about a third of the whole piece. In a clear response to overwork and general angst, I've dusted it off, added some links, and published it here at the site. Enjoy! [Link]
John Shirley's seen the new King Kong (via bOING bOING) and posted a review at JohnShirley.net. Mark has a good quote from the review, but I like the last paragraph:
And when King Kong dies--that's going to be our end too, don't you see. We're apes, who're going to fall on the pavement, shot down by civilization.Eyeteeth
These two images give you an idea why Eyeteeth blog is becoming one of my favorite destinations. (Read the blog to find out more...) Visionary in ResidenceBruce Sterling is ending his year as visionary in residence at Art Center College of Design, leading a course on the "New Ecology of Things." He's blogged images of his own class project, a massive mobile, which "is a pre-digital 'ecology of things,' since it's a nonlinear, interactive cascade of levers. And design is also an 'ecology of things'. Thus my edifying lecture on the subject, which is made out of steel wire, foamboard and PVC pipe. It's dangling in midair as I type this."
Ed Ward on John LennonYesterday Ed Ward acknowledged the anniversary of John Lennon's murder with a piece that's more history than celebration – Ed is critical of Lennon's music, and I think most would agree that Lennon never did great work after he left the Beatles. It could be that his genius worked in a particular context, not just as part of a group but as part of a particular milieu that slipped from his reach as he grew increasingly famous, rich, and isolated. Ed makes a good point at the end of his post:
I've mellowed slightly in my feelings about Lennon, but I remain firm in believing that groups are more than the sum of their parts, and leaving for a solo career, nine times out of ten, means that the quality of your art is about to go down precipitously. None of the ex-Beatles were close to what they'd been as Beatles. That includes John, his posthumous deification notwithstanding. And since I know that's going to piss people off, I invite the pissed-off to examine their relationship to nostalgia, the most destructive and limiting way to look at art you've experienced, since it usually means you've found a way to seal yourself off from the reality of both the art of the past and of the present.Little Nemo in Slumberland
Several years ago I wrote a short piece about my favorite comic strip, Winsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, which was published at bOING bOING DIGITAL while it was still a webzine, before it became the blog we all know and love. Today I was psyched to see a new appreciation of Little Nemo, written by Douglas Wolk, front and center at Salon. The occasion: publication of Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!, a large format (and expensive, at $120) collection celebrating the 100th anniversary of the strip.
That was the joy of "Little Nemo" at its best, the thing that set it apart from McCay's other strips like "Little Sammy Sneeze" and "A Pilgrim's Progress," and even "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend": It didn't just evoke its readers' dreams, it seeped into them. Nemo is too small to act, really, and he doesn't understand the real world yet, let alone the subconscious world in which his desires and fears are made strangely real, and which he leaves by falling or drowning or being shaken into wakefulness by unfamiliar voices that become familiar as he opens his eyes. But McCay also realized that the dream world is a richly aestheticized one -- streamlined in its motives, stripped down to the things the conscious mind cares about most, and amplified into impossibility.Texan named Harper's editorRoger Hodge, a rancher's son from Del Rio who came up through the ranks at Harper's, will be its new editor when Lewis Lapham steps down in April. [Link]
"We have had many talented people here that have gone on to edit other magazines, and I have thought for a long time that Roger was a keeper and that we should make sure that we hang on to him," [Harper's president and publisher John R.] MacArthur said. "And I like the fact that he is from Texas and a ranching family. He was bred to be independent and self-governed, to think for himself, and I think that is a great credential to edit the magazine."Pop TalkPop language may drown us in a sea of irrelevance. Read this excerot from Leslie Savan's Slam Dunks and No-Brainers.
As the late Neil Postman wrote in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Aldous Huxley painted a more probable future in Brave New World than George Orwell did in 1984, because, over the long run, pleasure is more likely than fear to produce compliant citizens. In "Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history," Postman wrote. "As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. ... Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance."Blog!
Today, there are clearly attempts by the government and corporations to conceal truth and to insist, as Newspeak did, that War Is Peace and Ignorance Is Strength -- but rarely in so many words. Such harsh notes don't jibe with our vernacular. Much more effective is the let-me-entertain-you language of the mass media; it bubbles and bops, tickles and cajoles until we come to adore it. I'm not saying that pop language is a tranquilizing drug with totalitarian side effects, like Huxley's soma. In its ability to break through obfuscation, which it does every day, pop can be a powerful force for truth. But in its ability to divert thought and numb our imaginations with commercial confetti, pop can also be a force that drowns the truth in "a sea of irrelevance."I led a discussion with David Kline about his new book, Blog!, on the WELL. David and his co-author, Dan Burstein, interviewed several bloggers in several fields ... primarily politics, business, and media. (David also interviewed me on blogging and activism.) The interview and the book are full of insights about the state and future of blogging, and are a must-read for those who are trying to grasp the depth and breadth of the blogosphere.
Blogs won't change human nature. But to my mind, a world in which millions of people now have voices that can be heard is better than a world in which only the chosen few "experts" or "pundits" or media do.Inside the Bowl
True democracy is messy. And it's true, there's still a lot of narcissistic "talking at" rather than "discussing with" going on. But I liken that to the ego-centric stage that early toddlers go through. Ordinary people -- people who have no special access or reach -- are learning what it means to now have a voice. As we mature and become more confident that what we say is valuable, if only to ourselves and to perhaps a few dozen of our readers, then I really truly believe the "noise" will be pierced by ever-increasing dialogoue and meaning.
Civility comes from confidence and self-assurance that you do, in fact, have the right to speak. Early practitioners of the new social invention of democracy a couple of hundred years ago were not very civil at all. Per capita, there were probably as many nutcases and angry narcissists as there are now. But by the mid-19th century, the average citizen could think of no better form of entertainment and enlightenment than to spend 12 hours listening to a Lincoln-Douglass debate. These were common men and women who attended these events, who eagerly read partisan newspapers, and who lived peacefully with their neighbors who read entirely opposing partisan newspapers.
Does this save the world? Usher in a permanent era of peace? End war?
No. But at least the world increasingly becomes *our* world, a world that reflects the voices and concerns of many millions rather than thousands.Inside the Bowl is a New Orleans blog started by Steve Seebol and Elizabeth Kahn, who've just returned to New Orleans. It's the first specifically post-Katrina blog I've seen, and I think it's going to be a powerful force for the reconstruction of the spirit as well as the physical infrastructure of the city.
....Many older people who evacuated could not deal with the stress. They left, but in many cases their health problems were more then they could handle. These deaths are not in the official death total, which is really just a body count. These people died in Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge or lord knows where. They might have passed away anyway, but the storm didn’t make it easier.Investment firms push human rights
One of those who died, while evacuated, was my friend and father-in-law Fred Kahn. Fred had been sick for awhile. But when faced with the arduous task of leaving the city that he was born in, he rose to the occasion with oxygen tank at hand got in the car and left for the 7 hour trip to his daughter’s house in New Iberia, LA. We were all staying there for the first 3 weeks, and it was painful to watch Fred’s energy wane and his concentration falter. He knew there was a storm and that the world was no longer the way he remembered it, but he wasn’t sure what was going on directly around him. Fred was in exile 2 months slowly losing ground before he slumped over while watching a football game and left us. It makes me very sad that he had to endure so much hardship at the end of his life. He was a sweet and decent man. We miss him.Pretty amazing: Reporters without Borders along with 25 U.S. and International investment firms pledged shareholder support "for an increased commitment to freedom of information by major Internet and technology companies."
The backdrop for the afternoons conference was a recent incident wherein Yahoos Hong Kong branch supplied information about an e-mail sent through its servers to the Chinese communist government. The e-mailsent overseas by Chinese journalist Shi Taooutlined new media restrictions imposed before the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The Chinese government charged Shi with divulging state secrets abroad and sentenced him to ten years in prison on April 30.[Link] Warren Easton in Exile
Information supplied by Yahoo led to the conviction of a good journalist who has paid dearly for trying to get the news out, an RSF press release stated. The company was apparently under no obligation to cooperate with mainland Chinese authorities.Here's something that takes the thinking behind the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and others like it to the next level: Warren Easton in Exile, a site that tracks everybody from the Warren Easton Fundamental High School of New Orleans. They're scattered over several states... and the site maps 'em with Google. There's also photos, blog items, polls, etc. Via Nancy White.
Grassroots tastemakersCNet writes about influential fan journalism on the web, focusing on Austin's Harry Knowles, whose site is one of my regular reads. [Link]
Bimbophonics, Bubbles, and 2.0The Web 2.0 meme seems to create quite a fuss. At the Seattle Mind Camp (the sort thing, incidentally, that we should be doing in Austin), Chris Pirillo evidently dissed Web 2.0 as a sign of a new Bubblocalypse, which John Cook reported here...
"Web 2.0 is a $2,800 ticket to a tech conference. That's all it is." He went on to say that he tries not to use the term.Moore made the mistake of dragging out a (mis-) quote, Tara Hunt of Riya.com saying "For me, it's the free parties and beer." Taken out of context, she felt it suggested she was a beer-soaked bimbo...
"I am praying it is not another bubble. If VCs are funding 'me-too' ideas than it is going to be another mess."What I believe I actually said was, "Web 2.0 is all about the beer and free parties", which was a tonge-in-cheek reference to the frenzy in the community (where there IS beer and free parties), not that beer is my only experience of it. Yes, like I uprooted my entire family and moved to a new country to be the sole breadwinner for parties and beer. I'm afraid I could have done that quite comfortably in Toronto.The "bimbo" thing is weird and dismissive, but she hits the real issue in her second graf, where she saysAll of the grand demos and in-depth conversations and contacts over the weekend were instantly twisted to "I'm a Bimbo" in that moment.Sounds like it was a swell weekend, and she was a little offended that Cook didn't say more about that. Meanwhile Cook posts an update that saysI just spoke with Tara again this morning to clear the air and set the record straight. We both agreed that the quote was in the context of Web 2.0 and was not a reflection on her. Just so we are clear here, my intention in using that quote was to show that energy and enthusiasm is once again surging in the Internet community -- and that has led to free parties and beer. Hunt's quote, which was set up by Chris Pirillo's comments about the possibility of another bubble, was a tongue-in-cheek way of commenting about what is happening in the Internet world. That was the spirit of the quote and that is why I used it -- not to cast some negative impression on Hunt or women in general.(Liz Lawley's in there, too, but 'nuff said.)Then again, one more thing: Web 2.0 is much maligned as a bubble-blowing buzzword, but I happen to think it's useful to have some way to acknowledge new web paradigms. And if the insane valuation of Google hasn't set off a new bubble-binge, I don't know what would. However there does seem to be some business going on, and that's okay.
Long Tail CampIf you understand "the long tail," you'll get the idea of the Long Tail Camp:
Long-Tail Camp will start on November 11, 2005 at a location of your choosing. Just show up and start talking about the long-tail of whatever. There might not be a lot of people paying attention or even showing up but hey, it’s the long tail, what can you expect? We’re certain that Long-Tail Camp will be a huge success and expect it will be over in about 10-12 years, depending on the exact parameters of the distribution...What is the long tail? Chris Anderson describes it in his Wired article with the example of Rhapsody, RealNetworks' streaming music service.Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.Open Content Alliance
The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.
This is the Long Tail.
You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.Yahoo and the Internet Archive are building the Open Content Alliance along with several other contributors "will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content." Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle says
The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further-- Universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable. Then the question became-- is it in the interest of enough people and institutions to get there? Some hang-ups have been around costs, rights, and guidelines for sharing. All of these things were worked out for their domains by Internet folks and open source folks in the last few decades. But how are we going build a system that has everything available to everyone?Hence the Open Content Alliance, where "our guiding principle is to offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of the public domain." Brewster goes on to discuss copyright issues and potential resolution via Creative Commons licenses.
Technorati Tags: opencontentalliance, media
What's the real recipe for destruction?Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy say that publishing the genome for the 1918 flu virus is a "Recipe for Destruction." Declan McCullach sent an excerpt of the article to his Politech email list, and got three interesting counter-arguments.
I would argue there are no "wrong hands" for information to get into. We are collectively responsible for situations that create the anger and misguided behavior that lead to mass destruction. My conclusion is that we (all humans) must recognize that technological instability requires us to make everyone (yes, everyone) a "right hand" for the preservation of the race. This conclusion will be forced on us whether people agree or not because of the power available through replicating destructive technologies.Banana breakfast!
Getting everyone to play together and hide information will only work when all involved agrees to hide it. One person can spill the beans. Similarly, in a world where 1 person with 80kb of data, a biochem cookbook and 3 feet of lab space can create a tool that kills tens of millions -- we should all be working toward a world where *no one* wants to do that. We won't be able to stop individuals who can. (Jonathan M. Dugan, PhD, Stanford)I'm sold on the idea that we should have a banana breakfast.
"Time to gather your arse up off the floor,
(have a bana-na)
Brush your teeth and go toddling off to war.
Wave your hand to sleepy land,
Kiss those dreams away,
Tell Miss Grable you're not able,
Not till V-E Day, oh,
Ev'rything'll be grand in Civvie Street
(have a bana-na)
Bubbly wine and girls wiv lips so sweet--
But there's still the German or two to fight,
So show us a smile that's shiny bright,
And then, as we may have suggested once before--
Gather yer blooming arse up off the floor!" pp 8-9"mugsfull of banana mead...banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy" p 10
(Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow)
A lost lifeI just read a beautiful, sad piece in Salon. Despite their new bargain basement design, the folks at Salon are still happening. Read this piece, it's a Rashomon take on something real.
Consumer is producer!Remember Community Access television? Think Wayne's World. Access television was home to all kinds of low budget, quirky content put together by pretty much anybody with a will to work through whatever training and bureaucracy was required. If you give people access to the airwaves and lower your expectations about quality of presentation, you could find occasional gems on the access channels.
With lower barriers to entry, better production technology, and potential millions of channels for delivery along with searches and filters, you might find thousands of gems, delivered at no cost to your computer, then possibly to your home theatre. "Consumer is producer" - the John Gulagers of this world won't need a greenlight to make and distribute their creations.
That's one vision, anyway - Open Source Media. I happened onto some people from the Berkman Center discussing this in a chat backchannel for a virtual meeting, and one of 'em blogged about it... a lunchtime talk about Digital Bicycle.
Participate.net
Participant Productions was founded to createquality entertainment that would engage, educate and inspire. Together, we built an environment to foster storytelling that engages the audience, generates awareness of topical and interesting issues and inspires individuals to take action.The company's films include Murderball, Good Night and Good Luck, and North Country. The company has a new site called Participate, which was set up to build community and encourage action relevant to the themes of particular Partcipant Production films. Currently the site has a couple of campaigns... "Report it Now," which is aligned with "Good Night and Good Luck," and "Host a North Country Community Discussion." It'll be interesting to see what the site's like when it gets busy, which should be any minute now.... East Coast media try to find blogging's pulse.Short on time, so this is a quick one... but I just got these links to posts about a meeting of bloggers with mainstream media (via Jay Rosen). The links are to Jay's comments, David Weinberger's, Jeff Jarvis', and something from the Business Week blog. So this meeting was mainstream media talking to mainstream media people who've become bloggers, and it was all folks from the east coast. Looks like an interesting discussion, but I can't help but note the ivory tower aspect. I think MSM and, to some extent, east coast bloggers still believe, however subconsciously, that nothing's "real" unless it emerges from the first thirteen... This may well be where blogs make a difference, by bringing so many others into conversations that were traditionally restricted to the east coast or east and west coasts, and restricted to writers and pundits who could publish via mainstream media. (Note that I understand the objections to that term "mainstream media," but I don't know what to offer in its place.)
The briefest summary was Weinberger's:
The MSM were not univocal in their reaction to the Web and blogs. That's appropriate and it's progress. There are still some who think they "get" blogs because they're using blogs as stringers. But others are genuinely uncertain about the future of mainstream news, which is (imo) also appropriate. They're facing the possiblity of genuine discontinuity.Web 2.0 visualized
There's a lot of experimentation on all sides here. Appropriate.
No one knows what the business model(s) will be. Appropriate.
The bloggers didn't have to spend half the morning explaining that most bloggers aren't journalists, that bloggers are in conversation, etc. Progress.
There were still elements of hostility and misunderstanding, especially around the question of accuracy. But there is definitely progress...Via Polycot I'm all over Web 2.0 in a very practical sense but not doing the conference circuit or waxing theoretical about it, for the most part. Who has time for theory when you're chopping the wood and carrying the water (or Kool-Aid)? Anyhow Nancy White pointed to a swell mememap overview at blog.forret.com, seen larger here, by Peter Forret. "Get/Remix/Deliver"! This is a better version of Tim O'Reilly's attempt, which emerged from a FOO Camp brainstorm.
Able Danger and Constitutional rightsIn April 2000, a data mining and analysis project within the Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) was shut down because it had "evolved into an abuse of Constitutional Rights." Recently Anthony Shaffer has said that the project, called Able Danger, uncovered data linking Mohamed Atta to Al Qaeda. William Arkin in the Washington Post suggests that the it's arguable whether Able Danger produced meaningful data (few who were involved share Shaffer's memory of data about Atta), but it's not arguable that the project, as William Dugan, Pentagon chief of intelligence oversight, said, "evolved, through mission creep, lack of clear rules, and the lack of meaningful oversight, into an abuse of … Constitutional rights…,"
Shaffer and others use words like "out-of-the-box" and "entrepreneurial" to describe the LIWA intelligence collection. The buzz words suggest, of course, that other intelligence efforts were in-the-box and boring, that only the LIWA and other compartmented workers were motivated and insightful enough to take chances, that if the lawyers and the bureaucrats and the Clintonistas and the other villains had just gotten out of the way, there would have been no 9/11. If only…(Via Politech) Alan Atkisson: More on a New New Orleans
But in 2000, the problem was also a pretty simple one: An off-the-books intelligence effort once again abused the "force protection" justification to collect information on Americans. Military commanders, mindful of the law and regulations, shut down the operation.My Worldchanging colleague Alan Atkisson's "Dreaming New Orleans" post inspired a piece in Business Week as " one of the most ambitious post-Katrina blueprints." He's posted a follow-up:
What is not yet clear is how to invest that money in such a way that the New New Orleans is indeed both wonderful and sustainable, in the eyes of the world, and in the eyes of its most loyal inhabitants.Alan follows with an issues list, and descriptions of a half dozen scenarios for New Orleans' future. Google Video
The pressures to rebuild quickly are great, and quick decisions, especially about long-lived infrastructure, are often not the most strategic. What can one do to influence the process constructively, now, while the key decisions are still in the process of formation?Google Video is interesting... I didn't find much compelling content via random search, but I could imagine using it at some point. Put television shows online for viewing on demand, for instance, and you get another instance of time shifting (similar to Tivo and others DVRs) which could mean a 'longer tail' for television programming that might otherwise fade away. I'm waiting for someone smart with a lot of server power to put the jillions of television programs from the "golden age" online, including shows that did well critically but died after half a season (there's a few of those I wouldn't mind checking out.)
Architecture for Humanity wins design prizeCameron Sinclair's Architecture for Humanity just won the Index Design Award, is the world's largest prize for design. Cameron is also a WorldChanging.com contributor. The winning project: Siyathemba Football Club, designed by Swee Hong Ng of Edge Studio in Pittsburgh for AFH's Siyathemba competition.
Plague playVirtual plague's broken out in the massively multiplayer World of Warcraft. BBC has the full story, and Joi, who's got into WoW recently, blogs about it with, with a funny quote from the infected Jonas Luster:
The idea was, to move all infected players into instances, where we could be by ourselves, so we hooked up into large raid groups, rezzed instead of corpse walked, and re-infected ourselves before hearthstoning back into Org. Bog Troopers, a huge horde guild in Org, raided Stormwind, which was almost empty, and killed the child king (no HK, there, you have to kill the Guardian) before walking into the Stockades, farming gold. The GMs congregated up on Honor's Stand, so we had a handful of players up there, stealthed, and infecting them. It was more fun than any other world event EVAR!.Truth is elusiveJay Rosen believes that journalists have such a fear of "getting it wrong" factually that they no longer try to tell the truth, according to Ethan Zuckerman.
As a response to the perpetual fear of being wrong, journalists have stopped taking responsibility for the truth claims of their reports, just that they’ve followed the rituals correctly: “We called you for your reaction on the story. We followed our rules.” These rituals - many of which focus on reporting what a person said without an analysis of whether it’s factually correct - are designed to prove “the political innocence of the press”.Bloggers, on the other hand, can be truthful.Truth is elusive; I would argue that you're more likely to approach it from an aggregate of many sources.
Ethan and Jay are among those who seem to have a powerful belief in what they know, but as the sages say, everything you know is wrong.
Cream Redux
Cream has a reunion tour booked, or perhaps not a tour – looks like the only dates are set for Madison Square Garden. I logged a lot of hours with Fresh Cream and Disraeli Gears, but never saw the band live, and would almost acquire a mortgage to pay the price for the reunion concert (which for me would include a jet to NYC and a night at the Mayfair. If you look at the reunion tour writeup at onlineseats.com, you'll see two photos, the second of which, aligned right with Cream's bio, looks suspiciously like Queen.
I had a bit of a senior moment when I saw the Cream tour info, trying to figure out which member of the band had died. Naw, they're all still more or less alive. Jack Bruce turned up on Rising Low, Phish bassist Mike Gordon's excellent documentary about Allen Woody of Gov't Mule, organized around the recording of a tribute album/DVD recorded by Mule with Woody's favorite bass players sitting in for him. Mule was another great power trio in the Cream tradition (but with Southern Rock roots via history with the Allman Brothers).
Another shaggy apocalypse storyJoke's on me: an apparently serious article about astronomers' discovery of a "chaos cloud" that dissolves everything in its path and will reach earth in 2014 turned up as I was poking around in the nooks and crannies of the web, and I wondered why it was on Yahoo under "Entertainment News and Gossip." Turns out it was a Weekly World News piece. This is the publication that tracks Bat Boy, a creature who is half-human, half-bat. (The recently speculated that Bat Boy and James Carville are related, heh.)
Permission to kill the InternetJennifer Granick's started a column at Wired News with a piece about the many challenges to the concept of a free and open Internet, focusing on the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and Katrinalist.net as "tangible evidence of the beauty and power of internet technology in the hands of well-meaning citizens," which she says is "also an endangered species."
...many ISPs and some prosecutors are arguing that it's a crime to use unsecured wireless access points without the explicit permission of the owner. Antispam crusaders advocate blocking any e-mails that haven't been whitelisted first. Airlines like American and auction sites like eBay -- which want customers to visit their websites, view their ads and "join the community" -- have won court injunctions against companies that collect price information on plane fares or auctions to help consumers comparison shop.Glocalization
Under ancient legal theories like "trespass to chattels" and ill-advised modern laws like the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime statutes, courts are holding that if you don't have authorization, you can't access computers
And if you can't access computers, you can't collect data about airfares, auctions or evacuees.
Web 2.0 as seen by danah boyd is a negotiation between global and local – not so much geographically but virtually. "Think of it," she says, "as a complex tango with information constantly flowing between the global and the local, altered at each junction."
The complex relationship between personal, local collectives, and global must all be modeled in glocalized networks for Web2.0 to work. We need to break out of the global village model, the universal "truth" approach to information access. We need to situate information access in glocalized culture. Folksonomy is emerging as a dance between the individual and the collective; remix occurs as individual and collective responses to the global. They are forms of organizing and situating global information in a glocalized fashion.The Battle of New OrleansThe Army is referring to citizens of New Orleans as "insurgents," a very weird choice of words reported by Xeni at boingboing.net.
Worldchanging I'm on an island in the Pacific Northwest talking and thinking with my Worldchanging.com colleagues, pretty exhilirating and a welcome opportunity to rub many minds together in a face to face context and see if we can start a fire. I personally feel a sense of urgency about doing more to kindle solutions as environmenal and sociopolitical issues loom ever darker, not on the horizon but just overhead. (Ed Burtynsky has joined us; he has compelling images that show dramatically the human impact on the environment - worthwhile to look through his site.] Robert MoogSynth-pop and electronica fans should observe a moment of silence (or low volume, at least) for Robert Moog, creator of the Moog synthesizer, dead at 71. [Link]
The popularity of the synthesizer and the success of the company named for Moog took off in rock as extended keyboard solos in songs by Manfred Mann, Yes and Pink Floyd became part of the progressive sound of the 1970s.Ed Ward on Biscuit
"The sound defined progressive music as we know it," said Keith Emerson, keyboardist for the rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
Along with rock, synthesizers developed since Moog's breakthrough helped inspire elements of 1970s funk, hip-hop, and techno.My pal Ed Ward, who lives in a subdirectory nearby (and, physically, in Berlin), blogged a very nice piece about Randy "Biscuit" Turner's passing. [Link]
Explosive farewell to HSTHunter Thompson's wake was a great metaphor for his life. None of that "rest in peace" stuff. Not going gentle, is what it was...
The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.Alan Ball
— Hunter S. ThompsonAlan Ball's HBO series Six Feet Under is powerful and mysterious as life itself, and so difficult that I found myself complaining that I must be a masochist to be watching the final season of the series (which ends Sunday). A couple of episodes ago Nate, the lead character, died, and everybody else in the series is falling apart - major tragedy. But life is like that, and Six Feed Under is all about life's inexpicable leaps from comedy to tragedy and (sometimes) back again, and our attempts to throw a saddle that isn't real on a horse that doesn't exist. Somewhere in all that, there are unmistakable threads of wisdom. The Buddhist journal Tricycle once interviewed Ball about the parallels between his work and Buddhism (though he's not a Buddhist, just a Buddha). Now Salon's published an excellent interview explaining some of the thinking – and searching – that's gone into the series.
I'm not interested in writing characters who figure it out, and get it right, because I feel like that's too simplistic, and then you're writing about something that vaguely resembles life instead of writing about life. Because even if you figure out something, something bigger is going to come along that confuses the hell out of you. And for characters who are soulful and have a soulful connection to life ... One of the enduring themes of the series is that trying to figure out the right thing to do is such a mystery, it's so baffling. So many times when you do the quote right unquote thing, it makes your life harder, and you don't get rewarded for it. Then you get into the whole question of what is right and wrong. Is there a black-and-white universal right and wrong, or is there what's right for you, or is there what's right for people you love, or is there what's right for the global community? Life is infinitely complex and I feel like we live in a culture that really seems to want to simplify it into sound bites and bromides, and that does not workRandy "Biscuit" Turner
Randy "Biscuit" Turner, as leader of the funk-punk-skate rock band the Big Boys, was a dominant force within Austin's punkadelic culture of the 1980s. Marc Savlov, in this week's cover story for the Austin Chronicle, writes "Turner's musical legacy has spread far and wide since its Eighties heyday, drawing into its orbit punk peers and progeny such as X's Exene Cervenka, Fugazi's Ian MacKaye, and Jersey spookster Glenn Danzig." He's known more today for his art than his music:
It's that seemingly ceaseless stream of mad-funkateer artwork as much as those growly punk rock pipes that has ensured Turner's enduring notoriety amongst the underground's forever fickle cognoscenti. Those explosions of Bizarro World hi-jinks frosted in daubs of blinding, Tokyo-esque neons and chockablock with cheerful chaos have done as much to keep Ausin weird as anything else the city has ever birthed.Sadly, just as Savlov's celebration of his life and art was published in the Chron yesterday, Biscuit was found dead in his South Austin home, described by Savlov as "a modest frame house in South Austin [that] sports a wealth of year-round yard art. Bowling balls ring the corner lot oak, a clutch of oversized scorpions guard the screened-in front porch, and the trees in the backyard rain oddities."I'm very saddened by the pain in the world and overjoyed at the mundane. That sly grin that people have. I can cry in a moment for people's joy, and I hope that reflects in my art – every facet of life's existence, the sad, the gothic, the funny-as-heck things that I do.Cindy Sheehan, War, and Denial
– Randy "Biscuit" TurnerPoliticos and activists working overtime were unsuccessful in penetrating national denial about the nature and causes of the war in Iraq, but a single determined mother, driven by grief and a growing sense that something's not right, seems to be having an effect, despite attempts by (I'll say this tactfully) her critics to undermine her credibility. What Christopher Hitchens refers to as dreary sentimental nonsense is interpreted differently by Sheehan's many supporters, perhaps as an awakening of American conscience. Almost 1500 Americans have died in combat since the war begin in March 2003. The war was actually an American invasion of another country, which should have been shocking in itself, and it was justified by a lie (Sadaam's weapons of mass destruction), which definitely should have been shocking... and some were indeed shocked, a few asked hard questions about the war, but it seemed to fade into the background noise behind more compelling issues... whether Scott Peterson killed his wife Laci, whether Michael Jackson molested children at Neverland Ranch, whether athletes were pumping steroids, whether Brad left Jennifer for Angelina.... The war was over, after all, after Bush declared victory on that aircraft carrier, Saddam Hussein was dragged out of his hole, and the soldiers who opposed us were tucked safely away in prisons (subjected to a playful bit of demeaning torture, which almost shocked us, but not quite). As this War in Iraq has shriveled American morality and commitment to principle (no offensive wars, no torture by Americans, frank and honest democratic dialogue guiding our efforts), world opinion of the USA has grown dark and ugly. Meanwhile the Administration is fighting its own war - to cloak its own darker side (Karl Rove's machinations) and corruption within its party (Tom DeLay). We're riding down a slippery slope and we haven't quite hit bottom... meanwhile a grieving American mother, recovering from shock over her son's death and beginning to question why he was sent to war, feeling she's not getting answers that ring true, decides to camp out on the doorstep of the President's vacation home (a great spot, considering the long duration of his many vacations) and insist that he give her an answer that makes sense. And people start listening... after all, the Jackson and Peterson trials are done, and this seems like a pretty good, newsworthy show, so she's getting coverage. And bloggers have posted thousands of items. Other people – many others – are beginning to ask the same questions Cindy's asking, and perhaps sensing a buried truth – could it be that an American president has placed his interests, and his friends' intersests, above the interests of the American people?
Note: The war will have to end sooner or later as it's diminishing our resources. Retired General Barry McCaffery on NPR: "We probably have enough troops to regain control of the national capitol and the lines of communication. But at this point there are no more troops essentially to send....8 of 10 army divisions are in movement into the theater or out right now. Essentially 70% of our combat power has been deployed. We've called up--from this deployment 40% of that deployment is national guard or reserve. We're down to 3 to 5 brigades of the army and marine corps strategic reserves, and we are at and beyond our elastic breaking point."
DarknetJD Lasica's Darknet is a very good overview of the tumultous evolution of the perception of content and distribution as all media is digitized and increasingly available online, sometimes through legal channels but more often via the Darknet, i.e. file sharing networks of trust (not to be confused with the euphemistic label trusted computing). I'm leading a discussion with JD at Inkwell.vue on the WELL. If you want to join the conversation, you can send questions and comments to inkwell (at) well.com.
The Darknet, at bottom, is the collection of spaces where unauthorized or illegal file sharing takes place. Most media outlets use the Darknet in the narrow sense to refer to the private, secure, encrypted spaces online set up to exchange files without fear of detection -- sites like Blubster and WASTE and the new initiative Ian Clarke announced 2 weeks ago that will expand darknets from small groups of a few dozen people to potentially millions of people.Truth, madness, and logic
My book deals with these kinds of darknets, but also points out that Darknets in a wider sense refer to any kind of illicit file-sharing network -- including the years-old sneakernets on college campuses, where kids trade, buy and sell CDs and DVDs of movies and software downloaded from warez sites and the Internet; Usenet and IRC Chat, where strangers exchange files; and a new wave of legitimate darknet companies like Grouper and imeem and Outhink's Spin Xpress (which I'll bet most of you haven't heard of!).
Darknets are not evil -- at least in my book. They're the public's reaction to overly restrictive copyright laws and bass-ackwards media business models. In some ways, darknets are becoming the last bastion of the digital freedom fighters (alongside the folks who just want to snag free stuff). So it's a decidedly mixed bag.Odd that Gödel, one of the three greatest logicians of all time, was also a paranoid schizophrenic. Barnard physicist and writer Janna Levin's writing a novel called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, about which she says "This is a story. Does that make it fiction? It's based on truth like all of our stories. It's a story of coded secrets and psychotic delusions, mathematics and war. It's a chronicle of the strange lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel. These stories are so strange, so incredible, that they are totally unbelievable. Except they're true. And fact is more extraordinary than fiction." Edge.org has an excerpt from the book.
Gödel didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would. He didn't invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you'll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you're staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.Pirillo's revengeChris Pirillo's got a great idea for dealing with telemarketers: record and podcast their calls! He's posted about it here, with a funny example.
Staci Kramer on BlogHerBlogHer was, I gather from the reports I've read, a unique conference, possibly because it wasn't just the usual suspects having the usual conversations. I wasn't there, so I've been looking for a good overview; today I ran across a rich account of the conference at the Annenberg Online Journalism Review, written by Staci Kramer. Staci has some thoughts about why this conference was different:
It would be easy to ascribe the difference to the overwhelmingly female majority, but it goes deeper than that.There were intense feelings, and "...it wasn't all sweetness and light. Anger, frustration, disagreement, disappointment – all made frequent appearances during the weekend and after." From Staci's report, I get the sense that BlogHer was great because it was a truly authentic experience for most of the participants, and authentic experiences are rare anywhere these days, especially at the myriad conferences focusing on talking-head panels pontificating for 45 minutes followed by ten minutes of questions. Sounds like everybody was talking – and listening – at this one. Ooky Corpses
Part of it came from the cross-section of bloggers self-selected as participants or attending as invited panelists. We could -- and did -- break into smaller groups (one time slot was set aside for "birds of a feather" groups) but we were there for reasons that pulled us together more than they pulled us apart. Plus, we were determined to make it work.Maida Barbour sent me a link to a piece about an "ooky" corpse exhibit, "Human Body World," at Mannheim's Museum of Technology and Work. It's essentially sculptures made with corpses, and according to the story, "religious and ethical critics say von Hagens has crossed an important line by treating the human body as something tantamount to a sculptor's clay." [Link]
Charlie Stross wins a HugoCharlie won the prestigious science fiction award for The Concrete Jungle... which is posted online with a Creative Commons license. Via Cory on boingboing.
Not citizens, but consumers.New FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has a perspective that's disturbingly different from his predecessor's. (Thanks to Michael Maranda for the pointer.) [Link]
Terrorists and the InternetNot long ago, CNN's Miles O'Brien tossed off a comment implying that where Al Qaeda is concerned, the Internet may be the problem. Today the Washington post is running a longer piece (requires free registration) that says
al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.According to the article, "the Web's shapeless disregard for national boundaries and ethnic markers fits exactly with bin Laden's original vision for al Qaeda," and that the Internet is increasingly used tactically, "especially for training new adherents," quoting Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, a group that monitors and tracks the jihadist Internet sites.We should be attentive to the story between the lines here: if people use the Internet to do terrible things, what should we do? That question's come up more than once since access to the Internet started spreading in the early '90s, often from people and organizations who, on the scale balancing openness and freedom with social control, put their thumb heavily on the social control side, The world would be so much simpler and safer if we had more restrictions, they think, though there's never been much evidence to suggest that this is the case.
Consider a substitution: if people use free speech to do terrible things, what should we do? This suggests the slippery slope we're on when we talk about restricting the Internet. As Mike Godwin used to say, often, in the freedom/control discussions... the best response to "bad" speech is more speech. If we're concerned that young Muslims will join the jihad because of something they read online, perhaps we should support wiser, nonviolent Muslims in their attempts to dialog with potential terrorists in their midst.
Whatever the case, we should get ready for the next attempt to regulate speech on the Internet, an inevitable response to this idea of web-based jihad.
Joi Ito on Hiroshima and NagasakiIn a New York Times op-ed piece, Joi says that Japanese of his generation don't really think much about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when they do, it's more of a remix.
To be sure, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still plays a part in the imagery of popular culture. But more meaningful references to Japan's nuclear past, like those in the story of Godzilla (awakened from his slumber by American atomic tests) or the cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa's best-selling series about a Hiroshima survivor, have morphed into the cultural equivalent of elevator music.Rag Mama Rag!
Indeed, Japanese culture is unusual (although by no means unique) in its ability to take shocks or disturbances and gradually transform and neuter them. In that respect, today's atomic imagery in pop culture is not so different from the mohawked punks who apologize profusely if they bump into you in downtown Tokyo: the T-shirts they wear with violent, antisocial slogans (in English) are an aesthetic statement, not a moral one.Ragstaffers from Austin's late, great first "underground" or alternative newspaper, The Rag, will have a reunion September 3-4, including an art show and a "Rag Mama Rag" concert. (Rag Mama Rag , a song from The Band's second album, was adopted by Rag vendors on the drag, who would probably be controversial if not imprisonedif they reappeared today – quoting without a license.) I wrote a few record reviews for the Rag and went to the meetings, which I recall were in the basement of the University YMCA, which was where the Scientology building now sents, if I remember correctly (this was the hazy past). Everybody who showed up voted on each piece submitted for the week's issue. At the time I t hought I was destined to be a rock critic, so I wrote record reviews, but when my review of the Dylan bootleg known as the Great White Wonder was voted down for length, I lost interest (and later changed majors from Journalism to English after a particularly intense short story course... though I still assumed I would write about media someday...actually a longer story connected to my high school and college newspaper columns under the header "Media Man,") Heh... I'm lapsing into reverie here... but I plan to attend the Rag Reunion, and if you want a taste of the rag, several issues are posted online, along with some photos. There's also a piece about the reunion in the Austin Chronicle.
Wooster collective!Maida Barbour sent a link to the Wooster Collective, "A Celebration of Street Art," the most fascinating art blog I've seen...wow. [Link]
Alex Steffen interviews Cory Doctorow WorldChanging editor Alex Steffen interviews Cory Doctorow (wearling his EFF hat) about the "copyfight" with WIPO.Information goods are a critical piece of the development picture. Every successfully developed country made use of free information goods. More accurately, they all went through a stage when they were a pirate nation. America spent a century as a pirate nation, ripping off the intellectual property of every country around it, and in particular, of Britain, because when you're a net importer of intellectual property, signing on to multilateral copyright and patent agreements is signing on to exporting your wealth off-shore. When you're a net exporter of intellectual property, it makes economic sense.
The choice is not simply one of piracy or monopoly. There is a whole rich middle ground of public domain and open information regimes which could give developing world countries the tools they need to serve humanitarian purposes, while protecting the legitimate interests of authors, performers and inventors. WIPO could have created a global knowledge goods regime which protected both the commercial and the humanitarian fairly.
But WIPO completely failed to do that, and it went on being a completely captive agency, simply making more copyright, more patent, more related rights, more trademarks on the grounds that all of these rights were themselves a good, regardless of the impact they had on people -- whether they were denying access to patented pharmaceuticals in poor countries that desperately needed them and couldn't afford to buy them at the market price, or simply creating copyright regimes that made basic education more difficult to provide in developing nations. WIPO and the World Trade Organization's intellectual property instruments together foisted a lot of policies on the developing world that required them to adopt knowledge goods laws that were incredibly dangerous to their body politic.Roll Over BeethovenBubble Wrap Appreciation DayRoll over beethoven and tell Tschaikovsky the news.The BBC gathered statistics on music downloads from its website and found the most popular artist was – not U2 and Paul McCartney, but Ludwig van Beethoven, with an impressive 1.4 million downloads! The music industry in the UK is a little freaked out by this whole music download thing, especially now ... [Link] Dvorak on Creative Commons
–Chuck BerryJohn Dvorak has an aggressively clueless column at pcmag.com wherein he calls Creative Commons "humbug" ... "This is one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes."
I have begged critics of the system, such as The Register's Andrew Orlowski, to explain to me how Creative Commons works or what it's supposed to do that current copyright law doesn't do. He says, "It does nothing." Okay, then why are bloggers and do-gooders and various supporters making a point of tagging their material as being covered by Creative Commons? Is it just because it's cool and trendya code for being hip amongst a certain elite? There is no other answer.Seeking advice from Orlowski isn't going to do much to cure Dvorak's failure to grasp the purpose of the CC, which is a system for proactively granting license to copy and distribute certain kinds of intellectual property. It "bothers" Dvorak that "Creative Commons is similar to a license" saying that "others have certain rights to reuse the material under a variety of provisos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for commercial purposes."Why not commercial purposes? What difference does it make, if everyone is free and easy about this? In other words, a noncommercial site could distribute a million copies of something and that's okay, but a small commercial site cannot deliver two copies if it's for commercial purposes. What is this telling me?The answer, of course, is that the author of the work has decided to license it only for non-commercial replication, as is her right. It's hard to get why Dvorak finds a license assigning some rights and not others so disturbing. He goes on to sayThis is nonsense. Before Creative Commons I could always ask to reuse or mirror something. And that has not changed. And I could always use excerpts for commercial or noncommercial purposes. It's called fair use. I can still do that, but Creative Commons seems to hint that with its license means that I cannot. At least not if I'm a commercial site and the noncommercial proviso is in effect. This is a bogus suggestion, because Creative Commons does not supersede the copyright laws. In fact, the suggestion is dangerous, because if someone were sued by the Creative Commons folks over normal fair use and Creative Commons won the suit, then we'd all pay the price, as fair use would be eroded further.If Dvorak had taken time to look (rather than seeking opinions from someone like Orlowski, who'd rather be outrageous than accurate) he would have seen that the Creative Commons licenses note that "Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above." Dvorak's assertion shows that his rant is uninformed by an actual review of the Creative Commons licenses themselves.He's also disturbed about the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication... "This means that the item is not covered by copyright but is in the public domain. So what's Creative Commons got to do with it? Public domain is public domain. It's not something granted by Creative Commons." He's right about one thing - it's not something granted by Creative Commons. Creative Commons doesn't grant anything - it simply provides a mechanism for authors to grant licenses. And a work doesn't enter the public domain automatically, of course - it's covered by copyright until the copyright expires unless the author specifically commits the work to the public domain. Creative Commons has created a bit of legal text for dedication to the public domain, and has also given visibility to this alternative.
Is there a House in the house?
Blog-a-thon tag:
EFF15
Bruce Sterling's excited about House Industries after hearing House's Andy Cruz. [Link]
This Cruz lecture was one of the most important and interesting things I've seen in my stay at Art Center. I mean... Bohemians are supposed to be recuperated by Modernists; Modernists just aren't supposed to be recuperated by Bohemians. But I just witnessed that, and what's more, they're great at it it. That's like watching Paris fall to the Mongols and discovering that Mongols are brilliant at vichysoisse and the can-can.Louisiana ManifestoDina Mehta blogs Jean Nouvel's Louisiana Manifesto...
The global economy is accentuating the effects of the dominant architecture,Joi on "the internets"
the type that claims "we don't need context".And yet debate on this galloping frenzy does not exist: architectural criticism,
invoking the limits of the discipline, is content with aesthetic and stylistic
reflections devoid of any analysis of the real, and ignores the crucial historical
clash that - more insistently every day - sets a global architecture against an
architecture of situations, generic architecture against an architecture of
specificity.Is our modernity today simply the direct descendant of the modernity of the
20th century, devoid of any spirit of criticism?Does it consist simply of parachuting solitary objects on to the face of the planet?
Shouldn't it rather be looking for reasons, correspondences, harmonies,
differences in order to propose an ad-hoc architecture, here and now?When George Bush talked about "the internets," we all laughed – of course there's one Internet, just like there's (by definition) one Universe, right? But Joi expresses a concern that there is in fact a fragmentation of the Internet into local/regional networks, partly because some countries block access to much external content, and partly because many users prefer to stay within their own realm. And "there are people who don't like the policies of the Internet and either want to censor or otherwise manage differently THEIR internet."
It is the fact that we have a single root and that we have global policies and protocols which allows the Internet to be a single network and allows anyone to reach anyone else in the world. Clearly, allowing anyone in the world to reach anyone else in the world with a single click introduces a variety of problems, but it creates a single global network which allows dialog and innovation to be shared worldwide without going through gateways or filters. This attribute of the Internet is a key to the future of a global democracy and I believe we need to fight to preserve this.I commented that we should fight censorship, but I don't what we do about individuals' decisions to focus on their own countries, regions, languages, etc. Any ideas? [Link] ProdigiesFrom Slate: would a genius like Mozart fail to thrive in today's hostile market? [Link]
There is no question that Mozart's youthful creativity was an amazing feata feat spurred on in part by his receptive cultural surroundings and, as Solomon points out, by his own avid receptivity to influence. But the wonder, certainly to a modern sensibility, is also that young Mozart thrived despite an early bombardment of demands and deadlines that sound as though they could well have waylaid, or worn out, a lesser genius. Being too plugged in to dominant cultural forces, of course, is a problem that contemporary classical music prodigies can only dream about having, as The New Yorker's astute music critic Alex Ross noted in a wistful blog entry not long after Jay Greenberg (who calls himself Bluejay) enjoyed a rare taste of the pop spotlight on 60 Minutes last fall. Cautioning that "the social and cultural pressures for a modern American classical prodigy are so unlike those faced by Mozart that no comparison is possible," Ross ventured a grim verdict anyway: "Then the market demanded such a talent; now, the market is hostile."Henry Miller
But perhaps it's worth considering whether there might be an upside to the pessimistic portrait of prodigies marginalized in a crass culture. It's true enough that a reward-filled market can be a great goad to achievement. But public demand and the clamor of competition can also be a distraction, eroding the near obsessive concentration that prodigious achievement of any kind seems to require. Creative isolation and independence are the truly rare commodities in our era of instant communication and information overload, and it may be that there's no need to pity boys like Bluejay, cut off from their "emo-listening, hip-hop-dancing, ironically 'American Idol'-analyzing classmates," as Ross put it in a New Yorker column. On the contrary, what is crucial is to find distance from an e-world of indiscriminate input. You might say young classical prodigies are liberated to listen to the voices of past musical heroes in their own heads. Meanwhile, Greenberg has harnessed the information age for his purposes: With a computer, he's his own transcriber, master not just of melodies but of the means of production.
A bit of surfing: I followed Pesco's link to Erik Davis' piece about Druid Heights, which includes a link to Steve Speer's Greetings from the S.S. Vallejo, a piece about the Vallejo's renovation. At the Vallejo site I saw a link under "stories" to Alicia Bay Laurel, author of Living on Earth, a book Marsha and I had around the house for years after we joined forces in '73. Curious, I followed that link, and found a piece that mentions the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. This brought back memories... I spent the summer of '72 in California and visited Big Sur with friends – we were on our way to Yosemite from Los Angeles. On that trip I had been reading Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Heironymus Bosch, a great little slice of Henry Miller's life. In fact all of his works were slices of his life in various shapes and sizes. I recall Big Sur as one of the Miller books that suggested a choice between making art, and making your life a work of art. At the time, having been told so many times by various mentors that I had writing talent, I thought I would be a kind of artist, a writer and poet. Miller made me wonder about that, and over the next year, around the time I was married, I sat for hours trying to write as an end in itself, and convinced myself that I didn't have a story worth telling (which is bogus – everybody has a story worth telling, you just have to believe that's the case).
Now I write what I want to when I want to – i.e. I blog – and I have plenty to talk about, but I don't practice writing as a craft the way I did then. This odd bit of surfing, though, has taken me back to a fountain where I can drink again and renew some of the old urges. Reading Henry Miller again can do that, and thinking about Big Sur, and finding the art in my still-robust life.
Steven Johnson, pop icon!Recent birthday boy and Weblogsky pal Steven Johnson's appearing on tonight's Daily Show with Jon Stewart, no doubt discussing his new book Everything Bad is Good for You: HOw Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Steven also wrote one of the best pieces in Extreme Democracy, "Two Ways to Emerge, and How to Tell the Difference Between Them" (Link to pdf), one of the best analyses of the rise and fall of the Howard Dean Presidential Campaign. Break a leg, Steven! [Link]
Stairway to HeavenWhat could be better than an Erik Davis book that explores the roots in mysticism of Led Zeppelin's songs? A Mark Dery interview with Erik, is what!
I believe the interpretive imagination is "open," and that a responsibility to one's creative daemon, and to questions of ultimate meaning, is as fundamental as a responsibility to history or the disenchanting function of the intellect. This interest in imaginative overreading underlies my abiding fascination with religious revelation, the occult, and "visionary culture" of all stripes. In my view, the occult is peculiar in that it is almost designed to elicit creative overinterpretationit encourages the reader to start connecting x and y, planets and roses, and drawing links between different texts until an immense quasi-conspiracy of signification arises. This process, once unleashed, takes on a life of its own, and takes one on a journey from which you never altogether return. Because the occult is designed for this sort of hermeneutics, one no longer needs to speak about the intentionality or ultimate value of individual texts. Random informationwant ads, comic books, stray conversationscan be transformed into grand cosmologies through the occult imagination, a process that ultimately leads to psychosis but underlies scores of great fictions as well. I don't believe Plant and Page consciously put a lot of the stuff in that I describe, but I believe the creative imagination did. In other words, I allow the creative imagination a sort of agency because that's the ticket to get into the door, an animism of consciousness. So I'd like to think my mythopoetic reading of a goofy rock record is both legitimate and perverse, and sustainedlike the performance of magiconly by its own ability, or not, to amuse, instruct, bewitch. I am drawn to a sort of "sacred irony": irony not as a simple dodge, but as a deeper turn of the screw.Subtle TechnologiesAt WorldChanging.com, Dawn Danby posts an overview of the Subtle Technologies conference she just attended... "a great interdisciplinary conference that overcomes the tyranny of specialization and gets the art and science communities talking."
The Story of the Sex PistolsJon Hicks has discovered a comic strip "Story of the Sex Pistols" from 1984, and posted it as a photoset on flickr.
Jesus loves me, but he can't stand you...America's Evangelical Christians, given an inch by George W. Bush, are taking a mile and then some. What a mess: Now growing rapidly while the more established denominations decline, the evangelicals suddenly see a chance to bend government to their will. This likely explains why they have reversed their belief in separation and adopted a radically new understanding of American history.... (Thanks to John for the pointer. [Link]
Mark and Carla on the Gadget ShowNice interview with Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair podcast via The Gadget Show includes a brief history of boing boing, the hardcopy zine as well as the creation of the blog and Mark and Carla's island experience. [Link]
Media, community, and "making sense"Prolific Malaysian social networker Bala Palai pinged me yesterday with a pointer to a Jeff Jarvis post about "newspapers must stop thinking of themselves as things but as places where people come together to do good things." Jarvis quotes Bala on media as community:
media used to be equal to community... because what mattered most to community equaled to the community... and what mattered most = media = community, as time went on, specialists creeped in... And in time the agency phenomena took over. Agency phenomena = agents become principals (another e.g. --> govt servants become masters) and thus media diverged from community. Media no more represented community. Nature abhors these divergences. It pushes towards equilibrium. So there was pressure to have facilities to enable this convergence and thus social software and citizen journalismThe entrepreneurial Bala is thinking about "how this fundamental can be used to derive emerging media business models," and, of course, he's not alone. (My first company, FringeWare, Inc., a "street market in cyberspace," was an experiment in online community and commerce, where the commercial aspect was an emergent property of the community.)In his recent post "What is Knowledge?" at Tamil.net, Bala focuses on the problem of making sense in a world of perceptions and inputs that are increasingly difficult to manage, and detrimental to community stability:
The more incoherent our sense-making framework, the more we hear, listen and see only what we want to hear, listen and see -- the less objective we are, the more default friction there is in that community. And if others in our community also do that, there will be a larger gap between our perception of reality and their perception of reality over a cross-section of contentious issues. Thus fostering social capital (trust etc) becomes an expensive proposition. Thus societies that grasp and solve this would have a competitive lead over societies that do not grasp or are in denial of this state of affairs.WorkaholicsAre elite "road warriors" laboring 80-100 hours a week at their jobs? A new Fast Company article says so, though when you read the article they're not talking about actual work, necessarily – many of the hours are devoted to travel. [Link to Fast Company article on "Extreme Jobs"]
I'm a known workaholic, so I've thought about this a lot, and I've observed other people who have "extreme" jobs. I find that people who are "at work" from 6am to 10pm don't work 100% of the 16 hours. They do all sorts of things, but because they never officially went home and called it a night, and they're doing stuff that's work-related along the way, they're still "at work" in a sense, even though the actual focused labor may not exceed 6-8 hours.
Is travel "work"? The Fast Company article talks about constant travel; I don't travel as much these days as I used to, but I remember pretty well what it was like. I once conducted a training session for a group in Chicago. I left Texas in the early AM and came back that night. It looked like I had a very long day, but I actually worked 4-5 hours that day. Much of the time I was in transit to or from, and I was reading or sleeping.
Most of my business travel was like that, and I didn't see profound differences in other people I knew.
I was also aware of people who would stay late at the office and who gave the impression they were working, though if you paid attention you'd find they were doing other stuff, like surfing the web at the office because the connection was faster.
People go to mixers and business events, and they're still "working" though much of the time is spent hanging out.
We call all of this stuff "work" when we're still tethered, still operating within your company's ethos. But I hate to perpetuate the myth that this is hard labor.
And just incidentally, I'm trying to learn to spend less time "working," not more. I think we should all do that for the sake of our clearly-imperiled sanity.
Right now I have to get back to work, though.
To Hell in a HandbasketI had a series of emails today the subject of which was "Terri Schiavo is finally dead." Tonight I saw an unbelievably tasteless web site on the subject, which I won't credit with a link. I was feeling cranky about this stuff, but I realize that Terri Schiavo is no longer a real person. She's a political weapon, and having been deployed in service of politicians (with no real principle involved, other than ink), she's invited dismissal by cynics who deplore the ongoing political circus. There's a lot of bad actors in this - coopting Terri Schiavo's life for political purpses is depraved; dismissing her life as a reaction is just as depraved. The whole day's been depressing enough, and the Pope's near the end, as well. I can only imagine what his death will bring to the surface.
Forgive the cranky mood, but I think we're all in a dangerously bad place right now.
Miracle in GizaRebekah Miracle is blogging from Egypt, where she's working on the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, Mark Lehner's study explained in "Who Built the Pyramids", a 2003 Harvard Magazine article. Lehner's found evidence that the pyramids were built, not by slaves as we've come to believe via Hollywood epics, but by skilled workers who were treated like near-royalty. This archeological study appears to be a fascinating bit of analysis. Rebecca's blog is a ground-level account of the work as well as a bit of play, as in her latest post, which is about sneaking into the light show at the pyramids. [Link]
... we hid out in one of the tents until it got dark and then snuck back onto the Wall of Crow ninja-style, hiding from the camel-mounted security guards. While archaeologists are poor and cheap, mostly this was just done out of principle and because it is way more fun to do anything when it's illicit. So we crouched behind the rocks on the top of the wall and watched the show. Towards the end, the night-time call to prayer went out...and suddenly the usual five-times daily cacophony of competing prayer-callers (some better than others) was joined by the howling of the dogs that prowl the pyramids after dark. The call to prayers is eerie under any circumstances (Farrah thinks it sounds like something out of Night of the Living Dead), but especially so when you're laying under the stars, in the cold desert night air, giggling and hiding from the guards.Who's your Dada?In his sci fi novel Good News from Outer Space, John Kessel has dadaist punks breaking into cars to install new sound systems. In a similar kind of prank, British graffiti artist Banksy smuggled his own art into the New York Museum of Modern Art, where it hung for three days before before anybody noticed. He also smuggled art into other museums as a coordinated detournement of art institutions. Banksy's run is documented at the Wooster Collective.
Joi, Doors of Perception, GandhiJoi posted about his Doors of Perception experience (I was going to link to the conference web site, but it seems to be broken at the moment), and his realization that his integrity can be compromised when he's speaking ("I realized that I was compromising and in fact evening softening my words assuming that the video of my presentation might end up on the Internet and that I would have to defend any hardline positions I took."). I feel his pain. So many of us want to improve the state of the world, but we really don't know the world at all. We see slices of the world, our perceptions colored by class biases that we never see; we have a blind spot. Our life style is probably doomed, because the 21st Century world has no room for wealth or privilege. I'm pretty well off now, compared to the rest of the world. I have a six-planet ecological footprint. I really don't *think* I'm that well off, much of the time, because I take so much for granted. If there is a leveling effect, if the rest of the world, including developing nations, gets something like an equal share of the planet's limited resources, I'll have to change my life style, radically.
And so will you.
Joi asks What would Gandhi do?, and I confess that I have no idea. Perhaps he would blog. Perhaps he would tell me, and Joi, and so many others, that the life we've made for ourselves is a lie, that we should look inward and cultivate silence. [Link]
Conspiracy as CommodityBelieve 'em or not, conspiracy theories are big business, and postmodern culture is riddled with a profusion of mind-blowing alternative belief systems that are, just incidentally, very saleable. [Link]
Conspiracy theories have pervaded every facet of our modern life. A.H. Barbee describes in "Making Money the Telefunding Way" (published on the Web site of the Institute for First Amendment Studies) how conspiracy theorists make use of non-profit "para-churches".Trippin' with Mr. HydeThey deploy television, radio, and direct mail to raise billions of dollars from their followers through "telefunding". Under section 170 of the IRS code, they are tax-exempt and not obliged even to report their income. The Federal Trade commission estimates that 10% of the $143 billion donated to charity each year may be solicited fraudulently.
Lawyers represent victims of the Gulf Syndrome for hefty sums. Agencies in the USA debug bodies - they "remove" brain "implants" clandestinely placed by the CIA during the Cold War. They charge thousands of dollars a pop. Cranks and whackos - many of them religious fundamentalists - use inexpensive desktop publishing technology to issue scaremongering newsletters (remember Mel Gibson in the movie "Conspiracy Theory"?).
Tabloids and talk shows - the only source of information for nine tenths of the American population - propagate these "news". Museums - the UFO museum in New Mexico or the Kennedy Assassination museum in Dallas, for instance - immortalize them. Memorabilia are sold through auction sites and auction houses for thousands of dollars an item.
Robert Louis Stevenson's famous "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was evidently influenced by his experience with ergotine, which is like LSD a derivative of ergot, and which has side effects similar to the effects of LSD. A couple of British professors believe that ergotine injections created a transformation similar to Dr. Jekyll's. [Link]
In the letter, dated end of August, early September 1885, Stevensons wife wrote to William Henley, her husbands friend and literary agent: Louiss mad behaviour . . . I think it must be the ergotine that affects his brain at such time.May you live to eat interesting frozen dessert...He is quite rational now, I am thankful to say, but he has just giving up insisting that he should be lifted into bed in a kneeling position, his face to the pillow.
Two weeks later Stevenson began writing his famous work about the duality of human nature. The story recounts the adventures of Dr Jekyll, who takes drugs that separate the good and evil in his psyche. Although the doctor is purified, the evil Mr Hyde is created as a terrible side-effect.
Yow, and we thought Blue Bell was diverse! "Having succeeded globally with cars, electronics and even fashion, it was only natural the Japanese turned their hand to trying to surpass the West with one of its favorite culinary delights - ice cream." Some of the flavors are ... interesting ... (Thanks, Maida!) [Link]
A Vernacular WebOlia Lialina appreciates the patchwork amateur aesthetics of the early web and calls for an exploration of the cultural history of cyberspace. [Link]
In the past few years Ive also been making work that foregrounds this disappearing aesthetic of the past. With these works I want to apologize for my arrogance in the early years and to preserve the beauty of the vernacular web by integrating them within contemporary art pieces. But this is only half of the job.Pam BrickerCreating collections and archives of all the midi files and animated gifs will preserve them for the future but it is no less important to ask questions. What did these visual, acoustic and navigation elements stand for? For which cultures and media did these serve as a bridge to the web? What ambitions were they serving? What problems did they solve and what problems did they create? Let me talk about the difficult destiny of some of these elements.
I never had a chance to meet Pam, but her husband Gareth Branwyn is a good friend and colleague from all the way back in the 'zine days, and Pam, an accomplished and versatile jazz singer, performed some vocals with one of my favorite bands, Thievery Corporation. Pam passed away Sunday. Now I can't believe I never met her or had a chance to hear her sing live. The recorded vocals I've heard are wonderful. [Link]
"In Praise of the Segue"Dave Mandl fears that we're losing something valuable – the segue and the concept of the set of music – as we adopt the Ipod shuffle and a file-focused approach to listening. This is an interesting argument, but I tend to think podcasting will save the segue.
[Link]... the importance of segues in music sets can't be stressed too much. In the days when I first auditioned for a radio show (and later screened other prospective DJs), audition tapes were made with most of the body of each track removed, leaving just the segues and the few seconds before and after each transition. Once it's been revealed which track the DJ has chosen to go to after the current one, the rest is more or less an anticlimax, at least when you're evaluating the person's chops. It's not just your musical vocabulary and taste that matter, but the ability to put it all together in some meaningful way. Having a listener give you three hours of valuable time to spin absolutely any music in the world for them is both a privilege and a challenge, and creating some kind of unique sound environment for them (and this applies to rock and roll just as much as more obvious genres, like ambient or soundtrack music) is about the best thing you can do in return. The idea of "psychogeography" is no less important in a set of music than in an experimental film or an actual psychogeographical drift through a physical space.Shotgun Golf"Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray" was evidently Hunter Thompson's last published column, though god knows what'll turn up in the wake of his death. I'm pissed off at myself for ignoring he recent work, and I'm a still trying to come to terms with the juxtaposition of his death and Sandra Dee's. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was instrumental in undermining my faith in journalism and pretty well trashing my writing career. If not for HST, I would have fallen from grace and become a successful journalist and author. I would have had credibility, and would have become a blogger only much later, after it was fashionable and cool. Now, that would stink. [Link]
The game consists of one golfer, one shooter and a field judge. The purpose of the game is to shoot your opponent's high-flying golf ball out of the air with a finely-tuned 12-gauge shotgun, thus preventing him (your opponent) from lofting a 9-iron approach shot onto a distant "green" and making a "hole in one." Points are scored by blasting your opponent's shiny new Titleist out of the air and causing his shot to fail miserably. That earns you two points.Hunter Thompson quits the sceneNothing here but silence... and this:
I think sometimes I really never learned anything much since I was fifteen. I know I have but I haven't changed much. And maybe I'm either an example of integrity in a person or the dumbest person around. I haven't learned anything since I was fifteen.
[Link]
From the New York Times' obituary:``He may have died relatively young but he made up for it in quality if not quantity of years,'' Paul Krassner, the veteran radical journalist and one of Thompson's former editors, told The Associated Press by phone from his Southern California home. "It was hard to say sometimes whether he was being provocative for its own sake or if he was just being drunk and stoned and irresponsible," quipped Krassner, founder of the leftist publication The Realist and co-founder of the Youth International (YIPPIE) party.
"But every editor that I know, myself included, was willing to accept a certain prima donna journalism in the demands he would make to cover a particular story," he said. "They were willing to risk all of his irresponsible behavior in order to share his talent with their readers."
Monday is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day!
Bubble Wrap brand cushioning starts as polyethylene (plastic) resin, in the form of beads about the size of pea gravel. The beads go into an extruder - a long cylinder with a screw inside that runs its entire length. As the screw is turned, heat builds up and the resin melts into a liquid that is squeezed out of the cylinder into two stacked sheets of clear plastic film. One layer of the film is wrapped around a drum with holes punched in it, and suction is applied drawing one web of film into the holes that form the bubbles. The second layer of film is then laminated over the first so that when the two films are joined, they stick together and trap the air in the bubbles.This may sound easy, but polyethylene is a porous material like a sponge. Air can easily leak out through the pores, which tends to limit the cushioning ability of the packaging. Realizing this, Sealed Air started using a Saran coating to seal the air in the bubbles. Eventually, a method of encapsulating an air retention barrier in the polyethylene during the extrusion process was developed. This process is a trade secret of Sealed Air Corporation.
You can pop a few bubbles here. Mark Dery: "Dimed Out"Mark Dery lacerates the pretensions behind "Not One More Damn Dime Day" in brilliant essay on left-elitist slacktivism. This is a wake-up call for me, having committed by usually-nonpartisan self to the support of partisan campaigns hoping to derail the vast right-wing conspiracy, I've been closer than usual to the mechanics and rhetoric of candidate and activist campaigns while trying to sort out the various biases and agendas there, and within the political blogging community as well, where the contests are not just for the hearts and minds of varied constituents, but also for the blogosphere measure of market share: Googlejuice, Technorati "blog authority," etc. Mark's post is a great cynical blast of oxygen...
Not One More Damn Dime won't work, for the obvious reason that it has niche appeal, and niche appeal only. A dated, they've-got-the-guns-but-we've-got-the-numbers attempt to pour sugar in the gas tank of the road-hogging, gas-guzzling SUV of consumer capitalism by refusing to buy a new cruelty-free loofah or foregoing that appointment with the feng shui consultant, NOMDD needs mass support to get off the ground. But mass support implies mass appeal. If you're going to sell a holy war, you need rousing, to-the-ramparts rhetoric, not some flabbyassed assurance that the faithful can "do something by doing nothing." (Although I have to confess, right about now, that NOMDD's Zen koan speaks to my Inner Slackivist). If your shock troops are going to suffer on behalf of your sacred cause, you need to make palatable, even desirable, the world of pain they're about to enter. Appealing to their better angels is fine ("Ask not what your country can do for you..."). Subliminally seducing them by playing on their naked self-interest is even finer. As in: "Rise up, o ye faithful, against the Great Satan and his Zionist puppetmasters to prevent our sacred sands from being defiled by the boots of the infidels! (Did I mention that every martyr who straps on a suicide belt and blows himself to chum gets to spend eternity in the Garden of Unearthly Delights, boinking dark-eyed virgins?)" By contrast, the left (among whose endangered numbers I count myself, I should probably emphasize again) hasn't managed, in recent history, to make either its public persona or its ideas sexy to the masses. Ensuring that you're synonymous, in the public mind, with hair shirt-wearing self-denial and granitic humorlessness (think Kerry, Gore, Dukakis...) is not likely to win the hearts and minds of Middle Americans, most of whom shrink from things like the NOMDD Day because they sound like the political equivalent of the gray, gluten-free, sugar-free, fun-free snack foods drearily gummed by vegans and other humorectomy sufferers. A mass boycott that mandates total self-denial and, by default, sentences the participant to house arrest in order to avoid spending a plugged nickel, let alone a thin dime, is a mass boycott doomed to failure.Tags: Current Affairs, Politics
Project Censored's Top 25 Censored Media Stories, 2003 - 2004Always a disturbing read,: Project Censored's latest "Top 25 Censored Stories".
Free Culture CommunistsBill Gates sez free culture advocates are "some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises." Xeni posts more of Gates' quote, along with Matt Bradley's suggestion that "we need ... a large red flag with a gold copyleft in the upper left, replacing the hammer and sickle." Xeni obliged by creating the flag, above. I have a hunch we'll see a bunch of those. Meanwhile somebody should lend Mr. Gates a clue... money is not the only incentive. And a willingness to share some things freely does not a communist make. We know what a communist is: a guy who looks like Oscar Homolka, drinks too much low-grade vodka, and beats his shoe on a desk when he's pissed. What does that have to do with free culture?
UPDATE: Xeni posts a second "Creative Commies" image by Jaime:
Will Eisner, 1917-2005Great visionary comic artist Will Eisner, who pointed to the evolution of comic book to graphic novel, died yesterday. [Link]
"Questioning the Frame"Coco Fusco fears we're abandoning history (and reality) in favor of matrixes and maps. [Link]
Viewing the world as a map eliminates time, focuses disproportionately on space and dehumanizes life. In the name of a politics of global connectedness, artists and activists too often substitute an abstract connectedness for any real engagement with people in other places or even in their own locale.Berlin ChristmasWhat gets lost in this focus on mapping is the view of the world from the ground: lived experience. What is ignored is the pervasiveness of the well-orchestrated and highly selective visual culture that the majority of Americans consume during most of their waking hours. Most people are not looking through microscopes and telescopes and digital mapping systems to find truth about the world. They are watching reality TV, sitcoms, the Super Bowl, MTV and Fox News, all of which also offer maps of a completely different kind: conspiracy theories that pit innocent Americans against the Axis of Evil, embedded journalists hallucinatory misreadings of foreign conflicts, allegories of empowerment through consumption and endlessly recycled, biblically inspired narratives of sin and redemption.
My friend Ed Ward, one of the best writers I know, has been living in Berlin for several years. He started blogging last May, and I'll put his blog near the top of my top ten list if I don one (but don't tempt me). He's posted an Actual Heartwarming Berlin Christmas Story, and it has indeed brought warmth on this chilly day after Christmas. (The image above is from his next later post, Christmas Card.)
Counterculture through the AgesKen Goffman, better known as R.U. Sirius, former co-editor of Reality Hackers and Mondo 2000, has just co-authored a history of Counterculture through the Ages with Dan Joy. Ken and I have been jamming about the book and his life on the WELL, along with several others who've read the book. The two-week discussion ends next Friday; if you have questions or comments, email them to inkwell-hosts at well.com and they'll be posted. Meanwhile buy the book, it's a great bit of gonzo nonfiction. Ed Ward has already pointed out some inaccuracies; if you see any, post here and I'll forward the info along for the second edition.
Buy the book:
WorldChanging wins Independent Press Award
WorldChanging.com just won the 2004 Utne Independent Press Award for online cultural coverage, which is a great honor for the growing team of WorldChanging bloggers (including yours truly), and for editors Alex Steffen and Jamais Cascio. [Link]
ShovelwareLongtime friend, fringester, culture jammer, media critic Mark Dery has a new site (Shovelware) and blog (The Gilded Hack). He hsa the right attitude (or altitude): "'Blog' sounds like a portmanteau for some clammy new fetish, best left undescribed – an unhappy hybrid of blob and flog. Yeah, I know its short for 'weblog,' but who calls journals 'logs,' anyway, except the glassy-eyed minions in sea orgs or people who begin their diary entries with stardates?"
This is going to be fun!
Link to Mark Dery's Shovelware
Jeff Jarvis: "Fisking our National Nanny"Jeff Jarvis challenges statements by FCC Chair Michael Powell regarding the agency's attempt to become a powerful new Legion of Decency.
Shall we read the First Amendment together? Congress shall make now law... abridging freedom of speech. Yes, I do not want government -- you -- abridging speech in any way. Neither did our founding fathers. I trust the marketplace, the citizenry, the people. So did our founders. You do not.A crazy Christmas in the UKHoliday weirdness:
CNN says church leaders in the U.K. have condemned a Christmas nativity display featuring David Beckham as Joseph and his wife Victoria (aka Post Spice) as th e, ahem, Virgin Mary. [Link] - also reported in the Houston Chronicle.
Also in England: Satan's Grotto at York Dungeon features a horned devil in lieu of Santa Claus. Santa's evil surrogate hands out severed fingers as gifts and proffers a scroll where visitors can sign over their souls. Says Reverend Roger Simpson, "It is not just complaining for the sake of it. There are real evil forces and we in our work come across people who are damaged seriously through their involvement with occult forces." [Link]
Steve Jackson and GURPSThe latest Austin Chronicle features and interview with my old friend Steve Jackson, former EFF poster boy and cofounder of EFF-Austin. One thing I got from the short interview: Steve Jackson games is almost 25 years old!
Jeff Tweedy, p2pXeni interviews Jeff Tweedy of my current-favorite band, Wilco, talking especially about the band's occasional practice of putting its music online to share with fans. He says I don't want potential fans to be blocked because the choice to check out our music becomes a financial decision for them.
A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.Traditional Non-TraditionalTreating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.
People who look at music as commerce don't understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property.
I'm not interested in selling pieces of plastic.
Mark Frauenfelder posted at boingboing about our friend Steve Silberman, a gay married man, whose written a personal account of his own marriage. Steve is one of the finest writers in the known universe, equipped to articulate eloquently the reality of "same sex marriage," which is really about two people in love making a commitment to each other.
The young voters of the near future already know that love does not discriminate. The laws against marriage passed in eleven states on this past Election Day will not stand and will be recognized for what they are -- ugly, fearful steps backward on the long climb toward democracy and respect for everyone. To couples like me and Keith, I say, keep getting married, proudly and publicly, even without a license, in the face of any cynical attempt to exploit misunderstanding of your lives for short-term political gain. A sane, ethical, compassionate world has to start somewhere.The Human Flower ProjectThis is a great site: The Human Flower Project is an international newsgroup, photo album and discussion of how people live through flowers. We report on art, medicine, society, politics, religion, and commerce. The site originates from Austin. (Thanks to Jason for the pointer!) [Link]
You want ketchup with that?Malcolm Gladwell writes about ketchup and, more generally, why some food products are better than others. What makes Heinz so much better than its competitors? You can extend the thinking in this piece: what are the metrics for food quality? What, more generally, is quality all about? [Link]
After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth. "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing 'Ode to Joy' on the piano," Chambers says. "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist." Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellman's mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake. When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can't isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket. "The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous," Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. "They have beautiful notes--all flavors are in balance. It's very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it's"-- and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds--"all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything."GodzillaFestWhile blogging about Neo Kaiju, I ran across another great item: GodzillaFest in San Francisco, November 17-23. I became a fan of Godzilla culture after reading Mark Jacobson's great surreal novel Gojiro, a postnuclear monster fantasy that got into my head for a while. (In Jacobson's book the monster is a postmodern philosopher of sorts.) This set me thinking about the cultural symbolism of these monster flicks, how they represent uncontrollable chaos and destruction and the human need to make peace with unrelenting nature. Or perhaps I enjoyed watching guys in monster suits stomp carboard cities. Whatever the case, with a Godzilla resurgence sorta fits the retro 50s USA political scene, and the renewed threat of nuclear holocaust - though this is toy nuclear holocaust, bite-sized bursts emanating from terrorist suitcases. (In Gojiro the monster shrinks to fit his buddy Komodo's pocket.) [Link]
The Neo Kaiju ProjectThe Neo Kaiju Project is a series of mini-figures based on Japanese monster toys but designed by contemporary U.S. artists and designers. The project's introduction is a cool animation.
Jacques Derrida
That difficult man, Jacques Derrida, has died. Derrida practiced direct transmission of the zen of decontstruction. Or perhaps not. [Link to NY Times obituary]
Update: Alan Sondheim notes that the New York Times is not a fair or comprehensive assessment of Derrida, let alone a fitting obituary. Here's a link to a pdf of a ten-page tribute to Derrida in Le Monde (in French).
David Weinberger: "Brad Doesn't Suck. Brad is our Future"David Weinberger posts about Brad Sucks:
On his site you can buy his CD for $5 (including shipping!) or download the very same music for free. If you buy the CD, it includes the MP3s to encourage you to share them. You can also buy his music from iTunes, from which he gets 65% of your money, a somewhat better deal than being squeezed like a Tropicana orange by a record label that uses some of its profits to sue your fans. I just bought his CD from Magnatune, who pays him half of what you choose to pay them ($8-$18) because I want to support Magnatune and I don't like the thought of Brad wasting his time sticking CDs into mailers when he should be recording. That's why we have middlepeople.I listened to one cut, and I was sold. Well, sort of sold (I haven't bought the CD yet, but maybe you will!) BTW the CD is called "I Don't Know What I'm Doing," but I think he does. Wikipedia's Systemic BiasJoi blogs about an inherent demographic bias at WikiPedia and a plan to address the problem. He also mentions Orlowski's comments, but (as usual) he's more tactful than I was.
Smile Tuesday!Something like 37 years ago, I (and many others) were waiting for a record album that was sure to be a masterpiece, Brian Wilson's Smile, recorded by the Beach Boys and set to release on Capitol Records. Smile would follow Pet Sounds, a pop symphony that stretched my thinking about the aesthetic possibilities in Phil Spectorish "wall of sound" pop arrangement. Brian Wilson was a genius who could make music from anything, even the clanking of spoons at the dinner table. The short version of a very complex story is that Brian ditched the project, evidently after a fire in the next studio that happened to break out as he was recording part of "the elements," the part about fire. I have a hunch there was more to it, but that's great myth-building. So the album was never finished, never released; bits and pieces of it showed up in other albums, like Smiley Smile. Now Wilson, having reconstructed his head after so many years, has finished the work; Smile will be released this Tuesday! Perseverance furthers. [Link]
Austin City Limits FestivalI'm an avid music fan living in the "live music capital of the world," but I seldom take time these days for live in-person music, so attending the Austin City Limits Music Festival over the weekend was like a great meal after a fast. But the air conditioner's broken, it's complicated to cook, some of it tastes a little flat; in the end I'm elated but my stomach's rumbling sore.
Complicated to cook.
The logistics for ACLFest are complicated but handled very well by the folks that organize the thing. The toughest part is getting there, but you have several options: you can park at the Long Center, which is a mile or so away... or you can park in one of the state parking garages along Trinity/San Jacinto and ride one of a jillion shuttles that run throughout the event. You can take a bicycle or a taxi or a bicycle-rickshaw (saw plenty of those around). However you do it, there's some walking involved, and this year the weather was HOT and muggy, so you could be dripping sweat by the time you get to the gate.
Once you're there you generally have to hustle from one stage to another to catch the acts you want to see, and often one's starting before another begins, and the crowds this year were so much more than last year's, we found it more difficult to get from one stage to another; you had to push your way through people who were jammed together in crowds that were especially huge and dense at the stages for the major acts. And then there were the chair people to contend with.
The chair people.
Of the 75,000 or so attending, I figure half or maybe two-thirds brought collapsible chairs, the kind you can fold and store in an easy-to-carry bag. Last year we thought this was a great idea, even brought our own for one or two days. However this year with so many people on hand the chairs were a nuisance, and there was a particular breed of chair-toting whacko that we referred to as the chair people – people who treated their chairspace as property, and god help trespassers who wander through. Wandering in for the Sheryl Crow set, we stopped to stand in a relatively clear space in front of a couple of these creatures, and they simply went nuts. "This is not going to work," they told us. "You can't stand there. We came here 45 minutes ago so that we'd have a place with nobody standing in front of us." Eh? You've got about 50 rows of people in front of you and they're all going to be standing. Aren't YOU going to stand? "That's not the point. We were here first, you can't just come and stand in front of us." That's not exactly the way we usually do it in Austin general admission shows, but from the looks of 'em, these folks hadn't been to many of those. (They were evidently young Republican typse who were set off by the Kerry bumpersticker Marsha was wearing.) We did okay, though... we moved a few feet over into a passel of young girls who knew Crow's songs by heart and became an emergent choir each time she it a particularly striking chorus. Amazing harmony! They took the Crow set to another level. In fact, this was one of the best sets - Sheryl was bubbly in love, her boyfriend Lance Armstrong hanging around the periphery of the set. Her band is incredibly tight, and she had a couple of extras (Ryan Adams and Doyle Bramhall).
Some of it tastes a little flat.
A couple of disappointments: The Pixies had a bad start, attributable mostly to a bad mix, though they didn't seem passionate about the music when they started... this might've been because they knew the sound sucked. The mix was thin and Joey Santiago was buried. After three or four songs we were wandering away, but stopped to talk to friends and, as we were talking, the sound system kicked in. The rest of the set was pretty good but not great.
Wilco didn't quite fly, either, though I think it was because we'd just walked over from the Drive-By Truckers set, and Wilco opened with a set of songs that were softer and less compelling. I think Tweedy was onto this; there was an up-tempo shift for the last half of the set, capturing the crowd's attention, which had been wandering.
The best of the best.
Four bands blew me away, and one was a surprise: I'd heard of Drive-By Truckers but I should've paid more attention. Their set was the most energized of all... explosive manic rock that drove the crowd wild. They were the second great Southern rockblues band we saw, the first being the North Mississippi All Stars, already one of our favorites. The All Stars play blues resonant with The Allman Brothers and Derek Trucks, at least Luther Dickinson's guitar style is Allmanesque (similar, but not derivative: his chops are his own). Then there was Gomez – I've been listening to their recorded music a lot lately, a kind of pop psychedelic blues combo, infectious listening. No disapppointment here, the band blasted through their set with relentless energy.
I'm elated but my stomach's rumbling sore
Heh - we had a great weekend but the heat and the walking and standing and DANCING wiped me out!
I should recover in time for next year's festival, though...
Be the first kid on your block to be tagged!This struck me as a little perverse: if you pre-order George Lucas' THX 1138 director's cut DVD from Amazon, you also get "a collectible aluminum replica of the THX 1138 ear tag featured on the DVD packaging art." What will those whacky marketing guys think of next? I'm sure I'm missing the joke, but it seems strange to distribute collectible symbols of stifling oppression - the movie's supposed to make you recoil form that sort of thing, no?
The Last Code TalkerFrank Sanache, the last living Meskwaki Code Talker, died last Saturday. The code talkers helped win World War II, and were unrecognized until recently for their remarkable service. (Suggested by Freaky Pinky.) [Link]
The Zenith Angle and the WELLI'm leading a discussion with Bruce Sterling on the WELL, focusing mainly on his new novel The Zenith Angle, a technothriller set in the wake of 9/11. We had a bit of a slow start because it coincided with a trip to Zurich, where Bruce is spending a few days teaching media and industrial design at the European Graduate School. Other faculty include DJ Spooky, Sandy Stone, and John Waters. Must be a helluva place.
Zenith Angle is not a futurist piece; it begins with 9/11 and explores how our construction of reality changed that day.
Five years after 9/11, the USA is a deeply polarized society with alienated allies and practically zero diplomatic credibility. The least whisper from the Al Qaeda camp is pored over and valorized; they're crazy, but they're successful. The emptyhanded USA with its witch-hunts for nonexistent WMD looks simply delusional. You'd be hard put to find a Mexican, Canadian or Briton with the least belief that the Bush Administration means anything it says.Fay WrayThis enormous setback came because of the loss of two and one-fifth buildings. We really need a better word for this struggle than "terrorism." People in the US were once pretty frightened about Communist subversives, but very few Americans are genuinely frightened about Al Qaeda. We just resent them furiously, we lost all sense of perspective. Americans aren't terrorized by Al Qaeda, but in 9/11, Americans got jolted into an unthinking revanchist rage that revealed the American state's deep political weakness.
As a King Kong aficionado, I appreciate this: the Empire State Building will honor the late Fay Wray tonight by dimming its lights for fifteen minutes. [Link]
A World of LebowskiI love The Big Lebowski, even though it's brought a torrential rain of bad jokes into my life, and reminded me how I was tormented by a particular football coach who dared me to correct his incorrect pronunciation of my name, Lebkowsky, and when I did, dubbed me Lebowski forever – a nom de fuckup that Freaky Pinky would never let me forget. But I digress... the good news is that David Edelstein has revisited The Big L. in this piece in the New York Times. Requires free subscription, as ever.
Caddis Worm ArtArtist Hubert Duprat has been collaborating with insect larvae to create 18-carat gold sculptures, some also incorporating pearls or beads. [Link]
Essentially, this in vitro experiment involves the modification of the larva's natural habitat and, more precisely, the replacement of the building materials ordinarily found by the larva (sand, small bits of gravel, sprigs of plants, the shells of planorbid and other water snails) with new materials. To begin with, I put the insect in a gold-filled environment for as long as it takes the creature to form a rough case. The larva must be able to move around in its new case and be picked up without any risk of breaking the fragile construction. First, I only provided the larvae with gold spangles, but then I gradually added beads of turquoise, opal, lapis lazuli and coral, as well as rubies, sapphires, diamonds, hemispherical and Baroque pearls, and tiny rods of 18-karat gold.What's WeirdI thought it was amusing that I got this return on an Amazon search for "Weird America":
Gallery of ComputationWhile we were clowning around in #joiito last night, Boris Anthony tossed out a link to Jared Tarbell's mindblowing gallery of images created by computer programs. Says Tarbell, "Numbers and algorithmic behaviors are their paints; their canvass stretches across the spacious depths of the video array." The site's subtitle is an M.C. Escher quote: "We adore chaos because we love to produce order." (Thanks, Boris! and Jared!)
SMiLEBrian Wilson invaded my brain with Pet Sounds in 1966, and never left. I'd been dismissive of the Beach Boys before then, but something pushed me to buy the album, and I was carried away by its ethereal beauty. When the album SMiLE was in the works, I was one of many Brian Wilson fans waiting for a world-changing aesthetic masterpiece, only to be disappointed when Brian abandoned the project, reportedly because he believed the Fire piece within his symphonic tribute to the elements caused a studio fire nearby. Whatever the case, the album was never finished or released as a whole, but in bits and pieces on albums like Smiley Smile, 20/20, and Surf's Up. There's a bootleg version or two, but no one's ever heard the complete album because Brian never put it together... until now. Malcolm Jones writes in Newsweek how Wilson is completing SMiLE and taking it on the road. The new, finally complete recording of SMiLE will be released by Nonesuch Records September 28. (There's also a just-released all-new Brian Wilson album, Gettin' In Over My Head.) Link to Newsweek's article. (Nearly forgot to mention the great Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the lyrics for the songs on SMiLE. He helped Wilson pull the album back together.
Marlon Brando 1924-2004John Shirley in LAFor those of you in Los Angeles, John Shirley will be appearing tomorrow, July 1 at Bodhi Tree Bookstore to discuss and sign his excellent book Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. John was a progenitor of the cyberpunk literary genre; the days he's known even more for his horror fiction. I first learned of his interest in Gurdjieff in '95, when he agreed to write a piece about the enigmatic teacher for an issue of FringeWare Review that I was editing. I blogged more about the Gurdjieff book here. [Link to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore Calendar]
Robot show in SAMy friend, the mad genius David Nuñez is sponsoring a robot show in San Antonio, during the First Annual Cam Carnival this Saturday, July 3. The Robot Group from Austin will be there. Lots o' music, too! [Link]
Gunner PalaceGunner Palace is Michael Tucker's documentary about a troop of U.S. soldiers staying in one of Uday Hussein's palaces. The film's web site is mostly Tucker's journal of the making of the film.
For the average soldier, any sympathy they had for the Iraqis was waning and the mood on the streets was very different than before. Fewer waves. The kids stayed their distance. I sometimes felt that the new Iraq was a shotgun wedding of two impossibly different cultures. While you could see positive changes and people did express hope, the violence was taking a toll.Through Al-Qaida's Media-Saturated EyeballsI tried to maintain an objective stance. Then one night, a young Iraqi interpreter who I filmed the first time, was arrested after it was discovered that he possibly had passed intelligence on to the insurgents. If true, he was responsible for four deaths. My whole picture changed as I watched them bring him in. He went from being a positive example of The New Iraqand a guy I had shared Marlboros with--to a glaring example of how confused everything had become. Could you trust anyone?
According to this description of Al-Qaida members' self-perception in Slate, members of this worldwide disorganization see themselves as action heroes.
Although al-Qaida adherents are commonly described as having a medieval worldview, their rhetoric and self-image owe as much to blockbuster movies and Mortal Kombat as to epic tales of seventh-century Islam. Al-Nashmi's narrative reads like a straight-to-video shoot-'em-up script, with James Bond car chases and people's heads exploding. "I shot him in the head, and his head exploded," al-Nashmi writes in describing killing an American in an oil company office. Later, when they battle security forces, al-Nashmi says, "I saw the skull of the soldier behind the machine-gun explode before me." As they make their escape, the group runs six roadblocks with Nimr hanging out of the passenger-side car window to squeeze off round after round, eventually taking a bullet in the chest. Al-Nashmi sums up the cinematic mayhem with a quote from Abu Bakr, who led the early Muslim community after the prophet's death in 632: "Strive for death, and you will be granted life."BloomsdayIf I was completely together I'd be celebrating Bloomsday in Dublin, and before going I would've re-read Joyce's Ulysses. I bought my first copy of the book when I was 14 years old, but it wasn't til I was in a class on epic literature at the University of Texas that I got serious... convinced the instructor to let me do a special study of Joyce's modern epic while the others were doing one of Homer's books (can't remember which). I remember writing the intense little paper that would summarize my Ulysses experience... ultimately something life 5-7 pages long, but sooo condensed. Not sure how I did it, and my Prof Rebhorn couldn't figure it out, either... normally, he said, I would expect twice this many pages, but you seem to've nailed it. Must've had something to do with the mouse in the walls of the house where we lived, who had a distinct rhythm as he pounded – something, I'm not sure what, certainly not snare drums – inside the walls. This while I typed and slashed and typed again, and Marsha slept. That was over 30 years ago, and the original Bloomsday was – so much longer, but it seems close. [Link]
Gina Gershon ~ RockedJust caught the episode 4 – the Austin episode – of Gina Gerson's Rocked on IFC. Rocked is kind of a picaresque, a chronicle of Gershon's travels in support of the independent film Prey for Rock and Roll. In the course of the tour, she came to Austin for the Austin Film Festival and played the legendary Austin blues club Antone's. She's fighting a losing battle trying to support the film when its distributors aren't lifting a finger, but she sho does know how to rock and roll. (I found myself wondering why she hasn't moved to Austin, where rock and roll still has a pulse.)
Cracks in the PavementCracks in the Pavement is an art project subtitled "gifts in the urban landscape." Art objects are placed at various urban sites in Austin and London. You can locate the object through the web site (which shows pictures of landmarks near the art, but no pictures of the art), or you might just stumble onto a piece somewhere. Thanks to pdl for the pointer. [Link]
Jesse Sublett: Never the Same Again
Austin musician and author Jesse Sublett of The Skunks is talking about his autobiographical book Never the Same Again: A Rock 'n' Roll Gothic in the Inkwell.vue conference on the seminal online community, The WELL. (If you're not on the WELL, you can still post a comment or question by sending it to inkwell-hosts at well.com.) Rock critic Ed Ward and musician Rik Elswit lead the discussion, which is powerful (Jesse's book talks about his girlfriend's murder and his battle with deadly throat cancer).Dianne's murdere was in 76, on the night of my first important gig. I stumbled thru 2 years with drugs and booze and rock n roll and girls, met Lois, hooked up, started the Skunks and the Violators, and got through the next few years on pure adrenaline and new love. But I pushed the murder down in my consciousness as far as it would go. It popped up again big time in 1998, after I was diagnosed with cancer and had surgery and was undergoing chemo and radiation. While doing that, I started keeping a journal, which was the starting point of the book.We're Off to See the LizardAnd I knew I would examine the murder and my feelings and the story of it, and find out more details about what actually happened, but didn't actually sit down and start writing about it until 1999. And that opened a vein, big time. I wrote about 40--50 pages and couldn't look at it all for months. So the book was written in many stages, with fits and starts. I didn't actually finally look up the newspapers and crime files until the fall of 2002. So I was having lots of problems with this mentally even as I was getting stronger physically from the cancer thing.
The late Vaughn Bode's son Mark is reviving the late, whacky cartoonist's focal character, Cheech Wizard, for The Lizard of Oz, a book that was brewing in his father's head before he died. [Link to the NY Times Story (which will require registration, natch).]"I never thought I'd revive Cheech Wizard because he was too personal to my father," Mr. Bode said. The 70's creature, seen frontally, is a flaccid yellow hat with cartoony red legs and questionable underquarters. "Cheech was my father's alter ego," he added, "a bad-mouth hat with no respect for anyone, completely the opposite of Vaughn, who was charismatic but shy." At first, the son said, he felt intimidated reviving his father's best-known character. The Cheech strip was enormously popular when it ran in National Lampoon magazine in the early 1970's.Blowing Garfield
Stumbling out of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind tonight, I heard what sounded like a vacuum roar, then noticed this surreal scene – somebody was adding air to Garfield. I moblogged it, o'course. The Other Side of Michael Moore
Michael Moore's big win at Cannes invites scrutiny – this article by Andrew Anthony of The Observer suggests that Moore, as he says himself, "deeply flawed." [Link]
What I think, after my short time in his company, is that Moore is a man you would not want as an opponent, but also one you'd think twice about calling a friend. Though a talented film-maker and a clever showman, a populist who knows how to play the maverick, he is too often both big-headed and small-minded. In his desire to be seen as the decent man telling truth to power, he is too ready to blame those less powerful than himself for his shortcomings. He was justly revered in the Palais, but out on the street no one had a kind word to say about him. At Cannes, Moore may have been the star but he was not, it seems, the man of the people.Party Management
On tour to support his latest book The Zenith Angle, Bruce Sterling's been ranting, in part, about his SXSW Party this year, trying to get his head around the turnout, which was 600 (about twice the max turnout for previous parties).
So, this is my problem, right? I have reached some kind of critical limit in these parties. You keep adding quantity and eventually there is a qualitative phase change here. They were nice about it and finally I got them to leave. I just announced that all of the liquor had been drunk and they left. There were no casualties and it was fine. But that's not what concerns me. What concerns me is next year's party. Because I don't have any way to define the proportions of this party nor do I have any security mechanisms in place, nor do the police. Which is kind of interesting....Fahrenheit 9/11 is Gold
Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
I have a sneaking suspicion that what you have done here and the response from everyone at the festival, you will assure that the American people will see this film. I can't thank you enough for that. You've put a huge light on this and many people want the truth and many want to put it in the closet, just walk away. There was a great Republican president who once said, if you just give the people the truth, the republicans, the Americans will be saved.Here's a new link with more info:
Andy Kaufman Returns?
Yahoo News Story.This is a bizarre turn: a press release saying that Andy Kaufman faked his death, is a life and living in New York City. He's got a blog, of course. Our friends at snopes.com, however, are skeptical. [Link]
Value Systems(Thinking aloud...) Beverly Veltman sent me this link to something called the Human Values Project of the Union of International Associations. The specific page lists value classes and talks about how holders of each class of values demonize the others. My response was to note that humans can evidently be screwy or vicious regardless of their class of values. I added:
I probably don't think enough about the values substructure for the political work I'm doing... but I've been looking for ways to connect people who think differently (or have different values) and have them collaborate and, as a happy byproduct, form some synthesis of their approaches. A group-nurturing form of facilitation seems to work best.The Best People Aren't Rock StarsJohn Shirley says what I've been thinking lately: there's way more talent than mainstream media will ever find. Some of the most talented might rather avoid "discovery," instead doing their thing in more intimate settings. I would add that there are a lot of brilliant writers and thinkers who would never work at getting a book or article published, but you can find them now via their blogs.
John Shirley on Gurdjieff
G.I. Gurdjieff was a fascinating, influential teacher informed by western esoteric traditions. His teachings have been passed on over the years, called the Gurdjieff Work or the Fourth Way. Several years ago when I was editing the Stay Awake! issue of FringeWare Review, I was thinking a lot about Gurdjieff's teaching that almost everyone is asleep, that what we call waking consciousness is just a kind of somnambulism. I wanted an article about Gurdjieff, so I asked Jay Kinney, then publisher of Gnosis, a magazine dedicated to the Western inner traditions. Jay had recently published a whole issue devoted to Gurdjieff. He referred me to John Shirley, science fiction/horror author who was one of the co-creators of the cyberpunk subgenre. John wrote a great piece called The Shadows of Ideas. A decade or so later, John has written a biography called Gurdjieff: An Introduction to the Man and his Ideas, just published by J.P. Tarcher. John's discussing the book in a conversation on the WELL led by Jay Kinney. [Link]So as a guy trying to do the Gurdjieff I look at how I feel--I'm angry because of a rip-off producer (or it may have been a coincidence--the uncertainty is maddening), things going badly when I'd worked so long on them, and I see my STATE. That is, I look at myself, my inner state, with my attention, as if it were something objective to me. But it's me who becomes objective. Once I do several things (meditative, somewhat esoteric, taught privately) to get into this self observational state, I see my anger and disappointment as things in themselves, like WEATHER in my inner being, that I have become IDENTIFIED with. That's key to Gurdjieff and certainly to Buddhism, at its best, the study of how we become identified with subjective states, so that we're caught up in desire, or reactive emotion, negativity. (All this sort of thing is parroted by celebrities in a vague, distorted, trendy and childish form, when they become interested in pseudo-Cabbala and the like, which has points of relation. They wouldn't know real Cabbala, or Kaballah, or Qaballah, etc, if it bit them in their surgically perfected asses.) Now that I see my state, I'm no longer identified with it. Through other methods I'm centered in my body's sensations in a way that prevents this nonidentification from being disassociation. I mean, two minutes ago DISASTER struck. Now I'm able to type up this material, grousing but functional, in a more or less objective fashion, thinking about a subject that was initially far from my mind. I did it through the Gurdjieff work.Einstein: "I am still a fire-spewing Vesuvius."Johanna Fantova spent Albert Eintein's last years with him and kept a diary of the last year and a half, just discovered and placed in the Firestone Library at Princeton University. Among the revelations: the older Einstein referred to himself as a political "revolutionary," saying, "I am still a fire-spewing Vesuvius." Another quote: "I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me." [Link]
FlashbackIf you remember the sixties, then this probably won't mean much to you. But if you've clean forgot, this will help you remember. [Link]
RIP Louis Mackey
Louis Mackey died, according to Wiley Wiggins' weblog. Mackey appeared in Slacker and Waking Life. Mackey was a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas; in Slacker, he was an anarchist and fan of sniper Charles Whitman. Falling into Rembrandt
Thanks to Betsy Devine, I seem to have found permanent residence in Rembrandt's "Night Watch"! [Link] Mad ProfessorThe amazing Mark Frauenfelder of boingboing is pouring bits of his head into a bubbling brew called Mad Professor, named after his great book of whacky science projects and experiments.
Eastern Standard TribeYou can download Cory Doctorow's just-released book, Eastern Standard Tribe, which is published under a Creative Commons license. Sez Cory:
Here's the deal: I don't believe that there's any market-demand for teasers or for "Digital Rights Management" technology: none of you woke up this morning and said, "Damn, I wish there was a way I could get less of the books I enjoy and a way I could do less with them once I have them." My goal here is to figure out what people actually want out of electronically delivered text, and so I'm giving this novel to you in three open and flexible formats with an invitation:Convert these files to any "e-book" or text format you want, and send them to me, along with a note telling me what reader it's intended for and I will add it to this page.
You can also order a signed copy. Of course, you can also order from Amazon.Here's the book description from Amazon:
Art is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule. Around the world, those who wake and sleep on East Coast time find common cause with one another, cooperating, conspiring, to help each other out, coordinated by a global network of Wi-Fi, instant messaging, ubiquitous computing, and a shared love of Manhattan-style bagels.Friedrich Hayek Rocks!
Or perhaps not. Art is, after all, in the nuthouse. He was put there by a conspiracy of his friends and loved ones, fellow travelers from EST hidden in the bowels of Greenwich Mean Time, spies masquerading as management consultants who strive to mire Europe in oatmeal-thick bureaucracy.
Eastern Standard Tribe is a story of madness and betrayal, of society after the End of Geography, of the intangible factors that define us as a species, as a tribe, as individuals. Scathing, bitter, and funny, EST examines the immutable truths of time, of sunrise and sunset of societies smashed and rebuilt in the storm of instant, ubiquitous communication.Kevin Marks was telling a bunch of us in social software discussions how important Friedrich Hayek's thinking had been, and since then I've had a too-low priority note in the back of my brain to look into Hayek's work. Forunately I've just stumbled onto a Boston Globe article clarifying the value of Hayek's thinking, which wasn't widely accepted in Hayek's time, the mid-20th century – but is like a road map for 21st century thinking. Though he was an economist, he theorized that the brain's activity is emergent, "arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals." And he understood the problem of knowledge management:
Hayek's most important insight, which he referred to as his "one discovery" in the social sciences, was to define the central economic and social problem as one of organizing dispersed knowledge. Different people have different purposes. They know different things about the world. Much important information is local and transitory, known only to the "man on the spot." Some of that knowledge is objective and quantifiable, but much is tacit and unarticulated. Often we only discover what we truly want as we actually make trade-offs between competing goods."John Shirley's Blogging
The economic problem of society," Hayek wrote in his 1945 article, "is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate `given' resources -- if `given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these `data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in totality."John Shirley, the author most readily held accountable for the instigation of cyberpunk as a literary explosion within a sleepy science fiction genre, has just started a blog, and it's a doozy. [Link]
That's how scary Bush/Ashcroft can be: they're scaring the conservatives. The piece is called Quarantining Dissent and it seems that Bush's secret service has done something unprecedented (and therefore issuing from the President or his staff)--when Bush is in town to make an appearance they have required local govt to restrict people who are protesting to "free speech zones" which are sometimes a third of a mile and more from the Bush event. A lady and her five year old girl were arrested for protesting too close to Bush and refusing to leave--the cops *separated* mother and daughter and took the weeping child away in a separate squad car. One man popped up with an antiBush sign in the midst of a pro-Bush rally and was arrested--police said "yes sir it is the content of your sign that is the problem". They moved him two hundred yards away--and that wasn't enough! "The protest zone kept moving" he said. Strom Thurmond junior pursued prosecution of this gentleman who is now in line to get a 5000 dollar fine and six months in jail just for exercising his constitutional rights. Just for being there--he was not disorderly. Some believe that they're using this case, which was in South Carolina, as a test case in order to establish a precendent, in a conservative state, to control dissent. An anti-terrorist information center spokesmen--presumably a govt employee--said that protesters protesting the war against terror (Iraq), are committing terrorism. "...a protest against that [the war] is a terrorist act." According to a senate report the FBI's "belief [was that] dissident speech and association should be prevented because they are incipient steps toward the possible ultimate comission of an act which might be criminal."...Suppression of free speech rights is unlawful and *that* is what is criminal here. The precedent of creating "free speech zones" is very dangerous indeed. It's a short, short step from there to totalitarian media control. . .Bruce Sterling and the WorldBruce Sterling and I are having our annual "state of the world" talk on the WELL. Join us! (If you're not a member of the WELL, you can send questions to inkwell-hosts at well.com; they'll be posted. [Link]
The Internet has always been "very transitional." Stuff just booms and blooms and collapses in there, there are vogues and rumors and moral panics. I suspect that the deep driving forces are social and ethnic and civilizational now, it's no longer a matter of sort-of engineering the hubs to be smarter or dumber, or sticking in spamSmart Mobs Wins Award
guards and security patches. The driving forces are things like vast batallions of Chinese and Indian software engineers who are discovering that this stuff can be bent to their own civilizational purposes.One of the places I blog, Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs weblog, just won the Utne Independent Press Award for Online Cultural Coverage. I'm proud to be a member of the Smart Mobs blog mob, a dedicated, clueful group.
Lenny Bruce Pardoned - 40 Years Too LateLenny Bruce was pardoned posthumously today by New York Governor George Pataki. The pardon was for the obscenity conviction that was part of a pattern of harassment that threw Lenny's life up gainst a brick wall and pounded him until he gave in. He died of a drug overdose in the mid-sixties. A decade ago I wrote a whacky piece remembering Lenny. Though I was a kid growing up in the middle of the West Texas desert, I knew about Lenny via Harvey Kurtzman's "Help!" magazine and the serialization in Playboy of "How to Talk Dirty and Influence People." I suppose we should be celebrating though the pardon comes at a time when free speech is on the ropes again. Pataki's move should remind us how far we've come – before we go back. [Link]
Music for America
Music for America, subtitled "Music and Other Social Causes," emerged from the Deanspace tech jams over summer as a platform for open source politics – with a soundtrack. [Link] Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping From AlterNet, this is a great followup to "Buy Nothing Day": a piece that starts as a consideration of Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping – a bit of anticonsumerist street (or mall) theatre in New York City, and gets to the difficult question, whether anti-consumerist rants blame the victim, whether they undermine the economic machinery that puts bread on so many millions of tables. Perhaps questioning the human costs of our financial well-being is a good first step toward some rethinking... which I personally will do as soon as I'm through Christmas shopping..... Link to AlterNet: Shop Till You Stop Alex Steffen on the Tech BloomPost-boom a whole new way of working emerges: working for the love of it, giving stuff away. (Thanks, Cory!) [Link]
The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.
Not just making it, but giving it away. Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.
Which may be why the media haven't quite gotten the magnitude of what's happening here: It's not about investments. If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything's a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool.Following up on my post about Malcolm Lowry... I had a conversation today about lives like Lowrys that are just incredibly painful. Gautauma saw suffering and created a system of thought around his acknowledgement of it. I find myself wanting to make a world where there's less of it. It's difficult to accept that a whole life could go like Lowry's.
Thomas Pynchon Wiki
When it was first released, I bought and started reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, then stopped reading for almost a year (okay, I get distracted). I recently jumped in again, and at the rate I'm going, I expect to be through sometime before I move to a nursing home (in case you haven't looked, it's over a thousand pages long, and brilliant - you want to savor it along the way).
Meanwhile I've just discovered the terrific Thomas Pynchon Wiki, which has a section dedicated to Against the Day. This is a huge relief. I've assumed I would have to read the novel at least twice, the second time researching as I go. Not as time consuming as the work you have to do around Joyce's Finnegans Wake, but still pretty challenging. Now I figure I can just refer to the wiki as I go.
