22 December 2009

Objects of Desire™

The Observer's Cell Phone
Fringe, episode "August"
Fall 2009

A terrific bit of prop design from an episode of Fringe a few weeks ago. The Observer's phone looks like a cross between the Bang and Olufsen Serene mobile and a military field compass as manufactured on another planet in 1958.

Obviously I want one.

14 December 2009

Like Brittle Things Will Break Before They Turn

Winter, 1979
West Second Avenue
Lenoir City, Tennessee

09 December 2009

Production and Decay of Strange Particles

The Truth Is A Revolutionary Act


...The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud."

From "Twelve Virtues of Rationality"
Eliezer Yudkowsky

23 November 2009

On My iPod This Morning

Listening to

Franco Battiato, Fleurs (1999)


30 October 2009

An Army of One


“To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”


Don DeLillo

from "The Names"


28 October 2009

I Wake Up and Have My Realizations Sprayed

My fondness for Brion Gysin and William Burrough's Cut-up Method continues, this time directed towards already mind bendingly surreal chemtrail/New World Order conspiracy theories. Genuinely creepy, shamelessly opportunistic and vastly unethical Henry Kissinger, it should come as no surprise, figures prominently in a lot of NWO scenarios, having been pulled directly from the Dr. Strangelove branch of Central Casting for Villains. The fruits of this exercise are as amusing, and revealing, as ever:

"Kissinger lives in depopulated California. The reasons that stopped a number of chemtrail depopulations are indeed useless. Nothing magical, the "contrails" have been overcast since 1998. I had your toxin-laden contrails posted horizon-to-horizon and lived the sprayed Holy chemtrails, described by Kissinger's NWO Society. Indeed, I stopped the dark sprayed plans, believing the depopulation peddlers are all useless eaters.


I wake-up, have my realization sprayed, and now: no reality."

26 October 2009

Counterpoint


The Bang and Olufsen Serene is the anti-iPhone. Or it was before the marriage between B&O and their manufacturing partner Samsung went south.

As a design object it's polarizing and spectacular, luscious and maddening. It bucks a raft of industry trends and glides obliviously past consumer expectations: something of a Bang and Olufsen tradition. Living with a Serene day-to-day requires lot of patience as well as a willingness to abandon wholesale a lot of reasonable expectations for a mobile device.

Where to start. On my carrier in the U.S. (T-mobile) it was ultimately impossible to set up the Serene to send or retrieve email or multimedia messages, so after a long struggle I threw in the towel. Next, the experience of dialing a number –never mind pecking out a text message– on the circular keypad runs from awkward to militantly counterintuitive, depending on your patience and the length of message (note: shorter isn't just better, it may very well be all you have the time to compose). And about that circular keypad: for a company that prides itself on innovative and superior solutions, the same diabolical, hand-cramping idea was abandoned as unworkable over 40 years ago by AT&T's Bell Laboratories before reaching the market, then attempted unsuccessfully by Nokia decades later to a chorus of hoots, jeers and mountains of scorn in the marketplace. Why repeat a competitor’s failed approach?

In the end, all of this is irrelevant to a niche product like the Serene. Designed by an audio company, the Serene delivers crisp, better-than-landline-quality voice communication, but either by default or design –take your pick– it makes any other activity so grudging and onerous that the user is discouraged from even trying. Ironically, It's this distinction alone that makes the Serene the anti-iPhone. While the iPhone’s ludicrously unreliable and overextended network is seldom able to make or complete a voice call, but offers a zillion applications to keep the user distracted, the Serene offers few features beyond the ability to hold a conversation in sparkling, interruption-free clarity, and this it does exceedingly well.

I like the Serene. Closed, it looks like an anodized aluminum and black rubberized Chanel compact. The build quality is first rate, the ringtones pleasing, the audio quality second to none, and the motorized open/close function at once truly useful, beautifully executed, and geekily delightful. Of course it's feature-free, favors style at the expense of usefulness, suffers from an near total absence of any technical support in the U.S. market, and is completely overpriced. In that sense it simultaneously represents everything that's right and wrong about Bang and Olufsen and offers some insight into why the phone and the partnership that sired it failed.

22 October 2009

On My iPod Tonight



Listening to
Splitting the Atom
Massive Attack, 2009

20 October 2009

Round and Round



"Experience is a form of paralysis" -Erik Satie


07 October 2009

On My iPod This Morning

Listening to
"Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space"
Spiritualized, 1997

04 October 2009

21 September 2009

The Inside Game

"You are now breathing...virally mutated molds, nano-particulates of aluminum and Barium and cationic polymer fibers with unidentified bio-active material...Drs. Staninger and Karjoom and researcher Jan Smith have reported findings of self-replicating nano-machines and rivers of silicon running wild through the bodies...Welcome to the brave new world of toxic skies, weather control, mind control and population control through the use of chemtrails modulated with electromagnetic frequencies generated by HAARP. Our health is under attack as evidenced by the skyrocketing rates of chemtrail induced lung cancer, asthma and pulmonary/respiratory problems as well as the emergence of a bizarre and frightening new plague...We must join together to stop this insane program of chemtrail spraying now."

-excerpt from a chemtrail conspiracy website

I'm a late comer to the chemtrail conspiracy. Don't ask me how, up until now, I've managed to miss it. It's exactly the sort of empty calorie, Krispie Kreme whackiness I usually can't get enough of. There are dozens upon dozens of websites devoted to the subject, most stocked to the rafters with elaborate, intricate narratives and New World Order paranoia futilely refuted by reputable experts.

All of this got me thinking about conspiracies and how drawn to them the intertwined popular and media cultures are. From Vince Foster-was-killed-by-the-Clintons, to Bush-blew-up-the-World-Trade-Center, to HIV-was-engineered-by-the-CIA, to the elaborate, shop-worn fictions of Roswell and the Kennedy assassination, and finally to the recent unhinged and deeply creepy Obama-isn't-an-American Birther movement, the coherent narrative offered by conspiracies, however dark, seem so much more attractive than the chaotic, random and incomplete realities they compete against.

Neuroscience has long described the human mind as a sophisticated pattern matching machine. While as a species we may be compelled from deep within the structure our brain stem to find comfort in organization, this hard-wired ability to tease out patterns from complex data may sometimes misfire and lead us to see connections where none exist --and at considerable cost and peril. Pattern matching it might indeed be. I'm not so certain about the sophisticated part.


"If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act." -Don DeLillo

07 September 2009

Fresh Perspective

"Defamiliarize the ordinary" Paul Rand


Here Come The Warm Jets

Like the Polaroid SX-70 Land camera and Concorde, the U-2 spy plane's spare, singular design has aged insanely well. Even though the first test flight was held in 1955, the glider-like fuselage looks completely contemporary: it could as easily have been drawn up yesterday by Marc Newson. Designed by Kelly Johnson and Lockheed for Cold War high-altitude reconnaissance, the U-2 was first rejected by the Air Force before catching the attention of a civilian review panel that included inventor, industrialist and 20th century American super-genius Edwin Land of Polaroid. He successfully lobbied CIA director Allen Dulles to sponsor development and construction of the plane, which 60 years later is still in chic, stylish service.

03 September 2009

Realer Than Real


"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde

02 September 2009

The Inhuman League

"I'm an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to "believers" in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, "What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?" But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer."

Noel Sharkey

Full interview here:

Toughen Up


Listening to "Biko"
Bloc Party Intimacy (2008)

31 August 2009

Enroute



29 August 2009

Molecular Gastronomy and The Kitchen of Tomorrow

The automated kitchen-of-tomorrow has featured prominently in science fiction since ...forever. The food dispenser is one of those ideas that seems an obvious enough next step if one assumes making dinner is nothing but toil. Of course in practice, the preparation of meals is an enjoyable activity, bound up in cultural and social traditions and needs that transcend the convenience of some automat-like contraption extruding dinner onto a conveyer belt. This might be why the more elaborate depictions of science fictional food dispensers are seen in spacecrafts and not in some imagined future home: surely astronauts and those people on Star Trek have better things to do than sauté spinach or poach an egg.

Of them all, 2001: A Space Odyssey's gleaming little General Mills-branded galley is my design favorite: intricate, sleek and practically seething with 1960's technological optimism, it's food preparation activities are so removed from human interaction that it functions as nothing more than an elaborate vending machine. While there has been little progress, or apparent interest, in fully automated food prep (outside my own home, anyway), smaller, incremental advancements soldier on with ever more sophisticated and complex ovens, cook tops, robotic Nespresso machines and the like making deeper inroads into the kitchen daily.

Recently, appliance giant Philips has posted several advanced and novel food preparation concepts that take more ambitious strides towards bringing molecular gastronomy to market. The standout concept Philips has proposed is a stereolithographic "food printer", that can both reconfigure and combine various foodstuff and ingredients, then "...‘print’ them in an array of unique shapes and consistencies, in much the same way as 3-D representations of product concepts are now produced" through repurposed ink jet printer technology (interesting article here, accompanying, somewhat cheesy video here).

28 August 2009

Bench Test, Lenoir City 1978

1978
Central Methodist Church
Lenoir City, Tennessee

19 August 2009

Don Hewitt

Don Hewitt was the creator and producer of CBS's 60 Minutes. He practically invented the the short documentary form of the television news magazine. By all accounts an irascible, hard nosed, stand-up guy, he managed to make news entertaining without making it entertainment.

"I plan to die at my desk" Don Hewitt

17 August 2009

Know Where To Stop

"If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." Orson Welles

09 August 2009

06 August 2009

I'm Nothing Like This

"When I lose my temper, honey, you can't find it any place"
Ava Gardner

01 August 2009

Recherché. Like I'd Know.

Biltmore House
Asheville, North Carolina
Summer 1978

24 July 2009

Dont Let Me Hear You Say Life's Taking You Nowhere

On my iPod today:
"Golden Years"
David Bowie "Station to Station" (1976)

22 July 2009

Sometimes Reality Is Too Complex

"...in life, one can only know the present. No one's lived in the past, or will ever live in the future"

Natasha Vonbraun to Lemmy Caution
Alphaville (1965)

17 July 2009

Sharing The Risk

40 years ago this month, I remember staying up late with my family to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon. What I recall most vividly was not the scratchy, black and white video images, but the surreal caption NBC ran at the bottom of the screen: "Live From The Moon."

Four days later the crew splashed down in the Pacific. When the recovered astronauts were choppered to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet, they greeted the cameras and cheering crowd wearing respirators and hazmat suits, before ducking into an Airstream trailer that had been retrofitted into a mobile quarantine facility. This quick dash into quarantine wasn't for the astronaut's protection: it was for the explicit protection of everyone on Earth.

In the years leading up to manned expeditions to the moon, there was broad (but not unanimous) scientific consensus that the lunar surface was lifeless: that the absence of atmosphere and continuous exposure to hard radiation alone rendered the moon perfectly sterile. But with empirical evidence to support this assumption unavailable, scientists could not guarantee the Apollo crew (and their lunar samples) would not return to earth with an extraterrestrial organism. In their report ("Conference on Potential Hazards of Back Contamination from the Planets, July 29- 30, 1964”. More background here), the advisory committee stated that "...negative data will not prove that extraterrestrial life does not exist; they will merely mean that it has not been found." The characteristics and behaviors of a hypothetical extraterrestrial organism, if introduced into the earth's biosphere, were as unknown as the consequences.

Should the hypothetical organism prove pathogenic, the committee hypothesized that contemporary science would likely be catastrophically ill-equipped to deal with the occurrence. With admirable actuarial precision, they calculated that the instant the returning Apollo 11 capsule's hatch was opened to the earth's atmosphere, the statistical risk of catastrophic (or possibly lethal) global contamination multiplied by 1,191,600,000 (using a formula they succinctly, if melodramatically, termed "the logarithmic order of death" and factored by the sum of the world's population, circa 1964).

The precautions taken by NASA to minimize a "back contamination" event were considered unnecessary by most experts, and arbitrary and incomplete by others. Most prominently, they included the construction of the now almost completely forgotten Lunar Receiving Laboratory: a high-containment facility where the lunar soil and rock samples could be studied in isolation much as we would Ebola or some other dangerous terrestrial pathogen. The LRL served as partial inspiration for one of Michael Chrichton's earlier best sellers, The Andromeda Strain, about a scientific team struggling to deal with a deadly extraterrestrial organism brought back to earth by a returning spacecraft (see the striking Robert Wise-directed 1971 original and not the flaccid, stupefying A&E network miniseries adaption of a few years ago).

With Apollo 11's landing on the lunar surface, the entire world watched that century's most perilous technological high-wire act from the safe distance of a quarter million miles. A few days later, upon the spacecraft's return, that same global audience --along with the earth's entire biosphere-- participated fully, if unwittingly, in a far riskier gamble. If the advisory committee’s logarithmic order of death was to be trusted, the odds against such an occurrence were better than a trillion to one, and as it happened, no pestilence returned with the astronauts. But when they cracked opened the hatch, all of us were along for the ride.

13 July 2009

06 July 2009

The Radioactive Wasps Have Come Home To Roost

For over 40 years, the U.S. Government and its civilian industrial partners enriched plutonium for America's nuclear arsenal at a remote, sprawling facility in Hanford Washington (background here and here). It was steady work, at least until peace broke out briefly in the 1990s and the Hanford Site was revealed to be one of most stupendously, mind-bogglingly contaminated places on the planet. Contamination of decommissioned nuclear weapons facilities has proven to be one of the most durable leftovers from the Cold War (by durable we're talking the tens-of-thousands-of-years kind of durable) and Hanford's the worst of the whole sorry lot.

Lately things at the Hanford Site have taken a distinctly Toho Studios turn: wasps that have nested in the contaminated ground have become seriously radioactive, giving Hanford's seemingly endless environmental train wreck a fresh B-movie dimension. The New Scientist has a thorough and relatively straight-faced account here.

None of the afflicted wasps have grown to Mothra-like proportions but there's still room for hope.

03 July 2009

A Territory to Ridicule

I've been having a lot of fun lately with Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up method. Although a good case could be made that most everything that comes out of Sarah Palin's mouth sounds like it's already been thoroughly massaged by a cut-up machine, I couldn't help but wonder what running the first few paragraphs of her resignation speech through the process would yield. Using one of the many online cut-up engines, here's the appropriately sinister and mildly hilarifying results:

"Faith and family: nothing's more important for our state. Vast riches, beauty, and strategic placement --remember the adversaries scoffed, calling this help the United States.


Hi Alaska.


Know that besides me, Alaskan's grasp what can be purchased in this great land and globe, mocking "Seward's Folly". Secure Alaska, so Alaska could the people serve. Our beloved Alaska I want serving boldly as a territory to ridicule."



29 June 2009

30 Ghosts

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living*"

Arthur C. Clarke


*or at least there were 40 or so years ago when Clarke wrote the forward to his novelization of the 2001 screenplay.

27 June 2009

His Sources Can Zoloft

Remember William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin's cut-up method? If not, there are scores of articles on the technique available on the Web (a good starting place can be found here), and a number of online cut-up generators (my favorite) that automate the process for our lamentable post-literate world. In light of this week's most recent Lurid Spectacle, I thought the process might provide some helpful clarity. I couldn't have been more correct:

"Recently he injected. Officers who acted, trying, reveal another was death --Paxil taking be included. Interviewed Dr. Reliever, his anxiety was also a sedative --and the star's injection. Officers after Vicodin: his whereabouts due. Jacko had prescribed pain star's other Cop. Soma, Vicodin, Dilaudid. Personal star's gave doctor painkiller at attack. Recently other pill was called Vicodin. His Sun called physicians.

His sources can Zoloft."

23 June 2009

Home Away From Home

Cochrane's beautiful little mid-[23rd] century cottage.
Star Trek, "Metamorphosis"
First broadcast November 1967

20 June 2009

Another Time. Another Place.

I've been ruminating a lot on the circular nature of change. Well, the circular nature of my change. Circling back, as it were, here are a few more photographs from that period several years ago when I last found myself at a cross roads.





17 June 2009

You Can Tell Me All About It On The Next Bardo

Knoxville 1997, Stormfront

Twelve years ago, after coasting along on neutral, predictable curves for what felt like entirely too long, things began to shift. Nothing seismic, or dramatic, or even particularly interesting at first. Just a series of small changes that seemed to be accumulating into something bigger, and a sense of things ending. I could see this particularly sharp, acute corner ahead but had no idea what was around it. But I did know everything was going to change and I remember taking very conscious stock of my life and wondering what would still be in inventory when it was all settled. Then I turned the corner, everything did change, and quite a few things closest to my heart, and a very many that weren't, were missing from inventory when it was done. Turn the page.

Today, everything is changing again. This time though, the shifts are seismic. And dramatic. And interesting, albeit in that slowing-down-to-look-at-the-traffic-accident sort of way. I made coffee this morning and figured the time was right to start taking stock.