Inflationary Reality

The market watchers have been buzzing about inflation a lot of late, and the noise seems to be picking up like a train rumbling towards the station. What it means is beyond me. I've never quite gotten the obsession with the big "catch all" concept of inflation.

Inflation has been here for years in some of the parts where it really counts, education, housing, and nights on the town. Its long been offset by Moore's "law" bring down the cost of computation and cheap Chinese labor bringing down the cost of anything that can be shipped over an ocean. This might add up to a mathematical wash in terms of "inflation", but that just hides the massive changes beneath the surface. The cost of living a life is going up fast, its been inflationary to the core for years. In strictly numerical terms its been offset by cheap gadgets and faster computers. But are they remotely equal in reality?

Are those extra megapixels on the digital camera really worth the $2,000 a year more in tuition? Is the ability to share and archive every photo on Flickr worth losing the ability to find a quality entree for under $10? The first strikes of inflation have long since hit us. Now the economists are warning us even the gadgets might start going up in price. What happens when we run out of distractions? And to take it back a step to the political-economic, it might be fun kicking Bush while he's stumbling down, but have we forgot that the worst thing about the man is that he is a position to take us all down with him?

ITP Podcasts, Clay Shirky, Social Facts week 6

There was no week 5. I was a second late to start recording on the first one, and a couple minutes late on the second. The second is good stuff though, a summary of what the class has done since the begining.

part 1
part 2

ITP Podcasts

ITP Podcasts, maybe not a gold master, more like a new school style beta*, in that it works but I'm not making any guarantees..

*with a nod to Blackbeltjones, who was in town today..

Get Healthy Fast

A few days ago I watched someone present the idea of healthy vending machine. It hits familiar themes, healthy fast food seems like a can't miss idea, its crossed my mind more than a few times and New York is littered with the failed attempts at making healthy lunch for frenzied workers. Its not that the business have failed, just that they never quite manage to provide that mysterious healthy lunch. Many more are bound to fail too. Why? Because its not the food that's unhealthy in fast food, its the fast that is unhealthy.

First and foremost the problem is a lifestyle problem. If you are living a life where you need your food fast, from vending machines or wolfed on the street, you are not living a healthy life. And its a problem of concentration. Its not that the 700 calories or whatever in a Big Mac are bad for you, and the 30 grams are fat are insignificant compared to the millions of grams that most Americans consume over their lifespan. Its only when those calories and that fat become fast, become something to be consumed in 10 minutes, that they become a problem...

Better Environmentalism

Whenever I see things like this list of ways to shop "green", I always wonder why they leave the obvious out. What's the single thing that so many humans do that has the largest impact on the environment? They have kids.

Talk about wasteful, have a kid and suddenly a couple has increased their contribution to pollution by 50%. No matter how many diapers you hand wash and miserable low flow showers you take, and how many cramped up little cars you drive you'll never be able to undo that one little act of massive environmental damage..

Seriously though, the environmentalists have made steps, but if they really want to succeed they need to prevent be good to the environment as coming across as a sacrificial act. Low flow showers are my pet peeve, I don't care how well meaning you are, anyone advocating those things is my personal enemy, sorry.

I ride a bike everywhere and don't even have a driver's license, but every time I hear someone ranting about SUVs I cringe up inside. People drive those things cause they are comfortable, spacious and make them feel good. If environmentalists are against comfort, space and feeling good, well then they are bound to lose whatever struggle they feel they are engaged in. Its the wrong path towards changing people's behavior. What environmentalists need to create is not just alternative products, but alternative products that are better then the ones they want to replace. A couple on the list above might just do that, its certainly possible, lets see it happen..

Classtops

Bringing a laptop to a classroom presents a particular problem. Its tempting to locate the problem in technology, in say students sitting at laptops IMing friends or reading dirty emails. But the relevant technology is actually far more primitive and its called a hinge.

First off let me note this is really about small classrooms, seminars, settings around a table small enough for everyone to know everyone's name. It need not be a classroom, its may as well be a boardroom, a conference room, a situation more relevant to a corporate setting than say a large lecture in a university.

I attend a technology oriented school, large for a graduate program, and a big majority of the 200+ students own a laptop. That's about 160 laptops that are officially discouraged in the classroom. This is a casual place, there never was a real ban, just a guideline, and there never was a real stated reason, beyond some mumbling of people surfing during class, and IMing their friends, etc, etc. The real reason though is clear as you sit around a table. The digital bits are somewhat irrelevant, students have found ways to zone out since before they invented puberty. The real problem with a laptop is one of walls, shields and hinges.

A laptop on a table is pretty nondescript, until you open it up that is. Suddenly the flat space connecting everyone in the room has been divided. A wall swings up and breaks the laptop user out of the circle of conversation. They can do it by daydreaming, but only in one direction. The laptop functions as a shield, it blocks both ways. The little portal into the internet doesn't hurt, but in the end it is the other direction that is most damaging. The physical vertical presence of open laptops on a conference style table shields the user from the speaker, interrupting the dynamic balance that guides a good "tabletop" experience.

Its exactly this reason that so many failed digital "notepad" type devices are on the market. Microsoft's initiative is the most prominent, but pen manufactures and assorted gadget makers have attempted to push into this space as well, with no major success that I know of. Why? Because of where decisions are made in modern corporations. Sitting inside a conference room, making those fateful product development decisions, what could seem more useful then a flat PC to replace those yellow legal pads and archaic pens. Of course that's just about the only place a generic notepad PC is really useful. They are necessary for computing while standing too, but stand up computing activities tend to be too specialized to map straight to a generic notepad device. So in a rather extreme version of a rather common mistake, the people in a conference room mistake their own needs with genuine demands for a product.

Now if a tablet PC where priced a bit closer to the legal pad side then the laptop side, then that might be a genuine product... Leaving the hinge aside the laptop filled classroom is a genuine improvement. Ignoring the largely unproven and uncharted idea of a backchannel behind, there are three main uses for the computer in a meeting or classroom, note taking, distraction and instant research. I'm not much of a note taker, perhaps the only valuable lesson in high school I actually learned from a teacher was that if you stop taking notes and use that energy to listen you might just learn a lot more. But some people are natural born stenographers, and the keyboard is their main tool. I knew one person who would take notes straight into Movable Type and publish them as a blog post at the end of class, quite effective.

Using the computer for distraction is the classic anti laptop in the room case, but I'm not sold. Sure their is a certain dynamic to IM that might pull people farther away from the topic at hand, but just how much does it differ from someone handwriting a love letter, doodling or reading all the small print on whatever they pulled from their briefcase? Any additional distraction the internet might bring is easily offset by what it can add to the conversation, no?

I like laptops being in a classroom for about two reasons, google and wikipedia. Fast, cheap information. An in room error correction machine. When used correctly the internet can transform a room from a closed information space, into an open one. For the most part this is a subtle addition, an anecdote here, a better definition there. But what can't be overlooked with error correction is that occasionally an error can unstablize an entire process, sending the room off on a tangent based not on reality but a mistaken fact. A group of people in a small room can sometimes produce the strangest results, a small lifeline to reality is perhaps a good thing.

Now if only they good get rid of that damn hinge...

Really Simply Now

As horrifying as last week was, a vicious wake up call reminding us just how real a disaster can be, this week has smashed in with an even harsher realization.

Really simply now:

They turned New Orleans into a prison.

Step back, breathe, think about it for a second. Breathe. FEMA shuts everyone out. The National Guard prevents those left inside from leaving. The army comes in guns alight. The Red Cross isn't even allowed inside.

They turned New Orleans into a prison.

Maybe that's what Barbara Bush was talking about today when she claimed that "this is working very well for them.", with the "this" meaning being stuck in a refugee camp and the "them" being refugees of America's worst natural disaster in a 100 years. Yeah things are working out very well, they may be refugees, their homes may have been washed away, but at least they aren't being held in that half submerged prison that once was New Orleans.

They turned New Orleans into a prison.

I'm an American, I love my country. I may not agree with every action it takes, but I do love my country and a good part of what it stands for. I still do, but a little part of me froze ice cold last week, and little more so this week. Why? Because the country I saw, the actions we all witnessed, they had nothing to do with the country I love, the country I believe in, or the country I want to live in. Something is deeply wrong in America today, it needs to change at the top and it needs to change at the bottom. Really simply now: New Orleans is not the exception, it is the reality that could strike any part of America, the storm that blew back the facade on the foulest aspects of our society.

And they turned it into a prison.

Anarchy, New Orleans Edition (bottom up)

The first warning sign I caught was in midst of the Hurricane build up. Can't remember where, but buried in some article was a line about long lines to get into the Superdome, the shelter of 'last resort'. Long lines because security at the door was searching everyone for drugs and guns.

The storm of the century is blasting towards New Orleans and police are busy searching people for drugs and guns, something was ajar, the record skipped a groove. The impact wasn't in yet the storm had not landed, this was supposed to be a story about a natural disaster and the human response, where the hell did the drugs and guns, the search and seizure, where did it come into the picture.

Welcome to New Orleans.

Beneath the jazz history, oil flows and 24 hour drinking establishments, is a city of deeply entrenched poverty, distrust and inequality. Its a city where a quarter of the population lives in poverty. A city where a largely white police force plays enforcer to a population that is 70% black. As liberated as the city may seem to a drinker, its never escaped the shadows of slavery and the equally insidious but far more subtle structures of racism that followed. As in much of the south the Civil War never quite ended in New Orleans. Beneath the Marti Gras facade of the city is a perpetual tension, a poverty that goes beyond economics, a poverty of communication, a poverty of politics, a poverty of trust.

The destruction of New Orleans began long before the hurricane hit. The looting, chaos and armed gangs began long before the levees broke. You could read it in the paper as Katrina approached, a storm is coming and what are the police doing? What they always are doing, searching the population, imposing their will. The city is being evacuated, but the police and general population can never work together in this city, the divides are so deep that they stand up strong and violent even as the levees fall.

In the intensely disturbing days that followed, that as I write this still appear to continue, two news items hit even harder, even nastier, then the rest. One was the stories of New Orleans police turning in their badges, their ties to the community had been severed by the waters, they no longer cared for the city they had sworn to serve and protect. Nothing could be a stronger indictment of just what a wounded community existed in New Orleans, of just how much the police force was their to protect property not serve the people of the city. Perhaps even more shocking and nearly entirely blocked from the news is the fact that troops (Louisiana National Guard?) where blocking the bridge out of the city, preventing thousands from walking out the disaster zone and the Red Cross from coming in. New Orleans had been turned into a prison, a war zone, an area not to be helped, but to be contained. If these reports turn out to be true, so far the only source I've found is of all places Fox New's Shepard Smith, then the story evolves from disaster and into one of crimes against humanity. And I suspect its damn true, I was wondering just why no one was walking out long before that report, and Nola.com was filled with reports of people being denied entry to rescue people at confirmed locations.

What this all builds up to goes beyond just the racism, repression and persistent
low level class warfare at work and into anarchy. Anarchy is a funny word, the mainstream news was full of it for the past few days. Anarchy as chaos, lose of control, the inmates running the prison while the lights stayed out. Anarchists however have quite a different definition of anarchy however, and completely out of step with their philosophy, are rather insistent that others use their definition despite the fact that a vast majority of people use a quite different definition.

My friend tobias c. van Veen provides a good example, in his other wise spot on essay "A Black Rainbow Over Downtown New Orleans", he makes the claim that no, New Orleans is not in a state of anarchy, but rather "the rupture of the facade of global capital". Which is all probably true if one follows one of the rigid definitions of anarchy favored by practitioners, but utterly incomprehensible to those of us who still are aware of word in its common usage. New Orleans was in a state of anarchy after the disaster, a state where the law was absent, a non force, a state of chaos.

What's really interesting to me though is that neither definition of anarchy, the anarchist's own definition or the common more frenzied one need to be contradictory. In fact both anarchies are easily contained within one definition, and both are in reality potential states of one concept, potential states of anarchism.

Anarchy is the social state free of political authority, and in the days after Katrina hit New Orleans is a clear example of what can happen in such circumstances. That "can" is essential though, it does not mean that is what will always happen and in fact there are plenty of examples quite to the contrary. New York after 9-11 is the one that immediately springs to mind, but perhaps Chalmette, Louisiana is even better, a small town seven miles east of New Orleans where the Katrina tied together rather then divide the community.

Anarchy is by its very nature an emergent system. What emerges does not necessarily need to be intelligent or organized, but since there is no direct centralizing force, whatever group behavior exists must be emergent in some manner.* But just how anarchy emerges is not predetermined in any manner, and in fact there are a variety of potential states that it might take. What determines what state anarchy enters into is largely determined by environment, culture and forms of energy circulating within the anarchistic space.

In New Orleans a culture of distrust and borderline warfare was long present in the environment. Poverty, racism and drugs where part of day to day life. As nearly all the white people, along with the black middle class and elite fled New Orleans what remained was largely two groups the helpless and the deeply repressed. Free of the persistent police presence, hungry, lacking water, plumbing and electricity anarchy emerged. Some of the anarchy was people breaking into stores for food and water. Some was people breaking in to obtain those material goods they never obtain in the political and economic climate that was New Orleans. And some of it was just plain people breaking. Pains and pressures snapping into the form of rapes, beatings and bullets directed at the police.

It was all there and apparent as the Hurricane approached. The police officers slowly and intensely searching every person as they entered the Superdome seeking shelter clearly illustrated the failure of this community and the vicious environment constructed to keep it that way. This was a community already at war, a long drawn out police action of a war. A community without trust. These are the force that directed the emergence of anarchy. The forces that pushed the anarchy towards its violent emergence, its most tragic form.

Anarchists, expect perhaps a few lunatics, want no part of this sort of anarchy, and in fact will go to great measures to redefine anarchy to exclude these realities. But in fact the anarchies of the anarchists are merely other potential states of the exact same anarchy that New Orleans produced. Far more positive potential states, and ones that can be glimpsed at in places like Chalmette during this disaster. There residents ignored by authorities for six days distributed food via boat, did their own rescuing and created their own shelter. Just as in New Orleans it was anarchy, the absence of political control, the parish officials had fled. But a very different state of anarchy, guided by an environment not nearly as oppressive as New Orleans.

Just who is responsible for the various police actions around New Orleans is still pretty clear, but its becoming evident that the various government agencies at work went out of their way to ensure the anarchy of New Orleans would be pushed towards a negative not positive state. The searches at the Superdome where just the prelude. The combat operations, "little Somalia" approach of the US Army was the most over the top. Most odious and damaging though was the sealing of the city, the turning of the city into a prison where people could not walk out. Volunteers with boats where turned away, people with confirmed locations could not enter to pick up relatives and friends. Even the Red Cross was kept out. The government it seems was far more concerned with containing the poor of New Orleans then in solving any problems. Its not a new story, its merely a wretched retelling of the same foul story of slavery in America and lord its not pretty. Its a story that will get told again and again too, perhaps never with the same catastrophic energy of Katrina pulsing through it, perhaps never with the same media attention, but the same old story, same old tragedy once again.






* This it should be noted gets directly at one of the biggest confusions surrounding emergence, there is a massive difference between an emergent intelligence, an emergent system and an emergent property.

Trial By Tabloid, New Orleans Edition

used to do this over on my long since discontinued politics blog American Dynamics, and perhaps its time for a revival. Actually, been thinking it'd be good to make this an automated feature/site/piece of netart, but the skills required are a bit beyond mine, if anyone wants to help out that'd be spectacular, just let me know, abe at this sites url.

Libertarian Disasters (bottom up)

Jared Diamond has been asking a question for years. What where the Easter Islanders thinking when they cut down their last tree? If New Orleans is any guide then answer was that they were too busy looting to notice much.

Managers at a nursing home were prepared to cope with the power outages and had enough food for days, but then the looting began. The Covenant Home's bus driver surrendered the vehicle to carjackers after being threatened.

Bands of people drove by the nursing home, shouting to residents, ''Get out!'' On Wednesday, 80 residents, most of them in wheelchairs, were being evacuated to other nursing homes in the state.

''We had enough food for 10 days,'' said Peggy Hoffman, the home's executive director. ''Now we'll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot.''

That's the saddest reminder of how low humanity can sink when things go bad, although Diamond pointing out how the Easter Islander's diet increasing consisted of humans as their society fell just might beat it. It leaves me wondering what the libertarian response to this disaster might be. That the government is actually impeding the repairs, the market would have fixed the levee faster? That looting is better called the "competitive redistribution of goods", and is actually a good thing? Or that if every nursing home aid carried a gun things would have turned out different?

I've been addressing these issues in some very different contexts in the various "bottom up" posts. Well New Orleans is at the bottom, in more ways then one right now, and it will be interesting to see what happens. And these early reports sound more like warfare in the Congo then the sort of beautiful emergence that free marketers and high tech libertarians love to fantasize about. None of this comes much of a surprise to me as I've long been arguing that emergent systems don't just emerge out of the ether. When they do occur they occur in very particular environments.

Markets (and no market is ever really "free") work in civil societies. They tend to fall apart in the face of guns, to the point of non existence in again the Congo, or to the point of deep corruption as in the mafia markets of Russia. Out of all the animals in the world only a few display the sort of emergent intelligence of ants or termites. Occasionally such as in elephant stampedes, humans rioting or perhaps the mythical lemming mass suicides some animals display behavior that's a bit more like emergent stupidity. The point being that emergence is not nearly the simple thing that some would make it out to be. Books on the subject naturally focus on the occasions where it works, but in the process they give a distorted idea of how often they don't work. Which in term leads to fans of the concept having completely unreasonable ideas of how to go about getting that magical self organization to happen.

Self organizing and self regulating systems are fantastic creature, but they take real effort to make happen. The environment needs to be right. For a market that means a stable trusting society with a surplus of goods and a standard of equable exchange. For a community to self organize to prevent looting I suspect you need a sort of cohesiveness, social equality and absence of poverty that just doesn't exist in New Orleans, a city rife with centuries of unresolved social tension. Rather then chaos theory down in Louisiana, instead we get a bit more traditional style of chaos, and no its not nearly as pretty as say a Julia set.

update: I wish I never wondered what the libertarian response to the hurricane was, cause it just made me a bit iller. Over at Reason, probably the premier libertarian blog, the only hurricane post out of nearly 50 in the past 3 days is entitled "Hurricane Bullshit". And its a rant against global warming and the Kyoto accord. Main source? That most reliable of them all, the guy who wrote the book predicting the Dow Jones average would hit 36,000 in 3-5 years. He wrote it oh about 6 years ago...

Oil Down

Katrina Threatens $25 Billion of Damage; Oil Near $70 - Bloomberg

U.S. Decision to Release Oil Sends Prices Below $70 - New York Times

You know its sort of funny, I can't even remember oil passing $70, yet Google News is rammed with stories on how its dipping below...

Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours?
- 1984

Ok, its clearly not that bad yet, but there does seem to be some cognitive dissonance at work here, no? This oil stuff keeps shooting up and up, one small disaster after another. I've never had held the catastrophic faith in the end of oil that some of the "peak oil" proponents have, but what was oil at a year or so ago? Under $30 I think, and while I'm having a hard time finding a good graph (ie one that I can understand) of crude prices, I'm pretty sure NYMEX's site confirms that. Has the levee broken? Or is this just a blip..

All the signs of a clusterfuck are in order. Lots of crying wolf, decades of it. People stop believing the warnings, maybe they understand the warnings, but they don't feel the fear. The prices creep up slowly, punctuated by a series of "one of a kind" events. It's not constant, there are little dips in price, dips of false hopes. Economists try and argue it away with their favorite refrain: "somebody else will take care of it"*. Maybe its just the onset of fall but I'm starting to feel like we are watching an explosion in slow motion.

Now betting that the world is going to end has been a losing proposition, for a few millennium at least. Alternative energy will improve for sure, but will it improve enough? Me personally, I really want to believe Thomas Gold's deep oil thesis, what could be more darkly comedic then a world of nearly unlimited oil? I'm not counting on it though, the world might not end, but that doesn't mean the economy is going to be good does it? Expensive transportation and expensive electricity stab right to the heart of our expensive culture and I'm not too excited to see that go down.








* just to be clear, that is not a direct quote from the site linked in the same sentence, but it is a pretty accurate summation of the faith.

Hurricane / Watch a Flick, Illin and Root for the Villian

It's not much of a secret, but no one talks about it anyway. But when disaster looms, who can help but to root for it to be a big one. After the fact it iss a tragedy of course. And the Mississippi delta is looking worse and worse with each refresh of the news. But during the build up...

With all the media hype of course it was a bit of a let down when Hurricane Katrina veered a touch to the east. "What you mean New Orleans isn't sinking into the sea after all? Damn, was looking forward to a good news cycle..." Not that I would actually want New Orleans to go, its a great town but I wouldn't want it to go even if sucked, and my heart goes out to all those who have suffered and lost in the hurricane. But when it comes to news based entertainment, once again they can't quite deliver on the hype. Horror just rarely looks the same in reality as it does in the movies.

If you think I'm bad (and what about you?), sci-fi author turned ecological disaster guru Bruce Sterling was almost ecstatic over the prospects. "In the meantime, however, humanity's incapacity to recognize and deal with its own peril is becoming eerie. And hilarious." I'm starting to get the feeling he'd rather watch the world burn then save it, but then again isn't that what most of us are doing daily anyway?

"Here comes America's worst storm ever, yet nobody on this plethora of satellites whispers the obvious: 'climate change.'?" Stirling has been beating this drum for a while now, and it almost feels like his frustration is sliding into some super-villain state, he's been turning himself into a cartoon caricature for a while now too. And well I hope he's actually wrong in his ecoparanoia, which unfortunately for him would put him close to the looney bin. But if he's right, and yes he may well be right, well I hope the world wakes up before he completely gives up hope...

Personally those rising oil prices just hit me for the first time. I've known the math and theory for a while of course. But I ride a bike. Live in New York City. Heck I don't even have a drivers license. When those prices go up I'm in the background cheering them on. But thinking and feeling are two different animals and a cold shiver just went through me, for the first time my mind felt that oil impact. Suddenly all those things I knew about just started to feel real. I wondered about heating costs in the winter, inflation, the costs of shipping my food and foreign bike parts. my plastic consumption. I might not need to mainline the oil, fill it straight into my commuting tank every couple day, but I'm just as hooked on the liquid gold as the rest of us. And so are you, no matter who you might be rooting for.

Donate to the Red Cross here..

Utilitarian Dry Goods

Scattered throughout New York are some very particular sites immune to the luxury organic process outlined in the previous post. The food is cheap, the quality high. And in what should horrify most leftists these sites are markets. More specifically farmer's markets. The fact that no one seems to notice the contradictions is a potent reminder both of the pitiful state of contemporary leftist thought and of the blessed ability of humans to ignore those contradictions that interfere with their lifestyle.

One of the strongest intellectual ties among today's thinkers on both the left and right is a fetishization of the market. Both gift it with the mythical ability to generate that famous nonentity "capitalism". The right of course thinks this is fabulous and the left a horrible thing. Both are terribly wrong though, markets do not lead to capitalism at all. Rather the opposite in fact, capital intensive firms have, from their earliest period (well documented by Ferdinand Braudel) attempted to subvert, manipulate and control markets. Sometimes they find the best way to do this is by creating markets. No, capital driven organizations don't emerge from markets, they can even emerge before any markets exist at all. Markets are just a particular tool they have found rather useful to their needs and desires.

Outdoor markets like the farmer's market are particularly immune from the excesses of corporate drives for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the nomadic nature of the markets themselves. They set up and break down in hours and can shift locations with ease. Their ties to the state, in the form of permits, fees and taxes, obviously exist but are quite loose compared to a fixed store or chartered corporation. And in the case of the farmers market the goods are by necessity designed to move rapidly, from earth to market to dinner. They are fast and nimble enough to avoid the drive of large corporations to make food either as cheap as possible (the crap in the supermarket) to make or as expensive as possible to buy (the somewhat tastier crap in the luxury grocery store).

By just showing up at the farmer's market, and possessing just a bit of food literacy, a New Yorker can eat high quality fresh food at reasonable prices. When it comes to dry goods, food items with long shelf lives, though its a far trickier proposition. There exists a whole class of utilitarian dry goods, triumphs of the industrial process, mass produced food of exceptionally high quality at a low price. Hellman's mayonnaise in America, Barry's Tea in Ireland, Carta Blanca beer in Mexico, Ritter Sport chocolate in Germany... But separating these gems from the mass of cruft in the supermarket is a true artform, and to do a proper taste test would take a luxury amount of money.

What New York needs is not more Whole Foods, more luxury health food stores. No, what it needs is a place for utilitarian dry goods, a modest shop with a small selection of high quality industrial food stuffs. The closest I've found is Brooklyn's Marlow & Sons, but not only do they often slip into the luxury category, but they also are almost certainly kept afloat by both their backroom restaurant and the owner's cash cow next store, Diner. A better model might be Is Wines, a small shop on East 5th Street that only stocks about 15 wines. All are inexpensive and all (that I've tried) are excellent. Quality and quantity are not by any means mutually exclusive, but they do often conflict. But by eliminating quantity in one dimension, the large variety that so many stores insist upon, perhaps its possible to maintain a high quantity in another dimension, sales volume. If provided they quality is right. Or at least one would hope.

Until reality provides a test though, I'd love to make a list of those elusive utilitarian dry goods. High quality, modest prices, mass production. Some of you must have favorites, so please let me know...

Organic Luxury

New York is probably the only city in America with 24 hour health food stores. Don't worry, if the groceries of NY are any barometer, you'll get one in your town soon enough. From the rapidly expanding Whole Foods to the ever nimble Korean delis, grocery shopping in New York is transforming into a luxury/health food experience.

Whole Foods, or as some prefer to call it, "whole paycheck", is the pacesetter. There is a moment of vertigo I experience nearly every time I am inside one. The best trigger is bulk goods section, the bins of nuts and dried fruit. Suddenly I realize "this is a freaking health food store!" A few years ago a health food store was a strange smelling place stocked with food fit only to be eaten for its imaginary medicinal properties. But with a good eye you could cherry pick out a few quality products, fresh made peanut butter, organic juice, an unknown cereal. Now health food is luxury food, money food, another successful marketing operation.

It was quite fitting in a Whole Foods in San Francisco that I first saw the cooption, a large display of organic bananas, Dole branded organic bananas. Organic was once a reaction not just to farm chemicals, but to the massive commercial farming of companies like Dole. But they caught on quick, organic is a way to double prices, what big company isn't down with that?

The earliest warning signs must have been the soy. Soy is a posthippie vegetarians best friend, a great source of vegetable protein. The fake meat section of Whole Foods is another great vertigo trigger. Soy is also a commodity crop industry, a favorite product of the industrial farm giants. Its the soy milk that gets me, its pushed as a healthy alternative to cows milk, a favorite of campus activists nationwide. But milk is one of the last truly regional industries left. Ultra-pasteurization is threatening that, but for the moment most of the milk you find in your grocery store comes from 50 or 100 miles away. Local dairies, local industry. Not only are the health benefits of soy milk dubious, but its a multinational product pushing against some of the last regional products left.

Recently I started buying organic half and half for my coffee, tastes a bit better, or at least I imagine it does. But then I started looking at the small print. The organic half and halfs are run by national brands (although its worth noting one of the biggest is a co-op), the regular ones are from local dairies. Once again leftist food politics it seems are turning into a trojan horse for big industry. Its not all bad, you could say the same about organic profits being a trojan horse by which leftist food politics enter big industry. Is this an even sort of tradeoff at work? It's far to early to know...

In the meantime one thing is becoming clearer in New York, healthy food is becoming luxury food. The statistical link between poverty and weight is a known phenomena in America, could it be that its about to become an entrenched one?

The Power of Nightmares (bottom up)

Finally got around to watching The Power of Nightmares, or more accurately the final installment of the three part series. This BBC documentary is something of a fetish object among American Leftists, spoken about in hushed reverent tones as an object that will unveil the hidden truths. "Have you seen the Power of Nightmares? You must see the the Power of Nightmares". The object itself circulates via transcript and torrent, a little googling and you too can be an initiate...

Criticism often says as much about the critic themselves as it does about their target. Director Adam Curtis also directed a four hour documentary on Freud and his followers, so he surely must be aware of that fact. So is the autocratic tone of this film a deliberate maneuver or an unintentional slip on Curtis' part? This is a movie about politicians manipulating facts, but Curtis seems intent on mimicking them. Rather then raising questions it dictates an alternative history. Its clearly a successful tactic, but for me at least it deftly undercuts the purpose of the film. Is Curtis deliberately copping the style? Unconsciously aping it? Or is projecting his own paranoia and monomania onto his targets? Regardless of the truth, it makes the film a bit hard to take seriously, both Curtis and his targets want to tell stories without questions, when in reality the facts at hand are rather uncertain.

The most powerful and effective parts of the documentary where simply the clips of Bush and Rumsfeld selling the war. That they grossly distorted the facts shouldn't come as any surprise to just about anyone who has followed the story in any detail, but watching them in action with a few years of hindsight is quite revealing. These are characters who understand the power of authority and how to put it on television, and the left it seems has no counterpart, with perhaps the exception of director Curtis himself. During this build up the left was busy, working the web, trying to be bottom up, protesting in the streets. Some old ineffective tactics, some new ineffective tactics. Even with online fundraising a new effective tactic. But all the while the right kept pushing the tried and true, get on TV and say it with authority.

The more I look at it the more the rhetoric of emergence, "long tails", and "bottom up" begins to resemble a far older idea, divide and conquer. Only this time the dividing is self inflicted, praised even. That not to say I'm here to blanketly dismiss "bottom up", there is far to much unknown, and too much potential, to do anything of the sort. But until these theories come face to face with concept and application of power, they seem doomed to a particular ineffectiveness. In other words, a nightmare.

Sound Law, Sample Down

In the last post I argued that the Kim's raid marked the first time the police used IP law culturally rather then in a more traditional customs/border control sort of manner. And on the upside it looks like the Kim's employees where sent through the process and out quickly with slaps on the wrist (update: according to today's Times it seems the charges are still pending so we'll have to wait on that one), one hopes its a sign that police realize that busting mixtapes is none of their business. But its important to note that while the police haven't been busting cultural productions on IP grounds lately, there is a strong recent civil precedent in the form of sampling.

Hip hop fans have long realized that the early 90's lawsuits around sampling (notably the Turtle's v. De La Soul and Gilbert O'Sullivan v. Biz Markie) had a significant impact on how the music was made. But it wasn't until I took a look at Jess Kriss' "History of Sampling" applet that I got a firm grasp on the full extent of that impact. The traditional storyline on the sampling lawsuits, which established a legal need to clear any and all snippets of songs, no matter how small or distorted from the original, is one of economic privilege. Getting a sample is a matter of money, a cheap sample can get used, an expensive one can only get used by artists with large budgets and ones that the original artist will not license at all, don't get used. The best example of this effect in action is probably Kanye West, a talented producer, but one whose often obvious and high profile samples get made into records only because he is backed by Jay-Z and Rocafeller Records.

The deeper effect of the sampling lawsuits however is not as much economic but sonic. Looking at the History of Sampling Applet shows another effect at work, one apparent in the high water albums of the sample heavy production, Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising. Look at the samples in these albums and you'll find songs built not with just one or two samples, but with four, six, eight, ten samples. "Night of the Living Baseheads" is built off 16 samples. The traditional hip hop sample takes one or two grooves and loops them to infinity with some small additional chops for the choruses and breakdowns. And this form lives on, albeit constrained by the shear economics of certain samples. It generates great songs, and awful ones, pop hits and bombs, it is valid but expensive, a bit of a luxury. In the late 80's though, producers like the aptly named Bomb Squad, Eric B, Prince Paul and M/A/R/R/S where creating a radically new sound, the sample as raw sound, something not to be looped, but something to be mutated and exploded, layered and recombined.

Sonically this is obvious, and has been obvious from nearly the get go. It sounded like a revolution, and the music literature of the time knew it well. But just how did it die? Perhaps the Bomb Squad's sonic frenzy was never sustainable, perhaps their explosions where an echo of Jackson Pollack's, a spectacular dead end, one incapable of being followed and reproduced. But looking at that sample applet we can see their own bad albums following a general trend, less samples, one or two a song, maybe none. Legally they just couldn't make it work anymore, nor can anyone else. To make a record in that style requires being underground, below the legal radar. Economically off the map.

Money at its core, is the abstraction of energy, raw forces transformed into an easily transferable form. The circulation of money, the economy, is a circulation of energy. The sample overload style of music is legally cut off from the major economies of the world. It continues to exist only when energy is applied from other sources, mainly in the form of personal commitment from the artists themselves. There is a minor economy at work, mixtapes, 12" singles, DJ gigs, websites, but the amount of energy circulating stays small, their is little left over for social glue, for recruitment of fans, broadcasting and replicating. Economies like this live or die purely off the energy of the core individuals, they never reach the point of sustainability, never transform from one directional vectors of energy into complex machines. In order for a subculture to survive it must make this transition, it must either develop its own functional economy or integrate into an existing one.

Often subcultures fail to reach a critical mass necessary to become self sustaining, sometimes they just die, other times they cycle on the edge of existence, driven by a few devoted individuals personal energy. Perhaps this is the fate of the overloaded sample, but it seems unlikely that the legal forces of sample licensing did not produce at least some, if not all of the killing pressure. This is a form of music that is nearly impossible to produce legally now, and when possible it requires extraordinary amounts of cash... Of course its death is not necessarily all bad, the minimalist sampling of DJ Premier and the RZA and the synth driven sonics of Dr. Dre, Timbaland and Manny Fresh are clear legal and sonic counterpoints to Bomb Squad overdrive. In a world of free and legal samples would they have emerged the same? Somehow I doubt it, but whether the transformation would be for better or worse is utterly unknowable.

Popular Revolutions/Mixtape Economics

It was probably Lawrence Lessig who first compared file sharing with the prohibition and the 55 mile an hour speed limit. Acts of government widely ignored the population at large. And like the prohibition and the speed limit, there are points of conflict between the law and human behavior. The era of intellectual property police action is unfortunately it seems beginning to reveal itself. Yesterday it took the form of a raid on New York's indie music superstore Mondo Kim's.

What separates the Kim's raid from the many that came before it is cultural. Kim's was targeted for selling mixtapes, CDs made by DJ recombining songs into a new cultural product. Most police actions in the intellectual property realm fall into a particular historical continuum that stretches back for centuries, smuggling and other acts of customs agents. While there is a certainly an intellectual property element to raids on sellers of fake Gucci goods, or unlicensed Star Wars DVDs, ultimately this is a new variation on the classic, avoid customs/import illicit goods operation. But in targeting mixtapes the New York Police Department changed the rules of the game, back into the cultural realm, back towards another tradition, censorship. Mondo Kim's is not in the position of the smuggler, but in the position of the bookstore selling Tropic of Cancer.

The mixtape is another item in a long line of artforms whose existence is threatened by "hard copyright". Were copyright to be enforced as written in the books today the mixtape would be far to expensive for anyone but a major label or wealthy fool to produce. Throw it in the box with remixes, fan fiction, sampling, web animations, collages, independent film, and home video. Luckily of course the letter of the law and the practice of the law are two separate, but intertwined, dynamics. Most police forces it seems have better things to do then to chase after DJs selling CDRs of their latest mix and blend. Until now that is, the Mondo Kim's case is perhaps a bellwether of a shift, or perhaps merely an anomaly, a police action with no more meaning then a ticket for doing 56mph.

What's really interesting to me though is the economic aspect of it all. I've written a bit about it in the past, but ultimately its still deeply gray. Gray market, unanswered questions. Who makes money of mixtapes? How many get sold? How many of those that get sold are made by the original maker and do they care? Do big hip hop mixtape kings pay for exclusives? Do young bucks pay to freestyle?

Some things are clear, this is an economy of velocity. The stars pump them out fast, the new shit, the hot shit, that's what's sells. Its a singles music market, but on 72 minute discs. Someone is making money, mixtape pioneer Kid Capri claims he made a small fortune selling tapes on the Harlem streets and the big mixtape producers run small empires now. Many a hip hop artist got their start selling mixes or freestyling on them. 50 Cent most notably kept his career alive via mixtapes after losing his first major label deal. A mixtape doesn't even need mixes on it, often its just a faster, cheaper way to put out a CD. Maybe its all one artist, maybe its a crew, maybe they rhyme over other peoples beats, maybe they freestyled it all in one night. The difference between a small regional record label and mixtape producer is sometimes non existent. Cash Money in New Orleans, Swisha House in Houston, Dip Set in New York, all murky economics. The price point for mixtapes ($5-10) just happens to be the same as street drugs, its a similar hustle although the turnover and size of the customer base are quite different. Street level economics, but with potential to turn into international brand names.

For a while it seemed the major labels had come to peace with mixtapes, at least in a hip hop context. They function all most like a minor leagues. A mixtape star like 50 Cent could graduate to the big leagues prefiltered and with with a hit under their belt. Songs can be leaked to the mixtape DJs for test marketing. A few years ago "Oochie Wally" by the Bravehearts, a collection of hangerons around the star Nas caught mixtape fire and was booming out of every other car in the tristate area. Nas's label quickly added a verse by the star, edited the impossibly pornographic lyrics for the radio and had itself a hit single. Use a mixtape properly and its like offloading your marketing and testing. Free publicity, what label is not down with that?

Rumor has it though that the Mondo Kim's case emerged when a Sony exec saw mixtapes in Kim's with unlicensed Sony tracks on them. An anomaly or a sign of a shift in tactics? The law and the culture are not in sync. Like the 55mph speed limit or the prohibition an uneasy peace can go on if the police forces are complicit. But if some thing, some exec, some organization, forces the letter of the law into conflict with culture, what happens then? In other words, what happens now?

Google

Been meening to return to the issue of Google and write something proper up. But before we drop the written, consider this something of the freestyle, emerged off the dome in an email exchange with T van Veen and Wayne Marshall on the subject of this particular propaganda.

Google:

1- There is nothing democratic about google, yes they provide information freely, but they take in radically more info then they give out. For instance each time you search they get more info, about what people are searching for, about what you (as a cookie) like to search for, which link results you click, which ads, etc. In exchange for all this data they give you back stuff they already know. All the relational stuff they keep for themselves and maybe their big advertisers. Its a completely asynchronous relationship. Google is a black box, you can only get out of it what they let out, they don't even provide a public way to get in touch with any human at the company..

2- There are only 3 search engines of note, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, all the other big ones use services from one of the three. The necessary capital to create new one is extraordinary over a year ago the NYT claimed Google had 100,000 servers running...

3- If you don't show up in a web search you barely exist online. People have an extremely limited capacity to remember addresses, bookmarks, links on their friends pages, memory. Everything else they go to google, which essentially defines the global web. Everyone has a small local web, cool. But if you are trying to communicate to a broader audience you need to leave your local web, and without the search engines you are pretty much fucked, they can sensor your info. Not completely, but enough marginalize you. Similarly the way they rank sites can radically alter traffic patterns, they claim the ranking is purely an algorithm, but its always shifting and could easily be politicized.

4- Google is a private company. Technically they are publicly traded, but the stock is structured so that only the holders of preferred shares have any say over the companies actions. Shareholder activism is a bit of a joke ala Nader, but its sure beats nothing, and occasionally is even effective. Google is structured to make this impossible, so is the NYT for that matter, but very few companies are. There is zero public accountability in Google's world. They say 'don't be evil' and we have to trust them. So far they seem pretty cool, they run porn ads but not gun ads for instance. But they've also rolled over every time a large entity sues them, ie the Scientologists and the French government. What happens when the NSA knocks on their door? Come to think of it, have they ever denied sharing info with the NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, etc...

5- Until Orkut and Gmail Google never knew your name. Not anymore.. The original Gmail terms of service even gave them the right to archive emails that you delete from you Gmail account. The only thing preventing them from reading these emails is that TOS agreement that splashed across your screen as a digital file a while back..

6- The issue isn't really what Google has done, but what they have the potential of doing.

this is a server

and no mr van Veen, its not made by Microsoft

Cracking the LES

Yesterday the NY Post tells us the LES is reaching that inevitable upscaling moment. Then today they tell us a story that makes us think of the LES returning to its prebar strip despair. And somehow this seems like an equally inevitable option to me.

Maybe its just another tabloid murder but what sticks in my head about the murder of the actress from Minnesota on the streets of the Lower East Side is the shear stupidity of someone asking a man who just pistol whipped a friend "what are you going to do, shoot us?" Clearly at 3:15am there was alcohol involved. But with American nightlife well deep in a cocaine epidemic.. Speculation aside what's been nagging in the back of my head for a while is "what next?"

Back when the LES was dangerous and stupidity was going there at night at all, not challenging people with guns, NY was in the midst of the crack epidemic. And drug epidemics tend to run on cycles, or at least the ones that have been around long enough do. Crack's only had one run through, no one knows how or even if it cycles. But it doesn't take reading on page six about failing rock star's $1,500 a day habits to wonder if its about to return and return hard..

And yeah, who knows what crack could do to the real estate bubble. Lets just hope the city never gets to find out..

The Slice Game: On DeMarco's Pizza

Pizza by the slice is the crack cocaine of the food world, cheap, overrated but mad addictive. In its home element, New York City, the cheap is less about the money then about the time, get it fast eat it fast, forget about it, back to work. I was born in raised in money making Manhattan, but I never quite could rep my borough's slices with the gusto. Sure you can grab a decent one at Joe's(Bleeker & 6th), Nino's(St, Marks & A) or Sal and Carmine's (102 & Bway), but out in outer Bs they have a bit more time and time makes a better pizza.

Deep out in Midwood is where the true slice addicts journey, to Di Faro's home of the legendary pizza dealer/maker they call Dom. The junkies swear he cuts the best slice around. Me I've only made the trip once, good shit, but I didn't get hooked. I'd rather get the real quality, by the pie, brick oven style. If I'm going way into Brooklyn for pizza I'll do Tontonno's, but usually its Lombardi's or Grimaldi's or the childhood local, the V&T.

But just as the crack game changed, so to does the slice game. Dom's staying tight in Midwood, but his family is expanding. DeMarco's is their maneuver and it puts them in the heart of it all, Houston and MacDougal, the West Village.

The kinks are still getting worked out, ovens take time to break in and master, but things are looking good. Too good really given how dangerously close they are to my school..

Visit one was a hit or miss. I got the slice, good, but somehow off to. You could feel the quality, but no magic. I wasn't impressed yet somehow as they pulled a square pie out I found myself ordering a slice of that too.

Visit two stepped it up. The pepperoni on the take out pie getting boxed looked supreme but I stayed with the plain slice. Good again, still no magic. And once again as I finished, I craved another. Remember some comment I noticed somewhere about Dom's three (or four really) cheese combo needing to cool to really taste right I ordered an as is slice, no reheating. There was the magic, a slice coming together, damn.

Visit three, time to see if they are a one hit wonder, or the real deal. Once again I grabbed an as is slice and this time walked out the door with it. The best environment for a slice is walking down a busy street anyways. The destination was Joe's reigning king of NY slices. Their famous corner location just got slain, victim of the NY real estate game, but the shop a few doors over cooks the same pizza. No matter, they can't hold fire to DeMarco's, first round knockout, no contest. A good slice sure, but I ate it quick and forgot it. My bike was still locked up outside DeMarco's. Bad positioning, I walked past the door and got sucked right in for the good shit, fast, cheap, addictive..

Show Time

2 Shows, featuring your's truly

On Sunday and Monday in NY the ITP Winter Show 2004 featuring my own Predatory Mirror.

And currently ongoing in Columbus Ohio till the 21st a show of prints at Roy G Biv 997 N. High St in the Short North. 614.297.7694 for more info.

Calm Technology

Calm technology. What an odd concept they pitch. Calm technology essentially comes into being via the act of frantic listening to its environment. Can a technology really be calm while its insides are stuck in an infinite loop, churning code, waiting for the moment to "calmly" react to the outside world?

RNC vs NYC

Some notes from the Republican National Convention and the streets of New York. If all goes as planned a more essayish thing to follow...

- New York is just to big for these things to impact for real. Neither the RNC nor the protesters have the numbers to make more than a half skip in the patterns of the city that never sleeps. It now seems laughable that people actually bothered to leave town over this. None of this however is relevant to the unlucky few who happened to be at the precisely wrong spot as the NYP broke out the orange security fences trapping and arresting like deep sea fishermen.

- the police have fine tuned the art of using the physical form of the city against protesters. 1 city block + 100 cops on scooters and motorcycles = a mobile holding pen. The protests are divided and dispersed before they can even truly form. It takes active hard work to find an active protest. At the moment it seems the action is at 100 Center Street.

- the sms channels are marvelous sources of tactical news. Let us hope they refine further. The fact that police can listen in and in some cases post makes for a fascinating experiment in open systems. As a historical note, I first noticed these tactics in action during the post 9-11 Davos Economic Summit, held here in NY.

- many of the police seem to be without gasmasks of any kind. A clear indication they have dropped tear gas as a tactic. One wonders if the cops will soon be the ones getting tear gassed? Or perhaps the no tear gas rule is temporary, a gift to the poor Republican eyes, they clearly have enough trouble viewing reality already.

- on Tuesday the undercovers wore green bands around their arms or on their heads. Wednesday yellow. Today orange and red.

- has anyone ever seen a protester with a gun? if there was such a thing as a "violent protester" don't you think they would arm themselves?

- the standard tactic in anarchist channels now seems to be to blame any and all calls (and acts) to violence on undercover police provocateurs. One wonders if they get a different color armband. Maybe black?

Gratitude

Wow, some beautiful, and presently anonymous, person actually took the time and money to send me something off my wish list. Thank you! Email me for a more personal thanks if you wish..

And on a less personal, but similarly flattering note, these people (possibly affiliated with the Onion?), sent notice of their event on Saturday (at Piano's in NY 8-10pm btw) and caked off the invite with a "ps bloggers drink free". Is society read to start respecting people who spend far to much time in front of their computer again? Must be part of the 90's revival...

The Corporation, Take 3 (of 3), Constructions:

The jewel of The Corporation is its conception of the corporation as being a psychopathic organization. I've previously mentioned its value (or invalue) as a propaganda tool. But this also stands as a key point from which to begin constructing solutions.

I'm not sure to what extent the filmmakers view the psychopath diagnosis as metaphor versus being the actual truth, but I'm fully in the metaphor camp. As a metaphor the psychopath construct's utility is basically constrained to its propaganda value. I don't think you can give a corporation the same therapy you would human psychopath. But right beneath the surface of the psychopath metaphor is an extremely useful analysis of the corporation.

Essentially the filmmakers look at the Corporation as an organizational form, one with a deep genetic flaw. Within the legal and cultural code of the contemporary joint stock corporation are serious flaws that influence the behavior of many, if not all corporations today. By locating and analyzing these flaws we unlock the potential to both alter the corporate legal code for the better, and to construct better organizations capable of replacing the corporate form.

The film underscores one particular flaw in the legal status of a corporation, corporate personhood, the fact that corporations have many of the rights of people under the law. Pretty much an absurdity, so much so that the law doesn't always actually follow the concept. Still a strong legal acknowledgement that corporations are not humans and thus subject to a completely different set of laws and rights could go a long way towards a better conceptualization of what roles these entities should play in society.

Ultimately though I suspect that corporate personhood is an effect of the corporate drive for power, not a cause. Is shifting the balance of power back towards another organization with repressive tendencies, the State, an answer to the problems posed by big business? In order for the answer to be "yes" the State must be ready to recode the corporate laws in a constructive manner. A dubious but not impossible prospect, and one that can be furthered greatly if the ideas on how to recode these entities are in existence. And this my friends is our job.

see also:
Abstract Dynamics: The Corporation, Take 1 (of 3), Propaganda

Abstract Dynamics: The Corporation, Take 2 (of 3), The Permanent Critique

plus a note: this piece was actually intended to be much longer, and might be updated, or might birth another piece. I'm putting it up now mainly because I dislike having an essentially negative piece as the first one on my site, my personal take on the Corporation is more positive then critical and hopefully the site will reflect that now.

The Corporation, Take 2 (of 3), The Permanent Critique:

The contemporary left has seemingly unlimited capacity for the negative. Their ability to find faults with world is match only with their in ability to offer viable alternatives to the awful picture of the world they generate.

An hour into The Corporation I'm fully convinced of the evil of this organization form, and I want to change things. Another hour passes, and I'd would like to thinking about the viable alternatives, the course of action. Instead I'm approaching the point of nihilism, of surrender, situation normal - all fucked up.

Its is at this point where point where one thread in my mind leaves the movies flow. If the world is really as awful as this movie paints it, then perhaps I am better off not caring? Would you rather be a medieval serf, toiling in servitude, or instead the king, living in luxury off the exploitation of the same serfs? Robber baron or the labor leader shot dead by Pinkerton guards? If the world is so bleak in helpless, perhaps you best of accepting that and living in ignorant pleasure.

Happily that is not my world view. I do not see world as half empty and out of resources for a refill. I don't see critique as a bludgeon or sword, but instead think it should be wielded more like a scalpel. With extreme precision and only when deemed necessary.

The king of the American left's materialist ubercritics is linguist Noam Chomsky. Now Chomsky occasionally is spot on. But I've never yet seen Chomsky acknowledge that life has room for pleasure. Chomsky seems to believe the overriding goal of most people's lives should be worrying about the world's atrocities. And from a propaganda standpoint that's a dud. Doesn't matter if he's right or wrong, few but the pessimists and sadists are going to subscribe to that world view. Critique as a bludgeon. Can someone please surgically remove this man from my mindscape?

It's not that The Corporation is 100% negative, there are a couple mild positives in the mix. Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface an industrial carpet company, pops in repeatedly through the film as a something of a hero. His Paul Hawkin inspired transformation of his company into a vision of sustainable development comes off quite well. Of course there is a certain violence between the possibilities he preaches and the filmmaker's "corporation as a psychopath" thesis, that unfortunately never gets addressed. Hmmmm.

The other hero is Oscar Olivera the Bolivian anti water privatization activist. And while I don't know his story other then through the film, he serves as a guide to what seems to be an old school marxist revolt against government privitization. Inspiring, yet hazily told, with no indication on how to reproduce or maintain such an action. More please!

Ultimately looking back on film (and bare in mind I have only had the opportunity to view it once, I will be rewatching once it is fully in the theaters), there is a clear junction of potentiality where the film could have run in any number of directions. The point is maybe an hours in, when the corporation is diagnosed as a psychopath. This could have easily been the climax of the film, a critical point, made sharply and strongly. Or it could have been the point of inflection, the diagnosis is in, time to develop a cure. Instead the filmmakers opt for more brutalist approach, they have diagnosed the corporation's illness and then proceed to kick the shit out it. And I'll admit I took some pleasure watching the god of neoclassical economics, Milton Friedman, hang himself with his own rope, for the most part the film criticizes endlessly into a cycle of despair. A cycle that seems perhaps perversely enjoyable to a certain breed of leftist. Count me out, I exit at the point of inflection. Critique ultimately breeds more critique and so its time to jump back and move on.

see also:
The Corporation, Take 1 (of 3), Propaganda

Abstract Dynamics: The Corporation, Take 3 (of 3), Constructions

The Corporation, Take 1 (of 3), Propaganda:

The Corporation - A film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan is some damn good leftist propaganda. Be even better where it 40 minutes shorter (cut Noam no pleasure Chomsky please...) but well worth watching. The corporation as a psychopath is brilliant meme to propagate, let it spread. Propaganda is a good thing, Emma Goldman proudly produced it, todays left could gain a lot taking that perspective. Hopefully a couple kids with some free time and a copy of Final Cut Pro will do just that and make a good piece of propaganda even better.

see also:
Abstract Dynamics: The Corporation, Take 2 (of 3), The Permanent Critique

Abstract Dynamics: The Corporation, Take 3 (of 3), Constructions

Welcome to the Slow Space

highly astute readers might have noticed that the taglione of this site just shifted from "nomadic, intense, daily" to "nomadic, intense, not quite daily". Undoubtablely that will change once I figure out something better. In any case that tagline change is symbolic of a shift in attitude towards this space, less posting, more development and research. Hell I might even proof read once or twice... The usual eclectic subject matter will remain though, so fear not and stay tuned.

Those seeking raw velocity of information can find it at American Dynamics. Where I have learned that it pays to be focused, that site already has more readers then this one...

C.R.E.A.M.

Like many people in this world, I suffer from an unfortunate addiction to money. If I don't have enough of it I go into a tragic state of withdrawal. I find it difficult to eat. I'm unable to travel as far and as efficiently as I'd like. Doorways are suddenly blocked to my passing. Bills become stressed. Bad stuff, not fun. I find it impossible to quit, and I've long since decided I should live with this addiction.

Now most money addicts tend to support their habits by entering into long term contracts with one particular money provider. Generally this involves hanging around the provider's premises for about 8 hours a day or more, 5 days a week doing odd tasks. While some take great pleasure in this routine, I prefer a taste more diversity. So I avoid the long term contracts and hang out with a variety of providers around the globe, and bestowing them with gifts from my laptop.

Generally it works great. Except all of a sudden my favorite dealers all seem to be out of stock. In other words, I don't seem to have any paying clients. Which isn't very good. Especially since, while I love working with new clients, I don't particularly enjoy looking for them. So consider this an experiment in seeing if I can get clients to come to me rather then seeking them out.

So what exactly do I do anyway? Well preferably I'd love to be one of those amorphous things known as overpaid consultants. But that doesn't tend to happen so instead I'd very happily do any of the following for money: graphic design, web design, Flash development/Actionscript programming, non-overpaid consulting on design, media, politics, branding and beyond, and even graphic production in the right circumstances. I might even try writing words for actual money, which I've never actually done before... And since I'm always open to new experiences I might even be willing to experiment with an actual permanent, non-freelance position, something which I have even less experience with than exchanging words for money ;) Don't get your hopes up on that last one though...

Over at abeburmeisterdesign.com you can find a partial list of past clients. And if I continue to have this freeish time, there might even be more content over there. Feel free to shoot me an email at: abe |at| abeburmeisterdesign |dot| com with any questions, or better yet projects.

all my love,
Abe

ps: if you happen to be of the opinion that my time would be better spent making art, blogging and writing a book about nomad economics, please feel free to just give me cash directly by clicking the button below:

American Dynamics, public beta

Politics, yeah I talk about that shit too much. Or maybe I don't talk about it enough... In any case I'm taking all the blatantly political stuff off of this here site and moving it to American Dynamics. Expect that site to have a bunch more politics then this one did, as the filters are coming off... There will be a lot of stuff on the intersection of design, marketing and politics, which doesn't get much coverage anywhere. That plus the stories the usual absurdities of power that blanket the world today.

And yeah its not quite done yet, but its done enough to post. Done enough for critique. Let me know what you think, it'll be a constantly evolving space...

Pattern Connection

If anyone is wondering if there is any connection between the two 'pattern' post surrounding this one, the answer is yes and no.

Yes in that as I drove around Austin contemplating 'pattern navigation' I held back on writing because I wondered if 'Pattern Recognition' addressed the issue. And no, it doesn't really, although it perhaps dusts upon the outside of it once or twice. So no, no connection other then the lack of one...

The Best of Austin, TX

So I'm a couple days out of Austin, perhaps blessed with perspective, but probably not... The conclusion so far? Its a fabulous place to spend a winter month or two. Culturally its far liver then SF is for real. The live music capital marketing is no joke. This is a place where you can stubble upon punk rockers rocking Irish jigs then flipping into Greek syrtos with a near virtuoso drop of the dime. On a Monday night at 1am no less.

Austin may be the freak show of Texas, but its also in Texas and that means meat. And in Austin two places reign supreme. Sam's Barbeque kills it with brisket, not to be missed. Back in the heart of town though is Casino el Camino, close to the only good bar on Austin's notorious 6th Street. A street that's basically a Disneyland of binge drinking... Austinite's will deny ever gracing this street, but someone is filling the bars. Casino though is the one to hit. Start with a burger order, they take ages to complete, but are worth it all. Top ten nationwide, perhaps, really. Vegetarian's order a 'blackjack' and relax. Then go upstairs and play pool while waiting, or just soak up flawless atmosphere, it's hard to finger, but this place is just plain comfortable with itself. Broken in like a cowboy's leather, lovely.

Then the coffee culture. 24 hours coffee shops, finally. I guess it takes cheap rent plus a massive university to make the economics work, cause really every city should have one. Free wifi at each one too. And space. Only in Texas is it economical to have people sitting all day nursing caffeine while sipping free internet. Spiderhouse is the personal pick, but there are plenty others.

The trump card of Austin though is rollerderby, Texas Rollergirls, the ultimate in punk rock feminism. Tatoos on women on rollerskates, moving really fast. Its a sport too, I shit you not. A good one even. With Texas sized women. Root for the Honky Tonk Heartbreakers ya hear?!?

SxSW Music 3 of 3?

SxSW is nearly done and out of the café speakers booms the Hollertronix CD. And god damn its sounds timely then it has. Guess I need to finish that massive post on them I started ages ago...

I'm not sure I found any greatness at work in this festival. Not sure because I finally caught TV on the Radio live and to my years they hit that greatness. But they are friends, so like Scalia I am not fit to judge. I will recuse myself from the case, and let ya'll make the choice. But my hollywood sum up = 70's Stones meets My Bloody Valentine.

The hype, aka the Unicorns finally made it into the country and errrr, does anyone ever live up the hype? Well I can see why the indie rockers are infatuated, they mix in a couple degrees of fresh new irony with some really spiffy graphic design. But they still sing like a 13 year old devastated that they are only going to Breckenridge to ski, instead of Davos... I'll pass.

Best surprise was Japan's the Emeralds, but as I mentioned before, lots of good, not great. Trans Am surprised too, but only because they were last show I saw before taking half a decade off rock n roll, not sure I wanted to see them at all the first time.

Biggest disappointment by far was the Swisha House. No Slim Thug, no Mike Jones, and Chamillionaire did a solo set before I hit the stage. It was a bit like going to a Wu-Tang show and getting Master Killa, U-God and Inspecta Deck. B team all the way. Never quite realized how much Mike Jones carries the Swisha records before, look for him to turn star soon.

Back the hype thing. Dizzee Rascal. So the beats sound good in the club. The tricky bit is that amorphous thing called flow. Unlike the rest of the brits his is actually good, but only when you can't understand the words. Its great when it sounds like an audio waterfall on top of a booming soundsystem. But as soon as the words become distinct? Good god he sucks. Bedtime.

Meanwhile one member of Ozomatli are still in jail, while the media now reports "madness" (lost the link) and "near-riot". Sorry try again, this time I suggest "police brutality" if you're conservative "overreaction"... There is video here.

Also up on Ozo's site is the first hand story of the side of things that struck me hardest. A story completely missing in all news coverage no less. This kid got maced started running and wound up with 6 or 8 cops throwing him on the ground. Looked like it was about to go Rodney King for a second, and if it weren't for the thousands plus potential witness on the street it may well have... And yeah kid claims to weight 150, but he looked more like a buck ten from where I stood. Big time threat you know...

SxSW Music 2 of ?

After cracking down on Ozomatli, Austin PD apparently continued on with the rest of their devious plans, turning SxSW into a festival for Strokes cover bands. Like the Strokes but from Mexico! Like the Strokes but with a girl keyboardist! Like the Strokes but from LA! Like the Strokes but not born rich! Like the Strokes but from NY!

The MO for last night seemed to be everyone is good, nobody is great. Haven't seen a bad band yet. But great? Only Ozo, and I've seen them dozens of times. VietNam is the only other one worth remembering the name. Like Bob Dylan, backed by the Stokes.... No that's not fair, the band is better then that. But not great.

Also encountered the first Texas sized line, 2 hours long. Then the Unicorns cancelled (customs) and that took care of that.

Today we seek that greatness, got to be here someplace...

SxSW Music 1 of ?

So the real value of the SxSW wristband or badge is not that it gets you into shows. Its that you have zero compulsion to stay at any show. Ex to the next, ce la vie, see ya round.

And yeah Josh tells the macing story so that I don't need to.

SxSW Interactive Summary

The shift in people between SxSW Interactive and Film to the much larger Music festival is fascinating. The film makers rock a casual bland stylishness and the tech geeks keep a post hippie dishevel with occasional burning man color highlights. Then in glides the music industry en masse. Simultaneously slicker and dirtier, more suits and more shreds. The ego level probably is the same at all the conferences, but suddenly far more visible, worn perhaps around the neck like a dangling medallion.

The Interactive Conference was perhaps an echo chamber personified. I've got a more complex post waiting on that subject, but lets just say I take the threat more seriously now then I did last Friday.

Also taken more seriously now is Deleuze's distaste in the conversation as an intellectual form. As a rough rule the solo presentations shined where the panels stumbled. There were exceptions of course, but for the most part the panels where either too technical (in areas I'm not hugely interested in) or too amateur. You'd think a panelist would at least be aware of the pertinent literature in the subjects they cover, but no that is not the case in this town.

The exception on the solo talks was Friendster's Jonathan Abrams. For a brief moment he had me second guessing my idiot savant take on his success, as he appropriated nearly every idea he was rejecting six months ago into his business plan. But in a truly repulsive panel afterwards, and several brief personal interchanges with him it became far clearer: Whatever his success may be attributed it sure isn't an excess of any intelligence.

The other monologist fared far better. While I agree with Adam that Brenda Laurel is coming from a perspective tinted very 1994, I didn't much find that a problem. Rather it felt more like an emergence. Donna Haraway, Seybold and Mondo 2000 fused into a cohesiveness of sorts. While I may not myself proscribe to this gelling California techno-humanist school of thinking, I can envision producing interesting results along the (on)line.

Perhaps the there is more hope for California thought in the Whole Earth tradition though. Howard Rheingold might be the last believable voice of Bay Area techno-utopianism, far more balanced and pragmatic then popped bubbles past, yet still positively flirting with the future. His call for a new cross disciplinary intellectual construction is much welcomed in these parts.

Like Rheingold, Bruce Sterling gave a far better talk then I'd seen him produce previously. The shorter? The future is a fucking disaster beyond belief. It'll be great, lets party!

And yeah, Neal Pollack is damn funny.

He's also scared shitless of me, but that's a story for another year.

The Edge of Real

That's a photo from the far edge of Real de Catorce. Its about a 15 minute walk to the far side of town where you enter through a 3km long mining tunnel, one lane wide. The road continues out on the other side of town, but I never saw a single car on it.

Pop That Crunk

Should be in the mountains of Mexico by days end, better clear that American pop out the system first.

Petey Pablo "Freek a Leek" (aka How You Like it Daddy) - There's something oddly gentlemanly to his crunk. And Lil Jon refines his dirty nasty formula on the beats just right. Towards the end of the song Petey interrupts, resumes the DJ voice of the intro and says "I've got to give a shout out to Seagram's Gin, cause I drink it and they paying me for it." Shit, at least he's honest!

Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris "Yeah" - I should like this really, Usher can sing like a mofo and you can't step on the crunk. Or at least you couldn't in the old year. And there was only so long Lil Jon could refine that same damn beat ad nauseam before hitting the pop diamond mine. The crunk never sounded so clean. Nothing fresh bout it though. He might get knighted pop royalty off this, but it's the Petey Pablo record that rocks the aristocratic crunk flair. Lil Jon's just warming up that "Yeah!" for some Pepsi commercials, no?

And god damn, I know Usher loves Michael Jackson as much as Sir Justin Timberlake. But I could swear he's actually imitating Timberlake imitating Michael on this here track. In theory perhaps its pop perfection, pop the new sound, simulate last years hit lyrics mix in the payola and roll. But something's missing, and I think they knew it, why else did they dilute their royalties by running the random Ludacris lyrics algorithm over the ass end of the track? Its close enough for Clear Channel, but is it real enough for memory?

Twista featuring Kanye West and Jamie Foxx "Slow Jams" - Any song with the lyrics "I'ma play this Vandross, you gonna take ya pants off" is obviously a classic. Where "Yeah" takes the incongruous style mix and plows straight up the middle with it, "Slow Jams" dips and dabs like a Mike Tyson jab. You're never quite sure where its going, but damn, that's a hit.

still to come, time permitting, Juvenile's "Numb Numb" and Swisha House's Mike Jones and Slim Thug...

Kawasaki Chernobyl

this women rides her kawasaki through Chernobyl, takes photos and writes about it in broken English. Yes the future indeed, unevenly distributed...

[via collision detection]

update: the link has been changed.

Rumors & Artifacts

In 1830 one Reverend George Bush apparently wrote The Life of Mohammed, relationship to more prominent namesakes is apparently nil, but there is not much info out there...

One John F Kerry aka JFK was definitely in a garage rock band circa 1961, the Electras. Kerry was tall and played bass. They recorded an album of which only 500 copies where released... Ebay of course had one for sale, no takers. No MP3s available yet. If you got em let me know. I am willing to host them, bandwidth permitting. [via catchdubs]

Finally on the recorded music tip, one prominent label with plenty of recent hits is apparently on the verge of disintegration, more soon I suspect.

The Passion of Christ

So I'm sitting in this café, thinking about going to check out that new Mel Gibson slasher flick. But then, then this fucker next to me starts talking. And get this, he freaking TELLS ME THE ENDING.

Damn. Guess I don't have to see it now.

Grey Tuesday

Today is Grey Tuesday, an act of civil disobedience protesting EMI's refusal to allow the distribution of Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, which remixes Jay-Z's the Black Album with the Beatles White Album. And its actually good.

The site is grey for the day. Tracks unfortunately are no longer available on this site. Illegal Art is still hosting it though.

Enjoy the album and free the music!

Grey Tuesday

Grey Tuesday is Tuesday February 24th. Its a coordinated act of civil disobedience to protests EMI actions to shut down the distribution of Danger Mouse's The Grey Album. Abstract Dynamics will of course participate since we actively called for just this sort of action. We urge you to participate as well.

[via hiphopmusic.com: Civil Disobedience for the Grey Album]

Ripping Mix CDS

Do any of my wonderful readers know of a good free program that allows you to rip an entire mix CD as one continuous file? I used to have one on the PC but its long lost and name forgotten. OSX is preferable but a PC program will do the trick if necessary...

thanks in advance, A

We Are All Cosmonauts Now

volume. new club. williamsburg. huge. all white. concrete floors. projections everywhere. bright. everyone in white suits. an equalizer. maybe. everyone modifies. must retain individuality. 2001. clockwork orange. gattaca. this must be someone's decade old fantasy. like a rave. but different. not fun. almost performance art. vanessa beecroft. without organization. dub in the main room. loud. loud. sound system. black music. white people. old black music. semi young white people. no one dances. bye now.

NYC Events

And then next week good music comes to NYC!

The one to check Andrew Weatherall playing a disco punk set at APT a week from Thursday, watch out. Here is the word from promoter Roy Dank:

Andrew Weatherall is playing a special punk-funk set at Pop Your Funk, much like his coveted Nine O'Clock Drop mix CD for the Nuphonic label. This is the first time he's done this in America and quite possibly the most intimate gig he's ever done in NYC so this is indeed a special night! Brennan Green from Balihu, Modal and Peacefrog and Roy Dank of Mathematics (who will be touring Europe just a couple days later) will be playing on the night as well.

Thursday February 5th, Open Smirnoff Bar 9-10pm. Come early to ensure entry. $8 adv / $10 at the door.

APT is somewhere in the meat packing district, look it up cause I'm too lazy too...

On the more hyped tip Dizzee Rascal drops in to new Williamsburg venue Volume. Still not feel the anglophile hype dropped upon Mr. Rascal, but Matthew Dear is playing so there is a back up if Dizzee falls flat... And it's a Soundlab party which means it should be more creative then your average club night.

Saturday February 7, 9:30 - sunrise @ Volume, 99 N 13th St at Whythe.

Official opening of the club is apparently this weekend btw...

Last but not least, right down the street sits NY's best café St Helen. 150 Whythe, at N 8th, peep it while you still can get a seat...

Snow

I never quite understood why all my fellow New Yorkers stay in while its snowing out. The act of snowing is by far the best thing about this snow thing, at least in an urban space. Turns the city into this beautiful pure space. Seas of white, and washed out shapes shifting through the periphery. And best of all you can enjoy New York City with out all these beautiful people blocking your view...

The real time to honker down and stay in front of your fire/TV or whatever is when it slushy out. Slush is the worst weather condition ever, makes crossing every street a logistical challenge. Its like the city needs to beat the snow into submission and the result is a cold dark puddle of nasty on every corner. Stay away, its movies and food delivery time.

But when the snow actual falls, when its actually white. Time to head outside and enjoy it for once, this is as close to natural beauty as NY will ever get...

As the RIAA Goes to War, the EFF Runs Away

LA Weekly: Music Industry Puts Troops in the Streets

Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black "raid" vests the unit members wore. The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read "RIAA" instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.

The Recording Industry Association of America is taking it to the streets.

Even as it suffers setbacks in the courtroom, the RIAA has over the last 18 months built up a national staff of ex-cops to crack down on people making and selling illegal CDs in the hood.

and if starting their own little, quite likely illegal, terror squad wasn't bad enough, the RIAA goes out and makes it clear just how racist they are:

"A large percentage [of the vendors] are of a Hispanic nature," Langley said. "Today he’s Jose Rodriguez, tomorrow he’s Raul something or other, and tomorrow after that he’s something else. These people change their identity all the time."

Say what? Not even going to comment on that one.

Then of course to top it all off with a cherry, the RIAA's biggest opponent the EFF condones these foul tactics:

"The process of confiscating bootleg CDs from street vendors is exactly what the RIAA should be doing," said Jason Schultz, a staff attorney for the San Francisco–based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Now that's apparently a misquote and Schultz corrects it on his blog. But honestly his answer doesn't make me particularly happy. Schultz and the EFF draw a broad line between digital file sharing and the alternative networks of CD distribution. And they have valid legal reasons for it.

But really what is the difference between the two? One is structural, P2P file sharing involves a computer and broadband connection while alternative CD networks involve physical goods, that are copied not stolen. The other difference between the two is socioeconomic. P2P is a middle class act, requiring expensive equipment and connections. The extralegal CD distribution networks operate in far less privileged spaces. And they represent a valid attempt by these communities to route around the restrictions the RIAA is attempting to impose. But since it doesn't involve extensive computer use the EFF can't be bothered to defend.

Just another reminder that techno-utopianism doesn't scale beyond the short confines of tech culture...

[article link via bIPlog]

Newsflash: the World Does Not Revolve Around Gigabytes!

To all the fools out there who think the iPod mini is a bad deal, would you care to explain why people buy 40GB iPods for $500 when they can get a Nomad Zen with 60GB for $400? Shit with IDE drives at $1GB why doesn't Apple just make a 3 pound $300, 200GB mp3 player? You'd just eat that up, right?

Personally I expect Apple to sell a whole load of the minis. Typical scenario, person walks into the store looking for an ipod. They can get a tiny colorful one that holds 50cds worth of music for $250 more. Or they can pay extra for something nearly twice as big, twice as heavy and it doesn't come in colors. Battery doesn't even last longer. All they get in return is... some exta gigasomethings. And for most people in the world, believe it or not, the world does not revolve around how big their hard drive is. For real. Hang tight and watch these players fly off the shelves.

J8, 2 Events

Next Thursday January 8th, is looking good for downtown NYC with two events round the corner from each other:

Aspects of Jupiter (pdf) is a benefit for the upcoming book Sound Generation: Recording - Tradition - Politics
which features several writings by our digital friend tobias c. van Veen.

Experimental Intermedia
224 Centre Street (btwn Grand/Hester)
Manhattan. 8pm. $5.

music and performances by:
tobias c. van Veen
Pamela Z
Marc McNulty
Annea Lockwood & Paul Ryan
Gregory Whitehead
Greyg Filastine
Larry 7
Ken Montgomery
Claudio Chea

but before heading over there be sure to check out the closing of Dream So Much 2, which we briefly reviewed here.

Artist talks, a catalogue launch, bear sponsor, car sponsor, should be good times. And only a couple blocks away to boot.

location: the AAAC
26 Bowery, 3rd Floor NYC (between Pell and Bayard Streets next to the McDonald's--red door)
6-9 pm

Warning

The FBI warns terrorists to stop flaunting their secret weapons almanacs.

Green Walls, Green Nets and The Beauty of the Desert

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: The Fall of the Green Wall of China is really interesting, I had no idea about this whole process at all. The people at World Changing are pretty smart, but they do suffer a bit from over focus on the bottom up emergence.

Its not that I have anything against bottom up solutions, we just emerged from a top down century and a healthy dose of bottom up style solutions is in order. But does that mean all top down solutions are bad? Somehow it seems a lot more interesting when top down and bottoms up come together and start working in rhythm together.

And on a different note, they end the piece basically calling for a "green and collaborative war on deserts". Which seems to be an odd choice of words. War is very top down for one. But deserts are also beautiful places, you might even call them natures bottom up solution for overpopulation. Do we really want to wage war upon them, or maybe just put them on a diet to slim them down...

Wink, Wink, Abstract Goes Mobile

Thanks to a tip from one Adam Greenfield, Abstract Dynamics now is easily accessible on a mobile phone over here: http://winksite.com/abstract/dynamics

Probably just going to mirror this content, but you never know. Adam's got a touch of a moblog going, on the down low but there.

As for the force behind it all, Winksite is remarkably easy to use. Better yet, the core people seem to live and breathe the company, sent them a suggestion at 11:15 last night, a touch after midnight I had a nice reply back from a founder. That's dedication and I'd like to think it leads to a good business.

The Greatest

GOAT - A Tribute to Muhammad Ali, damn, the book's a bit on the cheap side at $3,000, but hey the website is free. And its got the rarest of the rare, an intro that doesn't need skipping.

Course Ali is the greatest, if not as a boxer, then as a poet / political force / media figure. If anyone deserves a $3,000 book... Leave it to Benedikt Taschen to figure out how to sell books at art world prices. And at 75lbs that books sure has the heft of a heavyweight champion.

[via low culture: I'm waiting for the paperback]

The Animal-human Chimeras

Is a sheep with human cells making up part of its brain no longer just a sheep?

Sample Free(ly)

Creative Commons now has a Sampling license. Finally. Musicians take note.

Who Baits the Baitmen?

Vaguely knew there were people who bait Nigerian e-mail scammers as a hobby. What I didn't know was that there are now people baiting the baiters as a hobby.

[via As Above]

You Are Under Surveillance

New York Surveillance Camera Players

[via Soul In Code]

Mobile?

rodcorp: Becoming Homo mobilis

Downhill

Downhill Battle - music activism

[via notes from somewhere bizzare]

LES Pickle Show Down

Hit up the Lower East Side's two last pickle joints (up from just one a couple years ago). Both The Pickle Guys on Essex and Guss' Pickles on Orchard have their roots in the old Essex Street Guss'. Probably use almost the same recipe. Both blow away any other pickle I've ever encountered in the US. These are the real deal old school NY Jew pickles, you won't go wrong with either.

But this is a show down and in the end it wasn't that close, The Pickle Guys win hands down. The pickle is simple flawless. Toss in the lower prices, better attitude, indoor buying area (it was damn cold this weekend), and a solid website that is dramatically cheaper for shipping then Guss' it's over, no contest.

Guss' of course are still great, but they've got a bit of dirty grit that hits on the first bite. Maybe it's from the moth floating in the brine... There is a moment of pure pickle bliss though, the peak of a Guss' pickle might be touch better then the Pickle Guys' but it just can't sustain itself throughout. Factor in the fact that they make their employees sell outdoors in winter, and the tourist trap positioning outside the Tenement Museum and its cleat that the new Guss' doesn't quite life up the old reputation. So get your ass over to the old the location and get with the Pickle Guys.

Meanwhile In Less Known Corners of the World

Wasn't Transdniester a country in a Tintin book? Sure should be.

Silence Still Equals Death

When Political Art Mattered is article no. 2 linked today from the NYT mag. The first couple pages are especially potent, touching on the power to the Silence = Death pink triangle and then skirting towards issues of privilege:

AIDS made its debut among a very cultured group of people. Many were artists who, devastated and enraged, turned their professional skills to protest. The design collective Gran Fury was founded in 1988 after the New Museum offered Act Up a window to do with as it pleased; soon other museums nationwide were draping their paintings and scheduling protests on Dec. 1, which became the annual Day Without Art. But even those gay men who were not culture mavens by trade were knowledgeable amateurs; hiding, encoding and image management were a fundamental part of every homosexual's sentimental education. In short, the dying, and their friends, knew how to convey a message in the language of their times.

For Larry Kramer, it was that ''art'' -- the street theater, the protest graphics -- that mattered. ''It was the only thing we had, the only way we could get any attention,'' he says. The image-starved television news shows could not be bothered to cover claims that a drug company was overcharging for medications, but let a bunch of black-clad young protesters chain themselves to that drug company's headquarters, and the cameras were there en masse. How to get across the idea of governmental guilt in promoting a blood-borne disease? Bloody hands, of course, stenciled everywhere. Some of the street actions I saw in the late 80's were better produced than Off Broadway shows, complete with smartly edited scripts, disciplined chorus numbers and gorgeous accouterments. Act Up's greatest artwork -- furtively covering Jesse Helms's Virginia home in a giant custom-made condom -- made the crucial point that prejudice is as insidious a danger to society as H.I.V. But, formally speaking, it was pure Christo.

''We were a bunch of gay people; this is what we knew how to do,'' Kramer says. ''We knew how to pretend. We knew how to make things pretty.''

One of the most informative hours of life was spent in a meeting room of what is now the Drug Policy Alliance (support em) listening to a formerly prominent ACT UP member* describing the evolution of their protest.

Like the Black Bloc and Critical Mass, Act Up has no formal leaders and no acknowledged hierarchy. Whoever showed up was a member, and decisions where made as a group. The people who showed up were predominantly gay, urban and upper middle class. They were also in the midst of a crisis, with AIDS cutting a broad swathe of death through the community. Ronald Reagan and much of the political establishment was content to ignore the deaths that where sweeping through what was then a marginalized community.

The result was what history might see as the first full fledged guerilla media warfare campaign. The NYT mag highlights a lot of the more art /visual elements of it. From a tactile standpoint however the one that stands out clearest is ACT UP's first Washington DC action. In preparing for this action, the emerging local factions from around the country met in San Francisco to create a plan. The group from ACT UP's founding city, New York, stayed quiet as everyone debated the various cliche locations, Supreme Court, White House, etc. Finally the NY group stood up and announced that they planned to protest outside the Department of Health and Human Services offices in suburban Maryland.

Protests in the center of DC are merely part of backdrop. ACT UP only brought a thousand or two protesters to suburban Maryland, but the result was clearly, pure drama, not background scenery. ACT UP was news, and with the news came increased attention the AIDS crisis. Following quickly behind was a rapid opening up towards gay culture in American life.

Of course AIDS is still a huge unsolved issue, and homophobia still a problem, but there is also a hell a lot to be learned from the media techniques that have gotten things this far. Gay activists were probably the first repressed group to have access to major amounts of media technology and knowledge of their inner workings. Since then desktop publishing, the internet and digital video have changed the game dramatically. The weapons of media warfare are reaching the communities that need them most. Keep watch.

-----
*Unfortunately I've forgotten the name of the party delivering the info. Hopefully I'll be able to update with the name soon.

Attention Single Ladies

It is a little known fact that the best place in urban America to find young bachelors is at graffiti art openings. Here you will find that approximately 90% of the attendees are male and eligible. Now you might be a touch concerned that you might actually have some understanding of the art in order to converse with people. Fortunately it couldn't be further from the truth, the room will inevitably be so crowded that no one can actually look at the art anyway. This provides additional benefits to wallflowers who do not like to dance, as any movement to the beat beyond minor head nodding is physically impossible. In fact that only obstacle you will encounter during the event will be enormous lines for the free beverages provided by a large corporation vigorously attempting to improve its underappreciated brand. Enjoy.

Lyor Cohen

Move the Crowd: Lyor Cohen, the Real Slim Shady?

Dodgy?

Not 100% sure what dodgeball is about, but it seems to be a way to broadcast and recieve the location of friends via mobile phone. Could be interesting, could fall on its face...

Unlike say Friendster, I think granularity is really key here. Looks like you can have multiple "circles" of friends. But are you really going to make the effort to broadcast your location to them? Taking the wait and see on this one, something like this is going to blow up, but its going to need a touch of magic to be that one.

[via Many-to-Many: Dodgeball Circles: Social software through the phone]

Pop Your Funk

Tomorrow night (thursday) my old friend Roy Dank of Mathematics fame gets busy on the disco punk side of the rhythms.

APT // free // 10pm on

party's called Pop Your Funk, and "the music's gonna be the kinda shit you wish you heard more of out these
days, namely weird disco, punk funk, italo, dub reggae, deep house, and some detroit bits as well"

rumors of a secret meat packing district tunnel that leads to the Matthew Dear party are as of yet unconfirmed, but you can always brave the early winter chill and walk around the corner.

Next installment is in Febuary with the one and only Andrew Weatherall dropping a rare punk funk set, holla.

Iraqi Bombings

Social Design Notes has a great post on graffiti in post Saddam Iraq. Not much art yet it seems, pure content but also pure ugliness.

‘I discovered the draw-back of democracy, it dirties the walls!’

Up and Somewhat In

Back on what I hope to be the usable side of technology. Calls for the PC have been made, backups somewhat successful. Mac is in working shape, we'll see how it shapes the writing/posting style.

Down and Somewhat Out

My main computer is in a state of heavy crash. Just got my shattered Mac into somewhat workable condition. Hating the view of CRT, but I'm sure I'll adjust. Expect slow output until issues are resoloved.

Longer Kompakt Hell + Seven

Yow, Kompakt Records' Michael Mayer and Reinhard Voigt brought a far more visceral sound then anticipated. Actually I wasn't anticipating much at all, being a touch out of touch with latest in electronic music, 99% of which is deep into the bland territory nowadays. And of course its the ignored genres that tend to surprise.

The Kompakt boys added to the surprise by starting off with 20 minutes or so of some same ole same ole, pretty, housish stuff. Almost gave up and then wham, in come the sawtooths. Big buzzing bass topped with fuzzing hooks, pure and simple, but raw as fuck. The techno/jazz comparison holds no weight here, in a way this has more to do with the stripped down rock of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and White Stripes. Heading home it was actually the Stripes one bass driven track, 'Seven Nation Army' resonating through my head. And yeah, Black Sabbath is the most natural reference.

Its still techno of course, and at times the acid line / kick drum German style resurface. And a small core of the crowd eat it up like it was the 90's again. The old tricks still have a touch of juice. But it was the fuzz and modulated noisiness that made the night, screaming like machines stuck in the speakers aching to return to an organic form.

Rewind a couple days for a taste of the older (as in a year ago) German forefront. DJ Hell of label du jour Gigolo, dropped into NY darkest venue, Void. Half the crowd was fashionistas in for a party hosted by Seven, the LES avant garde clothing outpost. A mixed blessing of course, the fashion crowd is notoriously cold, but at least it always looks like a good party... Interesting faces, diversity, freak show styles. Pity it stops at the epidermis.

Hell rocked it in as blasé manner as it gets. The party percolated always interesting, never quite fun. The techno hit the rock and roll in far more straight forward manner. The nights highlight was probably Nirvana getting flawlessly dropped in the mix. Plus 3 Rapture tracks (well actually 2 with the Sister Savior remix seeing double duty). Is 2003 over already?

Shorter Kompakt

Kompakt Records party = Thomas Brinkmann + Black Sabbath, hott.

soon a longer version, we hope. plus DJ Hell write up. Techno is the new black?

Linkage; N25 2003

Spin Alley

A Shipping Container Embassy

Vandalize

Finally caved in and picked up a pair of Geoff McFetridge Nike Vandals. The seersucker looks better on then I thought, but its not going to last long anyways. I'm not a collector I'm going to wear these things and wear them out.

For those that missed out, these are the conceptual shoe of the season. The outer layer is canvas, but its designed to rip away slowly revealing an intricate print underneath. Constantly evolving shoes, that's the marketing tactic to win my heart...

Picked them up at Nom de Guerre and immediately rolled around the corner to have the kids on Bway write all over the left shoe. In retrospect I should have done both, and it should have read "Sweat" on one and "Shop" on the other. Instead it just says "Uprise" which is still political, and if I remember correctly the former slogan of a rival sneaker company too boot. Not much into the silver swoosh, think I'll try and get every good writer I know to tag up the branding... Stay tuned to see these evolve, I still haven't taken a knife to the canvas yet, thinking up a strategy.

Who Are You and What Do You Look Like?

Phil Gyford: Writing: Statement of a Photographic Man is a fabulous post in which he digs up this passage from London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 3 by Henry Mayhew. Its the story of an early photographers shop. Tells quite a lot about how our understanding of ourselves has changed...

When we are not busy, we always fill up the time taking specimens for the window. Anybody who’ll sit we take him; or we do one another, and the young woman in the shop who colours [photographs with paint]. Specimens are very useful things to us, for this reason — if anybody comes in a hurry, and won’t give us time to do the picture, then, as we can’t affford to let her go, we sit her and goes through all the business, and I says to Jim, “Get one from the window,” and he takes the first specimen that comes to hand. Then we fold it up in paper, and don’t allow her to see it until she pays for it, and tell her not to expose it to the air for three days, and that if then she doesn’t approve of it and will call again we will take her another. Of course they in general comes back. We have made some queer mistakes doing this. One day a young lady came in, and wouldn’t wait, so Jim takes a specimen from the window, and, as luck would have it, it was the portrait of a widow in her cap. She insisted on opening, and then she said, “This isn’t me; it’s got a widow’s cap, and I was never married in all my life!” Jim answers, “Oh, miss! why it’s a beautiful picture, and a correct likeness” — and so it was, and no lies, but it wasn’t of her — Jim talked to her, and says he, “Why this ain’t a cap, it’s the shadow of the hair” — for she had ringlets — and she positively took it away believing that such was the case; and evern promised to send us customers, which she did.

There was another lady that came in a hurry, and would stop if we were not more than a minute; so Jim ups with a specimen, without looking at it, and it was the picture of a woman and her child. We went through the business of focussing the camera, and then gave her the portrait and took the 6d. When she saw it she cries out, “Bless me! there’s a child: I haven’t ne’er a child!” Jim looked at her, and then at the picture, as if comparing, and says he, “It is certainly a wonderful likeness, miss, and one of the best we ever took. It’s the way you sat; and what has occasioned it was a child passing through the yard.” She said she supposed it must be so, and took the portrait away highly delighted.

Once a sailor came in, and as he was in haste, I shoved on to him the picture of a carpenter, who was to call in the afternoon for his portrait. The jacket was dark, but there was a white waistcoat; still I persuaded him that it was his blue Guernsey which had come up very light, and he was so pleased that he gave us 9d. instead of 6d. The fact is, people don’t know their own faces. Half of ‘em have never looked in a glass half a dozen times in their life, and directly they see a pair of eyes and a nose, they fancy they are their own.

(emphasis added)

[via Test: Image repertoires]

iPaid

Dear everyone who thinks that iPod batteries are not replaceable,

Please send your "dead" iPods to me. I will happily place a $49 battery in your old, beloved toy and use it daily with the utmost care and respect.

Many thanks,
A.

ps, if you are feeling real flush you can always just buy me a spanking new one off my wish list...

Out of Pocket Linkage

Emptied out my pockets from the past few days and these links emerged:

Downtown for Democracy - AUCTION - "Buy Art, Beat Bush", sounds good to me. Artists involved are no joke either, they're shooting to raise $10 million.

notKeren - quality art and illustration.

Dream So Much 2 - art, asian-american.

Anticipate Recordings - music.

Kicking Ass

Rocket equipped donkey carts!?!

Yes Master

WOEBOT: Mastering a Record

Propaganda Issue

Amazing old school propaganda.

Good new school propaganda.

Vaguely good people who have no clue about the importance of propaganda.

Propaganda from a slightly different universe.

[via catchdubs, S/FJ, Jim Moore, Interconnected]

Stranger Familiar

Familiar Stranger

[via Jens Christoffersen @ No Sense of Place]

A Newer New

LockhartSteele brings news and photo mock ups of the new New Museum.

In Asia We Trust

Looking at the Fed's latest numbers, I see its "custodial" holdings of bonds actually owned by foreign central banks have now passed the $1 trillion mark -- an increase of almost 25% since this time last year:

The Fed's own bond portfolio, by contrast, is worth less than $660 billion -- and the entire left-hand side of the balance sheet (net reserve credit) totals just $722 billion. If this keeps up, Uncle Sam is going to have to put a new motto on the dollar bill: "In Asia We Trust."

- Whiskey Bar: It's Good to be the King

Massive Change?

Massive Change - The Future of Design Culture

Designers barking again? or is there real bite in this one?

[via notes from somewhere bizarre & f r e e g o r i f e r o | weblog]

Get. That. Dirt. Off. Your. Sholder.

With a nod to S/FJ we present our almost completely metric review of the Black Album:

note we cheated by highlighting Dirt Off Your Shoulder, which is certainly leading in playback outside of iTunes. The objective list would be more like First Song, Dirt Off, 99, Lucifer, Threat, Moment of Clarity (underrated in the reviews I've seen). Also note how important sequencing is, I just haven't listened to any of the tracks that appear before Dirt enough.

99 Problems

I got 99 problems, but the first Rick Rubin hip hop beat in years ain't one.

The rest of The Black Album? Not up too the hype so far. Some heat, lots of slush. Other highlights?

Lucifer: Kayne West beat, what's that vocal sample?

The Threat: 9th Wonder samples R. Kelly from only 3 years ago. Good thing its one of his best tracks. Lil Kim just covered it too, percolating underground.

Dirt Off Your Shoulders: Timbaland can do no wrong. Except on his own albums of course.

My First Song: Aqua! Who? Dangerous on the beats. What a way to go out.

I got 5 on Jay dropping another album in the next 3 or 4 years.

Logo Trends

15 trends in logo design.

btw, I've probably mentioned it before, but the newish BP (British Petroleum!) logo is the most evil thing around. I'm mean it looks great, brings up thoughts of the sun, flowers and greenery. For an oil company. Great for them, awful for humanity...

[via Hideous Pursuit: Logos, Robots, and PowerSlaves]

Dracula's Real Estate

The opening of the M25 in October 1986 (Margaret Thatch-er's dome moment) signalled the end of London and its liberties. We were now a traffic island. The pollution was visible from space; we would be living under a skin of bad gas, an anti-Eden project. Walking the road, anti-clockwise, let me in on all the secrets: the vanishing hospitals, the asylums that became gated estates, military and pharmaceutical bunkers, the ever-expanding airport runways, CCTV cameras, John Wyndham villages and "severed" communities.

The best guides to the territory, in the days before JG Ballard perched in Shepperton, were to be found among the more imaginative late-Victorian authors: HG Wells at the southwest corner with The War of the Worlds, and Bram Stoker, who placed Dracula's abbey at Purfleet, where the QEII Bridge comes to rest among oil storage tanks. Count Dracula was the forerunner of contemporary real estate speculators: the first one to buy into Thames Gateway. The count anticipated Thatcher's boys-in-braces, Blair's quangos. Buy toxic, buy cheap: madhouses, old chapels, decaying abbeys. Then make your play: storage and distribution. "All that die from the preying of the Un-dead become themselves Un-dead and prey on their own kind," wrote Stoker. "And so the circle goes on ever widening, like ripples from a stone thrown in water."

-Iain Sinclair

whose new book, London Orbital is a chronical of walking around the massive highway that circles the far reaches of London.

[via rodcorp: Glued to cell phones, staring, without seeing, at an unmoving landscape]

Amen

[via collision detection]

Run NY

Forget Mr. Diddy, everyone knows MOP run NY. Sick beat, Beatminerz, strings, bass, only available on some Rawkus sampler and a Kay Slay mix cd, email me. Where the hell is the Roc debut?

Half a Review, Chickenbone Cafe

Its only half a review cause I've only ate one item... Place is called Chickenbone Cafe. Its a pretty good representation of a whole new layer of gentrification in Williamsburg but I'm avoiding that issue for a while, messy and cliched at the same. Some other time, maybe.

Went for the first time on Thursday, got the Cuban sandwich. Dreamed about it all weekend. Was back last night for another, plus the ricotta, pine nut, maple desert, which is fabulous and pretty unique as well. Remember something vaguely similar at a high end Indian years ago and that's it...

One annoyance. Sat at the bar both times. First time I ordered a pint of dark beer and sipped slowly, went to the bathroom, went out for a phone call. 40 minutes pass, no Cuban. Finish the beer and order a second. Bingo, a sandwich.

Second visit, order a light beer, came in a 12 ounce mug. Bartender forgot the water. First beer was gone in a flash. Quickly get halfway through the second and the Cuban arrives. "Sorry for the 'delay' we made it extra big because it took so long". Hmmmmm

Regardless, the Cuban gets caps cause its spectacular. Salty, juicy, with hits of garlic and superb long thin slices of pickles laced throughout. Its not an even mix and that's a good thing. There are maybe 4 or 5 flavors to the sandwich each emerging in its own bite. Sometimes its the salty meat, others the blast of garlic sauce, then the pickles might take a turn. Delirious. I'm not in the habit of dreaming of sandwiches, but damn this thing is good.

One economic oddity of the space. The Cuban is a "special" although indications are that its permanent. Its also significantly more expensive then anything on the menu. Perhaps it really costs more to make. But all indications are that it costs more because its more popular, not because the cost of the ingredients and labor. Now more popular restaurants often charge more as a whole, supply and demand and all. But its pretty rare for a restaurant to implement a popularity rather then commodity based pricing within its own menu.

Everyone's got to make their money no doubt, but its an odd statement isn't it? Imagine a restaurant that charged more for the burger then the lobster just because it got a write up as best burger spot.

In the end though whatever, if I'm going to dream about this Cuban I'm going to buy it. Hope the cheaper items taste that good...

and yeah the info:
177 South 4th Street, Williamsburg Brooklyn, 718.302.2663
opens at 4pm till late, possibly cash only

Crane Stars

- craneporn.org

[via nicolas nova : my blog: crane pornography]

Barlow 1: Burning Out

I felt as if I were watching the best minds of the next several generations blowing themselves into starry oblivions as deep as the desert night, pushing the envelope of strangeness into near-psychosis at a time when the world beyond The Playa seems to have gone quite mad enough already.

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then . . . ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.

Indeed, Burning Man strikes me as only one of many reality distortion fields within which the counter-culture, myself totally included, has sought self-ghettoizing refuge. On reflection, I realized that I felt much the same about the massive protest marches that failed to impede in any way the Administration's unprovoked assault on Iraq. We all had a grand time gathering ourselves by the millions, but we were up against opponents far more practical and smart than Dick Nixon or Spiro Agnew. The current Dick knows that the best way to deal with dissent is give it a spectacle to exhaust its energies on. He knows that we're suckers for a good show, especially one where we get a starring role, so he gives us unmolested stages upon which to mount our extravaganzas and goes on about his corporate affairs.

- John Perry Barlow

not much more to say other then I agree completely. Didn't go to Burning Man the last 2 years, and those sorts of thoughts are a significant part of the reason. Its time to build not burn, the taz can wait a moment or two. For real.

[via zephoria: barlow on burning man]

How Gay is That?

Six men are suing Sky TV claiming producers tricked them into snogging a bloke for a reality show.

Which just begs the question of who really is sexually confused, the trannie or the men who are suing? I mean really, if you haven't kissed a trannie once in your life can you even call yourself a man? And if that experience leaves you "psychologically and emotionally damaged"? Honey, you've got problems. What a freaking bunch of fa...

[via The Minor Fall, The Major Lift]

Sneaker Imeldas

Damn, is it me or is this sneaker fetish thing straight exploding?

Freshness mag has pictures of people camping out for limited edition Nikes. The NYT even felt the need to write about it. Shit's about as cool as stamp collecting now. Where is the art to it now? Finding out what line to bring a sleeping bag too? I could respect sneaker fetish cats when it was about hunting down forgotten merchandise. But now they just line up overnight to let Nike hoover up their wallets. Tragic.

New formula: the rarer someone's kicks, the further I stay away from them.

Ego + McGinness + live site

EGO is Ryan McGinness' design firm, and they've recently either launched their site, or recently made the bulk of it accessible to my popup blocking browser.

Not quite sure how many people are in the firm, but if its small then I'm not quire sure if they sleep at all...

Great Stuff. One pet peeve they are guilty of though, using an impersonal email as contact info on the site. Personally I believe that all companies should have a human face. And part of that requires listing a human name and a named email as contact info. Seeing things like "info@blahblah.com" "contact@egosum.com" just leaves me cold. Tells us your name, really. Or just make one up. But make an effort to appear human, ok?

Yet Another Small Step Towards 1984

It doesn't stop does it? What doesn't you ask? The Bush administration's war on reality of course. Perhaps one could even call it a desperate war.

The latest?

The White House web site changed one small file recently. A file called robots.txt. Robots.txt is used mainly by search engines like Google. The White House changed it in a what that Google will no longer index any story on the White House about Iraq.

The purpose? No one really knows, but the best guess is they want to prevent Google from caching the pages. Why? To rewrite history of course. They got caught once before, changing all references to the end of combat in Iraq, to read the end of major combat. Now it seems they are prepping to change whatever they want. Guess pretending to own a country makes you think you can do these things...

[via Calpundit: The White House Memory Hole]

To All My Wonderful Readers

You are all very beautiful and flawless readers, and I love you very much. Extremely intelligent too. However I'm not sure I'll actually be writing anything, is it too much to ask you to forgive me?

In the meantime one Mr. Clay Shirky has some interesting things to say about
restaurants, reviews and reviewers, please enjoy and come again soon.

All my love,
A

oooh, oooh, oooh, a ps bonus, new Banksy! new Banksy:BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Graffiti star sneaks work into Tate

The William A. Blaze Cold Weather Tactics

The days are getting colder and shorter in the northern hemisphere. (in other words its fall -ed.) That means its time for a lesson in the William Blaze psychological tactics for cold weather. I'm always pretty shocked at how many smart experienced people have not learned this simple technique, so listen close my friends.

Its really simple actually. All you need to do is make sure that you don't leave the house completely bundled up.

You need options to get warmer. If you blow them all before you leave the house, you are going to suffer. Don't put your hat on until you get outside and feel cold. Don't zip up for a while. Don't wear your scarf until a bitter blast of wind hits you. Etc, etc.

Its a simple tactic and it works because of one simple reason. Cold is a psychological state. Actually that's not 100% true, there is a certain point where the cold becomes a physical threat to a human, but that point is very rarely reached in urban areas south of Canada or Scandinavia. Also note that this is for moving humans, its an entirely different story if you are sleeping or sitting in the cold.

99% of the time though, the cold you experience is not going to hurt you. Its just a psychological state. And once you are feeling cold, its not going to go away until you do something to get warmer. So the tactic is obvious, always have options to get warmer.

So I'm walking out the door. I've got on several layers, all unzipped (well except that one you perv), I've got a hat, in my pocket (actually several, but one is wool), and I've got a scarf in my bag, or loosely over my shoulders. I step outside and try and embrace the cold. Occasionally it works, a crisp sunny winter day can greet you beautifully. Generally though I get slapped in the face by that fucking cold.

Time to get warm. Zip up a layer. Oh that feels nice and warm. Keep moving towards that destination. Damn that wind sucks, time for hat. Oh, its nice and warm now. Ride that warm as long as you can. Its all in your head. At least until the wind comes back around, screaming "it's cold" in your face. Zip up another layer, warm it up again. Repeat, repeat until you run out of options. You should be at your destitination before that happens anyways, you hot little thing.